In a turbulent era, the media must define its values and principles, writes Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner
‘No former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the unrest of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public .” So began the announcement, nearly 200 years ago, of a brand-new newspaper to be published in Manchester, England, which proclaimed that” the spirited discussion of political questions” and” the accurate detail of facts” were” particularly important at this crossroad “.
Now we are living through another extraordinary period in history: one defined by amazing political shocks and the disruptive impact of new technologies in every part of our lives. The populace sphere has changed more radically in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries- and news organisations, including this one, have worked hard to adjust.
But the turbulence of our time may demand that we do more than adapt. The circumstances in which we report, create, distribute and obtain the news have changed so dramatically that this moment requires nothing less than a serious consideration of what we do and why we do it.
The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, stated a very clear purpose when it was established in 1936:” to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference .” As an editor, it's hard to imagine a finer mission for a proprietor: our sole shareholder is committed only to our journalistic freedom and longterm survival.
But if the mission of the Scott Trust is to ensure that Guardian journalism will exist for ever, it is still left to us to define what the mission of that journalism will be. What is the meaning and purpose of our run? What role do we play in society?
After working at the Guardian for two decades, I feel I know instinctively why it exists. Most of our journalists and our readers do, too – it's something to do with holding power to account, and upholding liberal values. We know what defines a Guardian tale, what feels like a Guardian perspective, what constructs something” very Guardian”( for better and for worse ).
In my own run as editor of the Guardian in Australia, and then as the editor of the Guardian in the US, I tried to conceptualise the Guardian with a different accent- to identify the essential qualities of Guardian journalism and bring them to new audiences. Now, as the editor-in-chief of the Guardian and the Observer, I believe our time necessitates something deeper. It is more urgent than ever to ask: who are now we, basically?
The answer to this question is in our past, our present and our future. I want to lead a Guardian that relates to the world in such a way that reflects our history, engages profoundly with this disorientating global moment, and is sustainable for ever.
The history of the Guardian begins on 16 August 1819, when John Edward Taylor, a 28 -year-old English journalist, attended an enormous demo for parliamentary reform in Manchester. In St Peter's Field, a popular radical speaker, Henry Hunt, addressed a crowd estimated to contain 60,000 people- more than half the population of the Manchester area at the time, dressed in their Sunday best and packed in so tightly that their hats were said to be touching.
At the time, the mood in the country was insurrectionary. The French revolution, three decades earlier, had spread throughout the world the seismic notion that ordinary people could face down the powerful and win- a revelation for the masses and a fright for those in power. After Britain's victory at Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic wars, the country was mired in economic depression and high unemployment, while the Corn Laws, which maintained the price of grain artificially high, brought mass thirst. There were protests and riots throughout the country, from handloom weavers trashing freshly fabricated mill machinery to anti-slavery campaigners boycotting sugar.
There was also a growing campaign for the vote: the big, densely populated city of Manchester had no member of parliament- while Old Sarum, a prosperous hamlet in southern England, with simply one voter, had two MPs to represent him. The city's businessmen were demanding an overhaul of this rotten system- and running men( and, for the first time, females) wanted their own chance to vote.
The combination of economic depression, political repression and the politicisation of workers with economic need was combustible. As the essayist William Hazlitt wrote one year earlier,” nothing that was established was to be tolerated … the world was to be turned topsy-turvy .”
John Edward Taylor was in the crowd that day, reporting for a weekly paper, the Manchester Gazette. When a reporter for the daily Times of London was arrested, Taylor was concerned that the person or persons of the capital might not get an accurate report of the massacre- he correctly feared that without the account of a journalist on the scene, Londoners would instead get only the official version of events, which would protect the magistrates who had caused the bloodshed.
So Taylor rushed a report on to the night coach-and-four to London, got it into the Times, and thus turned a Manchester demonstration into their own nationals scandal. Taylor exposed the facts, without hysteria. By reporting what he had witnessed, he told the stories of the powerless, and held the powerful to account.
But Taylor did not be brought to an end. After the massacre, he spent months reporting on the fate of the wounded, documenting the injuries of more than 400 survivors.
Quick Guide
What was the Peterloo massacre?
What was the Peterloo massacre?
On 16 August 1819, a crowd of more than 50,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields outside Manchester to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.
Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry to scatter the demo and the sabre-wielding cavalry charged the crowd. At least 15 people died and up to 700 were injured.
Labelled Peterloo as an ironic nod to the battle of Waterloo, which had occurred four years earlier, the carnage triggered an outcry that was a key contributing factor in the process of creating the Manchester Guardian.
John Edward Taylor, a radical Quaker cotton merchant who did unpaid journalism for the Manchester Gazette, was at St Peter's Field on the day of the slaughter.
When the reporter from the London Times was arrested, Taylor and a friend sent an account of the killed to the paper to make sure the truth wasn't smothered by the official version. This was published along with an angry editorial based on the reporting.
Peterloo and its aftermath is proving to Taylor that reformers in Manchester needed their own voice. Two year later, and with the financial backing of 11 advocates, a prospectus for a new newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, was issued, stating:” It will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religion Liberty … It will warmly advocate the cause of Reform .” The first edition of the paper was published on 5 May 1821.
Photograph: Rischgitz/ Hulton Archive
Taylor's relentless effort to tell the full narrative of Peterloo strengthened his own reformist political views- and he became determined to agitate for fair representation in parliament. He decided to start his own newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, with the financial backing of other middle-class revolutionaries( 10 put up PS100 each, and an 11 th contributed PS50 ). The first edition was published on 5 May 1821, devoted to enlightenment values, autonomy, reform and justice. It was launched with great confidence and optimism, by a man who believed that,” in spite of Peterloo and police spies, reason was great and would predominate “.
The Manchester Guardian was founded in a mood of great hope, and religion in ordinary people. The manifesto that Taylor rendered before the paper's launch speaks powerfully of the” great diffusion of Education” that was taking place, and” the greatly increased interest which political subjects excite, and the immense extension of the circle within which they are discussed. It is of the utmost importance that this increased interest should be turned to beneficial account “.
It is a powerful document, and one whose ideals still shape the Guardian- a gala of more people get educated, of more people engaging in politics, from different strolls of life, from poorer communities. And it is a document that articulates a sense of being responsible to the public- that the Manchester Guardian could engage with the people who were starting to become involved in politics, dedicating them the information they need to take action. It is a wholly uncynical and unsnobbish document. It is on people's side.
In the decades following Taylor's death in 1844, the Manchester Guardian began to drift from the political ideals that had inspired its founding. It was highly profitable, but in becoming this is why it got too close to the Manchester cotton merchants who paid for the advertising that supported the paper. It even sided with the slave-owning south in the American civil war: the paper demanded that the Manchester cotton workers to whom starved in the street because they refused to touch cotton picked by American slaves should be forced back into work.( Abraham Lincoln wrote to the” working humen of Manchester” in 1863 to thank them for their” sublime Christian bravery, which has not been outdone in any age or in different countries “.)
This period of complacency for the Guardian was dramatically aimed by the appointment as editor of CP Scott, who transformed the paper and helped establish the political commitments that have been so important to its identity ever since.
Scott was stimulated editor in 1872, at the age of 25. He was a revolutionary Liberal and party activist who cared greatly about social justice and pacifism. Scott faced two big ideological challenges during the 57 years of his editorship; and his response to both helped form the Guardian as it is today.
The first was the question of Irish Home Rule: on the most contentious issue of the time, which split the Liberal party in the 1880 s, Scott campaigned for self-government in Ireland- commemorate the moment, in agreement with the historian David Ayerst, when the Guardian most clearly became” a newspaper of the Left “. At the end of the 19 th century, Scott took the Guardian to an even more controversial anti-colonial posture. During the second Boer war, from 1899 to 1902, Britain was rampantly jingoistic; anyone who opposed the war was cast as a traitor. The Guardian stand against it and ran a campaign for peace, while the brilliant Guardian reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camp for the Boers run by the British.
– In April, a prospectus announces a new paper for Manchester. A month afterwards, on 5 May 1821, John Edward Taylor publishes the first Manchester Guardian as a newspaper in the liberal interest.
1872
– Charles Prestwich Scott, a liberal intellectual with strong principles, becomes editor of the Guardian – a post he holds for 57 years.
1907
– CP Scott buys the Guardian, becoming both owned and editor.
1921
– CP Scott writes a leading article to mark the centenary of the paper that becomes recognised around the world as the blueprint for independent journalism and includes the line” Comment is free, but facts are sacred .”
1929
– CP Scott retires as editor in favour of his son Ted.
1932
– CP Scott's death in January is followed swiftly by that of his younger son; Ted Scott is killed in a tragic boating collision in April. William Percival Crozier is appointed as editor.
1936
– Ownership of the Manchester Guardian is transferred to the Scott Trust to protect the paper, its independence and the journalistic principles of CP Scott.
1944
– Following WP Crozier's death, Alfred Powell Wadsworth becomes editor.
1956
– Alastair Hetherington becomes editor following Wadsworth's death.
1959
– On 24 August the newspaper changes its title from the Manchester Guardian to the Guardian, to reflect the growing importance of national and international affairs in the newspaper.
1964
– The editor's office and major editorial departments relocate from Manchester to London.
1975
– Peter Preston is appointed editor.
1988
– The Guardian has a revolutionary redesign, splitting the newspaper into two sections and introducing a new masthead.
1995
– Alan Rusbridger becomes editor.
1999
– Guardian Unlimited( GU) network of websites is launched.
2005
– The mid-sized Berliner format newspaper launched. It is the UK's first full-colour national newspaper.
2011
– A new digital operation, Guardian US, is launched in New York as a hub for Guardian readers in the US.
2013
– The Guardian launches Australian digital edition, Guardian Australia.
2015
– Katharine Viner is appointed Guardian editor-in-chief.
Photograph: The Guardian
Many of these core values were laid out by Scott on the 100 th birthday of the Guardian, with his justly celebrated centenary essay of 1921. It was here that Scott introduced the famous phrase” comment is free, but facts are sacred”, and decreed that” the voice of adversaries no less than that of friends has a right listen to this “. It was here that he laid out the values of the Guardian: integrity, cleanness[ integrity ], fortitude, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and a sense of duty to the community.
CP Scott's essay, like John Edward Taylor's foundational prospectus, is both powerful and hopeful; as Scott writes,” the newspaper has a moral as well as training materials existence “.
Our moral sentence, as exemplified by Taylor and codified by Scott, rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they're in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair.
These inspiring notions have always been at the heart of the Guardian at its best- whether the paper is called the Manchester Guardian or the Guardian, the name it adopted in 1959- and they are enshrined in our independent ownership structure, in which the Guardian is owned exclusively by the Scott Trust. Any money built is necessary spent on journalism.( The Observer, of course, has its own distinct and honest history and perspective- and as part of the same company, we are close siblings, but not twins .)
These values, notions and ideas are well-established and enduring. They do not, by themselves, tell us how to gratify the moral importance of this new era. The world we knew has been pulled out of shape, and we must ask what it means to uphold these values now- as journalists and as citizens- and how they will inform our journalism and purpose.
Almost 200 years have passed since the public meeting that triggered Peterloo. But the past three decades- since the invention of the world wide web in 1989- have transformed our notion of the public in ways that John Edward Taylor and CP Scott could not have imagined.
This technological revolution was exciting and inspiring. After 600 years of the Gutenberg era, when mass communication was characterized by established and hierarchical sources of information, the web felt like a breath of fresh air: open, creative, egalitarian. As its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, put it, “this is for everyone”. At first, it felt like the beginning of a thrilling new epoch of hyper-connectivity, with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips and every person empowered to participate- as if the internet was one big town square where all our problems could be solved and everyone helped each other.
While many news organisations find the internet as a threat to the old hierarchies of authority, forward-looking editors like Alan Rusbridger, who led the Guardian from 1995 until 2015, embraced this hopeful new future for journalism, by investing in digital expansion – hiring engineers and product directors- and by recognizing also that journalists, in this new world, must be open to challenge and debate from their audience. From building the Guardian the first British news organisation to employ a readers' editor to launching an opinion site that inverted the traditional model of top-down newspaper commentary, he put the Guardian at the vanguard of digital innovation and the changed relationships of this new era. As I wrote four years ago in my essay The Rise of the Reader, the open web created genuinely new possibilities for journalism- and journalists who defied the technological revolution would harm both their own interests and the interests of good journalism.
But it has become clear that the utopian mood of the early 2000 s did not anticipate all that technology would enable. Our digital town squares have become mobbed with bullies, misogynists and racists, who have brought a new kind of hysteria to public debate. Our motions and feelings are constantly monitored, because surveillance is the business model of the digital age. Facebook has become the richest and most powerful publisher in history by replacing editors with algorithms- shattering the public square into millions of personalised news feeds, changing entire societies away from the open terrain of genuine debate and argument, while they make billions from our valued attention.
This shift presents big challenges for liberal democracy. But it presents particular problems for journalism.
The transition from print to digital did not initially change the basic business model for many news organisations – that is, selling ads to fund the journalism delivered to readers. For a hour, it seemed that the potentially vast scale of an online audience might compensate for the decline in print readers and advertisers. But this business model is currently collapsing, as Facebook and Google swallow digital advertising; as a result, the digital journalism produced by many news organisations has become fewer and less meaningful.
Publishers that are funded by algorithmic ads are locked in a race to the bottom in pursuit of any audience they can find- urgently binge-publishing without checking facts, pushing out the most shrill and most extreme narratives to boost clicks. But even this huge scale can no longer procure enough revenue.
On some sites, journalists who learned in developing that” news is something that someone, somewhere doesn't want published” churn out 10 commodified stories a day without making a phone call.” Where once we had propaganda, press releases, journalism, and advertising ,” the academic Emily Bell has written,” we now have' content ‘.” Readers are overwhelmed: bewildered by the quantity of “news” they watch every day, nagged by intrusive pop-up ads, confused by what is real and what is fake, and confronted with its own experience that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
Many people get most of their news from Facebook, which means that datum arrives in one big stream- which may contain fact-based independent journalism from transparent sources alongside devised stories from a click farm, or content funded by malevolent actors to influence an electoral. The Richmond Standard, a website in California's Bay Area, describes itself as a” community-driven daily news source “. If you see one of its headlines in your news feed, you couldn't possibly know that it is owned by the multinational oil giant Chevron- which, according to the Financial Times, also owns” the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 capture flame, spewing plumes of black smoke over the city and sending more than 15,000 residents to hospital for medical help “. Such arrangings are no longer remarkable: the Australian Football League employs about 30 journalists to write friendly narratives. Many free local newspapers in the UK are funded by the very councils they should be holding to account. It is asking a lot of individuals to sift the real from the fake when they are bombarded by info- how do they know who to trust?
Trust in all kinds of established institutions- including the media- is at an historic low. This is not a blip, and it should not be a astound, when so many institutions have failed the ones who trusted them and responded to criticism with contempt. As a result, people feel outraged but powerless- nothing they do seems to stop these things happening, and nobody seems to be listening to their stories.
This has created a crisis for public life, and particularly for the press, which risks becoming wholly part of the same establishment that the public no longer trusts. At a few moments when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and attain themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation.
” If mistrust in institutions is changing how people participate in civics, news organisations might need to change as well ,” the MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman has argued.” We could rethink our role as journalists as helping people … find the places where they, individually and collectively, can be the most effective and powerful .”
To do this well, journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent. Members of the media are increasingly drawn from the same, privileged sector of society: this problem have in fact worsened in recent decades. According to the government's 2012 report on social mobility in the UK, while most professions are still” dominated by a social elite”, journalism lags behind medicine, politics and even statute in opening its doors to people from less well-off backgrounds. “Indeed,” the report concludes,” journalism has had a greater switching towards social exclusivity than any other profession .”
After 71 people died in the devastating Grenfell Tower flame in west London- which residents had forewarned for years- the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow said that the failure to attend to these warns showed that the media was ” comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact or connection with those not of the elite .” As Gary Younge, the Guardian editor-at-large, has put it: “‘ They' are not' us'-‘ their' positions are not often heard in newsrooms, and they know it .”
If journalists become remote from other people's lives, they miss the tale, and people don't trust them. The Guardian is not at all excluded from these challenges, and our faculty is not diverse enough. Because of our history, values and intent, we are committed to addressing these issues- but there is still a long way to go.
Meanwhile, those in power have exploited distrust of the media to actively undermine the role of journalism in the public interest in a republic- from Donald Trump calling the” fake news” media” the enemy of the American people” to a British cabinet member suggesting that broadcasters should be “patriotic” in their Brexit reporting. All over the world- in Turkey, Russia, Poland, Egypt, China, Hungary, Malta and many other countries- powerful interests are on the march against free speech. Journalists are undermined, attacked, even murdered.
In these disorientating days, championing the public interest- which has always been at the heart of the Guardian's mission- has become an urgent necessity. People are understandably anxious in the face of crises that are global, national, local and personal. At the global level, these crises are overwhelming: climate change, the refugee crisis, the rise of a powerful super-rich who bestride the global economy. It is easy to feel that humanity is facing a great change, about which we were not consulted. Overwhelming technological, environmental, political and social change has precipitated what the philosopher Timothy Morton memorably describes as” a traumatic loss of co-ordinates” for all of us.
These global upheavals have patently destabilised national politics, making the shocks and surprises of the past two years: the unexpected result of the Brexit referendum, which leaves Britain facing a deeply uncertain future; the stunning election of Donald Trump; the collapse of support for traditional parties across Europe, and the unexpected rise of Emmanuel Macron. These events confounded the experts and the insiders who confidently declared them impossible. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn appeared to have torn up the rulebook that had governed electoral politics for two decades- procuring a upsurge of support in the June snap election, particularly with young person, by promoting socialist ideas that had long been dismissed. Bernie Sanders tapped into a similar mood in the US Democratic primary.
Skyrocketing inequality between the rich and poor has bred bitternes at the political and economic establishment. In October it was revealed that the world's super-rich now hold the greatest concentration of wealth for 120 years– many of them taking elaborate steps to avoid taxation in the process, as the Paradise Papers showed.
What is becoming clear is that the style things have been run is unsustainable. We are at a turning point in which, in writer Naomi Klein's terms,” the spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed for the purposes of the weight of lived experience and a mountain of evidence “.( Klein defines neoliberalism as” shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere “.) Perhaps the markets don't have all the answers after all. The Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, who says that many had not understood how” radical the implications” of worsening inequality would be, been shown that the political backlash to globalisation could possibly produce a” fundamental transformation of the world- at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution .”
In many local areas, in our neighbourhoods and our communities, we assure the collapse of civic life, from public space sold off inexpensively to developers to the closing of libraries to the underfunding of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/school-
