All The President's Men

Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos & why press ownership matters.

This summer, I became briefly caught up in a breaking news story involving the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, Will Lewis.

Lewis is a Brit who’d previously worked in senior positions for Rupert Murdoch and who’d been poached by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to take over the most prestigious job in journalism: the helm of the newsroom that toppled a president.

Watergate is the closest thing that journalism has to a sacred text. But this summer, a string of stories began to unpick Lewis’s past leading to questions about his fitness for the role, including from his own newsroom. It’s because in an earlier life, he’d been Rupert Murdoch’s senior consigliere: the man appointed to clean up the biggest - and still ongoing - corruption scandal in British history, phone hacking. And he had skeletons in his closet that he was seeking to suppress by any means possible, including killing a Washington Post story about them.

There was one American friend of mine who reacted to these events with fear and anxiety. Lewis was an active threat to the Washington Post, she believed. And if he wasn’t exposed, he’d go on to do more damage. ‘There are some moments when an event happens, and it doesn’t seem like such a big deal at the time,’ she said. ‘But actually it’s a pivot that changes everything. It seems like something small but it goes onto have huge historic ramifications. I’m convinced that this is one of those moments.’

What I hadn’t realised until that call is that she’d witnessed the Watergate scandal unfold, the ‘purest most extraordinary thing that has happened in my lifetime.’ She was a friend of the Graham family, the then-owners of the Post, and had seen up close how the Post’s owners and editors held fast as the White House had desperately tried to shut the reporting down.

Lewis’s surviving the scandal was, she was convinced, a watershed moment that would see the Post - and everything it stood for - irreparably damaged.

As she told it, the Washington Post was a mirror of America. ‘And if the Post falls, it’s a sign. It matters.’ Bezos was no longer the nerdy tech guy whom the Graham family had carefully chosen as a steward of their family’s legacy. He’d become an oligarch. And he needed Lewis to do for him what he’d done for the other great oligarch, Rupert Murdoch: his bidding.

It turned out, she was right. Just days before the US presidential election, the Washington Post announced it would not be endorsing any candidate, after its journalists had already drafted an endorsement of Kamala. It was a decision that shocked its journalists and triggered a readers’ revolt. Columnists resigned and 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions. For many Americans, it really did feel like something precious had been broken. And that it was a sign of what was to come, what Yale historian Tim Snyder calls ‘obeying in advance’.

I’ve been thinking about all this because of what’s happening at the Guardian and Observer, my journalistic home for the last 19 years. As I wrote last week, we were gobsmacked to find out in September that the Scott Trust which owns the Guardian is seeking to sell the Observer and its journalists to a small financially unsuccessful start-up, Tortoise Media.

This too feels like it could also be one of those ‘small decisions’. A newspaper changes hands. So what? But for us, the journalists, we have that same visceral feeling that my friend in America had: that something precious is about to be broken. At a moment in which the head of MI6 said, yesterday, that he’d ‘never seen the world in a more dangerous state’, it’s another alarm bell. We’re entering an age in which independent journalism is going to be under pressure like never before, a process, that I learned from a Slovakian journalist last week we need to start calling ‘oligarchic capture’.

Until September, we had no idea it was even a possibility. The Observer, alongside the Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust which was set up to preserve the Guardian ‘in perpetuity’ and to promote liberal journalism and press freedom. It’s fortunate to have an an endowment fund of £1.3bn which generates millions of pounds in interest a year.

This week some wag on Bluesky set up a new account (no, Guardian comms, it’s not me). It’s a spoof account claiming to be the ‘Guardian’s £1.3bn trust fund’ and its singular mission is to lampoon the Guardian’s advertising and messaging campaign in which it proudly boasts that it doesn’t have a billionaire owner.

Beyond the joke, is that the £1.3bn trust fund is meant to be there to protect the Guardian’s journalism. And as much as the Scott Trust might try to deny it, that’s the Observer too. If you live in the US and you’re a Guardian reader, you may not even know what the Observer is - we’re the Sunday’s sister paper to the Guardian but our journalism appears on the Guardian’s website as Guardian journalism beneath which a box appears asking you to donate to the Guardian. Nobody who reads the Guardian outside the UK would even know there was any difference.

The Observer has no independence, no autonomy, no commercial team, no foreign, business or sport teams, no ad sales, no contracts, no website. It is the Guardian. In fact the trickiest aspect of the sale is that the Observer doesn’t actually exist. There’s no corporate entity. What is even being 'sold’?

At the moment, all the Observer really has is a trail of broken promises. This is what the chair of the Scott Trust, Hugo Young, publicly pledged on the front page of the Guardian on the day it bought the Observer.

Ownership matters

The Washington Post’s decision - and the tragedy of having a proprietor with too much to lose in an incoming Trump administration - became a major marketing opportunity for the Guardian. That day, it sent a message about the Guardian’s lack of a billionaire owner out to its database and raised $2m. Inside the Post, the journalists and staff of the Washington Post are leading their own rebellion. The paper’s guild - the US equivalent of our union chapel - posted last week about their latest efforts to defy their editorship who seems to have gone into hiding to avoid them. This is a photo of them invading Lewis’s office.

At the Guardian and Observer, the Washington Post moment felt less like a marketing opportunity than a vision of what may come. It’s why 464 journalists - 93% - have voted to strike in protest at the Guardian’s decision, a protest backed this week by five former editors and an ex-editor-in-chief. And since last week, as the news has trickled out, the readers. Thank you to everyone who has voiced your support or written to the management.

Our demands are so modest: we’re asking for a pause. That’s it. A few months to investigate options that don’t include selling to a financially struggling podcast company backed by a political donor: we’re still in the dark over the financial details of the proposed Tortoise deal, but it includes Labour donor Gary Lubner.

But this week, the board of the Scott Trust - which owns both the Guardian and Observer - spent Monday discussing the deal and said ‘talks continued to progress with ‘a few outstanding issues’. This is now the 11th hour. And my friend’s words echo in my ear. That from small and maybe seemingly inconsequential decisions, historical consequences can cascade.

It brings to mind another such moment. When James Harding, the ex-editor of the Times and the founder and editor in chief of Tortoise Media spoke to Observer journalists about his plans for the paper, he said it was ‘unlikely’ he’d endorse any political candidate in an election. Harding later told me by text that he couldn’t ‘recall’ saying those words and pointed out that while he was editor of the Times, it did endorse political candidates.

He’s right. It did. Harding like Will Lewis, his contemporary, started out at the Financial Times and then went to work for Rupert Murdoch’s News UK. And as editor of the Times in 2010, he backed the Conservatives under David Cameron to win.

The paper’s editorial is worth reading. It’s a passionate endorsement of the man who became prime minister. It ends: ‘David Cameron has shown the fortitude, judgment and character to lead this country back to a healthier, stronger future. It is time, once again, to vote Conservative.’

Did James Harding, the Observer’s prospective new editor-in-chief, see Cameron and the Conservatives as the party and the candidate who cleaved most closely to the Times’s readership? Is he a Conservative? Or was he just doing Rupert Murdoch’s bidding?

Who knows. Though it’s something for the journalists and readers of the Observer to ponder. We are the link to the newspaper’s past. And we should be to its future too. The Observer reported hard on the Conservative’s programme of austerity, a programme that created and still creates misery for millions of households. And although the Observer has made terrible mistakes: backing Tony Blair’s war on Iraq most catastrophically and serial disappointment Nick Clegg - now Mark Zuckerberg’s fluffer-in-chief - in that same 2010 election. It’s never knowingly endorsed a Conservative for prime minister. And the whole point of not having a ‘billionaire owner’ is that it’s never had to.

The 2010 election was a pivot, a hinge of history. The Times-endorsed David Cameron won. He got his government and went on to promise he’d ‘settle’ the question of Britain’s place in Europe once and for all. When he stood for re-election in 2015, he promised an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. We all know what happened next.

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Thank you

Thank you so much to the people who wrote last week. If you have questions about why the Guardian is ‘selling’ the Observer or any other aspect of this deal, your letters do make a difference and your voices should be heard. The address again is observer.readers@observer.co.uk and please feel free to send to me also, carole.cadwalladr@theguardian.com. I want to put out some anonymised excerpts on social media because many of them have been so articulate and clear and so many of you are as shocked by this as we, the journalists, are.

There are new official NUJ accounts on Twitter and Bluesky that will share news throughout this week. Our strike days are Wednesday and Thursday. It’s the first for more than half a century and feels pretty momentous. There will be a picket line outside the offices in Kings Place near Kings Cross. All are welcome.

The Daily Mail did a pretty thorough job on re-capping all the main questions. Why was this deal was conducted in secrecy? Why was an exclusive arrangement made with one preferred bidder only? Why the rush is to get it done as soon as possible? Why would a news organisation choose to ignore the views of its former editors, journalists and readers?

Underneath the article is a heated argument among Daily Mail readers about the rights and wrongs of the strike. Though what’s really incensed their readers is the claim that the billionaire’s yacht on which the Guardian’s CEO holidays with the founder and editor of Tortoise media is ‘not strictly a yacht since it’s powered by two Rolls Royce engines’

In a depressing and tumultuous week, it’s the small things that have sustained us.

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Labour donor #2

On Friday came the news that a new bidder has thrown his hat into the ring, another Labour donor, Dale Vince. As yet, we have no idea what that means.

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Why it matters

If you want to understand why so many of us care about the Observer, I urge you to watch this short film. I re-discovered it on Thursday and posted it on Twitter and Bluesky. It was made by the Observer’s former editor, John Mulholland, and it tells the story of how the Observer, under legendary editor, David Astor, championed the anti-apartheid cause to the world. Winnie Mandela recalls how it was the Observer’s coverage that saved Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership from a death sentence. It’s an extraordinary story that made the hairs on my neck stand up.

There are so many parallels between that story and the time we’re in. Astor’s son describes how it was his father’s visits to Germany and his horror of fascism that led him to understand how the apartheid government was continuity Nazism. And, as the world stands on the brink with its superpower seemingly on the way to becoming an authoritarian state, it’s notable that two of the most powerful and influential men in it - Elon Musk and Peter Thiel - were shaped by a childhood spent under apartheid.

David Astor’s Observer worked tirelessly to expose and campaign for a new pluralistic, colourblind South Africa. This is our newspaper. And we want it back.