The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.
It’s good to be here… The worst kept secret in the media world is that a lot of publishers and media organisations are facing some financial distress, and people know that. They can smell weakness, and it’s a great moment to move in, in the expectation that media owners will not be able to be as robust as they were in the past. I just want to speak about what solidarity looks like in that context, and I think there are two different types of solidarity.
So, the first is with other publishers, and I think media organisations are learning habits of solidarity. It comes easier to some than to others, but it’s a notoriously competitive field that we’re in, and collaborating with others and standing up for others is not always the most natural instinct. But I know that there was a moment when we were working with the New York Times on the Snowden investigation in 2013, when there was a real risk that the British government and the British police would try to either stop what we’re doing and/or take legal action, including criminal action against me and the paper. I have to say that there wasn’t a great deal of solidarity in the British press, which I’ve always put down to the fact that The Guardian had exposed the phone hacking habits of some newspapers and I think they didn’t feel very charitable towards us.
But at the moment of the greatest peril, I spent a morning emailing all the editors I could think of around the world that dealt in that kind of reporting, national security reporting, and said we badly need statements of support here, and they were very very forthcoming. By the end of the evening, I had about 30 or 40 editors saying how this work was important, right and natural – natural thing for news organisations to be doing – and we published them all. I think that became a factor in the British government and maybe for the police in thinking, “Okay if we injunct this paper, or if we take criminal action against this editor, this is going to create the most Almighty smell around the world”. So that kind of solidarity matters.
The other kind of solidarity I think is with readers, and this is more intangible. But the more I think about the trouble that some newspapers and news organisations are in, I think this relationship with readers is central. I’ve just been reading for the New York Times, the latest volume of history of the [newspaper] – and that is an organisation which has not been without its troubles in the last 30 years. But it’s journalism I think is so self-evidently valuable and important to readers particularly now, that they have demonstrated that they’re willing to support it. We had the same thing in a different way with The Guardian, when we had a weekend where we invited readers into the building and said, “Look, at some point, you’re going to have to pay for the Guardian in some form”. It was a session moderated by the American academic Clay Shirky, who said, “Hands up everybody, who would like to support The Guardian as a private good, i.e. I will pay you for my Guardian, but I wouldn’t want anybody else to be reading it. I’d be very upset if somebody else was going to be reading it if I was giving you the money”, and almost no hands went up in the audience
I thought, “Okay we’re in trouble here”. Clay then asked a different question to the audience, of how many people would support The Guardian as a public good, i.e. its journalism would be free to you, to everybody in this room and to everybody in the world. All the hands went up, and it took quite a lot, I have to say, to convince the Guardian management that there was something in that idea. That was about 13 years ago, and The Guardian is on a perfectly sustainable footing with contributions from millions of people around the world; and they wouldn’t be doing that if they didn’t think The Guardian‘s journalism was worth supporting. I think the investment that we did in stories like Snowden, and stories like phone hacking and stories like Wikileaks, torture and rendition, and stories like tax avoidance and stories like undercover policing and so on, were the reason that readers felt, “Actually if you’re going to do journalism like that, we will absolutely support you”.
I think that it’s an experiment that can now be shown to have worked for The Guardian. It wouldn’t work for everybody, but the point I draw from that is that we can only face down the threats that we are getting, and I think we will increasingly get, with the support of others. That can be colleagues and solid solidarity with other publications, or it can be with the support of readers and it’s so clear now what doesn’t work – it’s so clear that you can’t cut yourself out of the problem. You can’t. If you get into the spiral of death, of producing less and less worthwhile journalism, then there is no reason why readers will come to your support, they couldn’t care less.
I think we have to face up to the fact that there is a great deal of cynicism about what journalism is, what the craft of journalism represents, and the value of journalism in the world today. But if you go into journalism with the idea that the support of your readers will be crucial at the point that somebody comes for you, I think that is an incredibly valuable thing, because they will. If they think that you’re doing something that is important, meaningful and on their side, they will support you. I think that will also make those in authority pause. It’s not a foolproof shield, but I think it would make them pause before taking action. That, at the notice that you gave me, is my five pennies worth contribution towards what is I’m sure a fascinating and important discussion.
Alan Rusbridger is Former Editor-in-Chief, The Guardian, Editor, Prospect magazine, and Chair, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford, UK.