How to Speak Truth to Power

...when that power is your own news organisation? I don't know. And I wish it was a question I didn't have to ask.

This is a post I never wanted to write.

The Guardian and Observer has been my journalistic home for nearly 20 years. All of my and my colleagues’ work is published globally on the Guardian’s website, but in Britain it also appears in a printed format in The Observer. I’ve been lucky to work there with some of the best editors anywhere: they have made my work infinitely better than it would be without them. I passionately believe in the ‘mainstream media’ and why we must fight to defend it at a time of unprecedented danger in the world from an information ecosystem that rewards lies.

But this week, 464 journalists at the Guardian and Observer voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. It’s a huge deal, the first time in decades, with 93% of union members voting in favour with a first two-day walkout on December 4 and 5.

At stake is not just the future of a 240 year old newspaper, The Observer, the Sunday sister of the Guardian, it’s also the integrity and values of the Guardian and the future media landscape of a fractured and dangerous world.

I’ve always believed what I was told, that the Guardian was different to other news organisations. It’s owned, not by a billionaire, but by the Scott Trust, which was set up to preserve it in perpetuity and to promote the values of ‘press freedom’ and ‘liberal journalism’.

But the events of the last two months have forced my colleagues and I to question everything we thought we knew. In September, we found out that the Guardian had entered into secret and exclusive talks to sell the Observer to a financially struggling start-up, Tortoise Media.

This is a long post because there’s a lot to say. But I’ll summarise it in a few points here:

• The organisation’s journalists feel completely betrayed. They - we - believe the Tortoise plan is financially unsustainable and that it’s the beginning of the end for the paper.

• The editor - who stepped down last week - went on the BBC this week to denounce both the deal and the conduct of the deal

• The exclusive negotiation with Tortoise was entered into without testing the brand’s value or soliciting other bids.

• The Guardian is refusing to even look at two other bids that have subsequently registered interest.

• The Guardian’s CEO is a long-time friend of Tortoise’s founder and editor-in-chief and they holiday together.

• The responses the Guardian has given to external journalists suggest the relationship was not disclosed to all Scott Trust and GMG board directors.

• Tortoise’s last accounts show a £4.6m loss on £6.2m revenue.

• Its business plan claims it will reach 170k paying subscribers, from print and a new paywalled site. In contrast, the Daily Mail’s Mailonline reached 100k paying subscribers this year off a website that already sees traffic of 18.3m.

• The Sunday Times reports today on a culture of ‘chaos’ and ‘waste’ at the start-up that has haemorrhaged staff through both resignations and redundancies. It includes claims that the bid to buy the Observer a Hail Mary to raise further investment. Tortoise denies both.

• The deal’s financing is so under-powered that the Financial Times reported yesterday that the Guardian was considering paying Tortoise to ‘buy’ the title. Even though the Telegraph today put a valuation of £30m on the Observer.

• ….and on and on it goes.

Last year, the Guardian ran an entire advertising campaign with the tag line ‘Not For Sale’. It put up billboards in the streets pointing out it was ‘reader funded not billionaire backed’.

So, why would it seek to sell off a huge chunk of the organisation and 70+ journalists….to a financially precarious start-up financed by a bunch of VCs and billionaires?

We still don’t have any sort of answer to that question. We’re totally in the dark.

This whole process has been conducted in darkness. Without telling journalists - or even the Observer’s editor - the Guardian’s management decided to enter into a three-month exclusive negotiation period with Tortoise to sell the paper.

At the moment, the Observer is a net contributor to the Guardian’s finances. The Guardian’s management’s argument is that in three years, we will move into loss. But that wasn’t a financial concern that was shared with the editor. Nor did it seek to put a valuation of a title with a media heritage like no other - The Observer is credited with keeping Nelson Mandela off death row and the foundation of both Amnesty International and Index on Censorship.

The decision now rests in the hands of 12 directors of the Scott Trust, the private company which owns the Guardian. The final vote on whether it goes ahead or not is expected tomorrow.

To make a comparison to what’s happening in the US, there’s an eerie similarity to what’s going on inside the Washington Post where this week journalists rebelled against their editor-in-chief, Will Lewis, and their billionaire proprietor, Jeff Bezos. What’s so gobsmacking is that…so are we. It’s just that in our case, the billionaire is an endowment fund: the Guardian is sitting on a £1.3bn fund (about $1.6bn).

The union’s main demand is modest. It has asked for time. Time to look at other possibilities, other deals, other solutions.

If I had to sum up the mood among my colleagues, I’d say it was shock, anger, disgust, frustration and an overwhelming sense of disappointment.

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Why I decided to speak out

I took the decision to speak publicly about the deal, first on Twitter and then on the former Guardian editor’s podcast, Media Confidential. I didn’t do this lightly. But I was supported through my long-running court case by Guardian and Observer readers (more than 30,000 of them) and I felt like I owed a duty of confidence to them. To keep quiet in the face of what we, the journalists, believe is an existential threat to our journalism and which they pay to support felt…dishonest. It would have been counter to the ethos and spirit of the journalism that I have done and which I and my colleagues believe in, journalism which is based on openness, transparency, accountability.

A news organisation is its journalists. And if we, the journalists, are not honest with our readers, then…who are we? And what are we for? Trust in journalism and news organisations is already low and falling. I quote Marty Barron, the great former editor of the Washington Post below and as he told NPR’s Fresh Air this week, ‘If you’re trying to earn readers’ confidence, the first thing you have to do is be honest with them’.

Until this week when our editor broke cover, we had no-one to speak on our behalf, no-one to counter what we considered the corporate spin. Our readers knew anything about the turmoil going on behind the scenes.

We do now have a voice in that our collective action - an unprecedented strike - is our voice. But understanding the context of the decision and being able to explain why we believe it will end in the death of the newspaper and our journalism is important.

Should our efforts actually work, it’s unclear what if any future I would have inside the organisation I’ve fought for. I have been formally warned that I am compromising ‘the editorial integrity and reputation of individual journalists or GNM’, a potential breach of contract.

But it’s the other way around. We the organisation’s journalists are striving to protect the Guardian’s editorial integrity and reputation. My colleagues are so worried they’re giving up almost a week’s pay just before Christmas. And if press freedom means anything, it must include talking about the threats to it. Even when that’s coming from within one’s own news organisation.

This week I travelled to Vienna to a summit on media freedom organised by the OSCE. That’s the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a multilateral body that’s a sort of security-focussed version of the UN. I hope that making my remarks in this context may put what is happening in its rightful perspective, against a world in turmoil in which journalism has never been more important.

I also spoke briefly about my own legal travails. While it was happening, I largely kept quiet about the lack of support from the Guardian. That’s because the whole purpose of that lawsuit - labelled a ‘SLAPP’ by press freedom organisations - was to separate me from my news organisation and I couldn’t risk being isolated further. What most people don’t know - and I never broadcast - is that the TED talk that I was sued over and that the Guardian denied any responsibility for was actually reviewed by the Guardian’s own head of corporate communications, at his request. It’s all in the judgment.

At the time, I wrote to the chair of the Scott Trust - the Guardian’s owner - and asked ‘If a news organisation isn't there to at least try and protect and support its journalists, what is it for?’ And that’s the same question we’re asking now. I recognise the stress and fear and bewilderment on my colleagues’ faces because it’s what I lived with for four years.

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Keynote speech to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s media summit on press freedom

Palais Berg, Vienna, November 22, 2024

Thank you so much for having me here. And to Malta for chairing and organising this summit. You are a country that knows first-hand how vital press freedom is and how devastating it is when it comes under attack. 

It’s a great honour to be here with Matthew Caruana Galizia, a wonderful journalist who has been doing vital work on the issue of weaponised lawsuits. The story of his mother, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, murdered as a result of her work is Matthew’s to share. And is critical to hear for us to really understand what is at stake here. 

Because killing journalists is what happens when every other attempt to silence them has failed. And these are deadly times. In Ukraine, at least 11 journalists have been killed. In Gaza, 137. 

And every time a journalist dies, a tiny fragment of truth dies. 

We are living in a world in which there is a war on truth. And what I think is coming is a war on journalists. 

I want to talk about America. Because what happens in America is going to affect us all in Europe too. Our freedom. Our security. Because America stands on the cusp of a new era of repression. Of a type I don’t think the world has seen before. 

Donald Trump has called the press ‘the enemy of the people’. Here, in Europe, that is a familiar phrase. We have heard it before. We know where it leads. 

Marty Barron, the legendary ex-executive editor of the Washington Post, speaking on national public radio this week, reeled off a terrifying list of possible weapons that Trump may use to target journalists and news organisations.

I’m going to read that list…it’s long and it includes: 

Prosecuting and imprisoning journalists for leaks of national security information. 

Trump has spoken at his rallies about journalists ‘meeting their bride’ in prison, that is a reference to being raped. And he has said that to cheers.  

He is likely to increase the classifcation of documents. 

To scale back freedom of information laws. 

To put pressure on the owners of newspapers. 

To encourage allies to bring libel suits. 

To challenge the key supreme court decision - NYT versus Sullivan - that protects news organisations from libel suits. 

He is likely to put pressure on advertisers.

To expand his power over tech platforms,

To deny funding to public radio

And to turn the Voice of America into a propaganda outlet. 

This is going to create waves across the world. It will give permission for other leaders to do the same. Trump is borrowing many of these moves from other authoritarian leaders. And what we are going to see is an accelerated feedback loop. 

The USA is entering a new age of politically motivated witchhunts that will look like McCarthyism on steroids. Because we are entering a whole new era of state power. 

The alliance of Trump and Elon Musk is an alliance of a type the world has never seen before. It’s the blending and merging of state power with a global communication platform. This is the kind of propaganda machine that Joseph Goebbels  couldn’t even dream of.

And, again, this is going to affect us here in Europe too. Our elections. Our security. This week Elon Musk has been threatening British parliamentarians. 

His platform is a weapon. It’s a weapon that can be turned onto our elections at any time. Just as Musk did in America.  And it can also be turned on any individual or organisation that Musk decides he doesn’t like.

And the consequences of that, allied to state power, are terrifying. This is a new kind of darkness facing the world. 

And to explain how that will impact individual journalists, I want briefly tell you some of my story here. Which is a nothingburger compared to what is to come. But it is a warning. 

I was sued for defamation in the British high court by the subject of my investigation into a small data company called Cambridge Analytica. 

That became a huge story, Facebook received multibillion dollar fines for allowing Cambridge Analytica to illegally obtain 87 million people’s Facebook data. And it showed us, I think maybe for the first time, how these Silicon Valley companies operate with total impunity. How both journalism and Congress were unable to hold Mark Zuckerberg to account. 

And the individual who sued me over that investigation did something very clever. The biggest political donor in UK history didn’t sue the Guardian, instead, he came after me as an individual. He waited for me to repeat a line from a Guardian article in a talk, and he sued me for that. 

It was clever and deliberate and designed to silence and intimidate me. To isolate me from my news organisation. And to silence and intimidate all journalism into him. And it worked. 

And this, I have no doubt, is a playbook that will be deployed against other journalists.

It wasn’t just that that the lawsuit tied me up for years in litigation and led to years of stress and fear, it also became a central weapon in an online harassment and abuse campaign against me. Every court report led to a new wave of attacks. It was like being trapped in a washing machine, a spin cycle of abuse. 

This is a playbook. Journalists are not just facing litigation and lawsuits. It’s that plus online abuse, doxxing, threats, online mobs. And what we see is that these two things enable and amplify each other. And it’s a weapon that we’ve seen being overwhelming directed at women journalists. It’s what happened to Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize winning journalist in the Philippines, and Rana Ayyub, an investigative journalist in India. It’s what happened to Daphne. 

And I want you to understand what this is: it’s hybrid warfare. It’s across both the real world and the online world. Which by the way are the same thing. It’s hybrid warfare being waged against journalists. And think what that is going to mean when Elon Musk has his hands on the control of the global propaganda machine. 

Rana Ayyub rang me this week to tell me how the abuse against her had rapidly ramped up since Trump won the election in the US. It’s already empowered and emboldened Modi and his supporters. Rana had been tailed on a reporting trip by state intelligence officers. Her mobile phone number was shared online then, she’d become the victim of a deep fake porn video. She was scared, freaked out. And this, believe me, will happen to other journalists. 

I want to finish talk briefly about my own news organisation. Which is itself under grave threat. 

All of mine and my colleagues work is read by a global audience on the Guardian’s website. But in the UK, it also appears in the print edition of the Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday sister newspaper.

And, as we speak, the Guardian’s board has approved the sale of the Observer – the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world – to a tiny, financially unprofitable podcast company.

We, the journalists of both the Guardian and the Observer, believe that this is an existential threat to our journalism. 

We believe the company that is seeking to buy us has no track record of success, no business model, and insufficient funds. We don’t understand why no alternatives have been considered. We believe that the Guardian is risking the trust of the readers by making such a reckless decision in haste. We believe it is the beginning of the end of our newspaper. 

93% of us have now voted to go on strike.

I’m telling you this. Because ownership matters. The British government has previously scrutinised the potential buyers of news organisations and I urge it do so in this case. 

Because the freedom of the press is precious and  fragile and when a news organisation dies, it leaves a gaping hole. Politicians go unscrutinised, crimes go unreported, human rights abuses go undocumented.

If press freedom means anything, it has to mean the ability to speak out to advocate for the survival of our own news organisation. Because if a newspaper is allowed to die, it’s never coming back.

And at this point, we, the journalists of the Guardian and Observer, believe the Guardian’s management is an active threat to press freedom. 

I speak on behalf of those journalists when I say that we believe its actions are imperilling the survival of a 240-year-old newspaper. 

I’ve learned the hard way what happens when journalism comes under attack. I am lucky. I live in a country with strong institutions and rule of law. I faced a civil not a criminal suit. And it still felt like an existential struggle for survival. I’m only now two years on, recovering my psychological and physical health. And I’m ending by telling you this because there is a global witch hunt coming. And what happened to me must not be allowed to happen to other journalists.

I am just one person. But what I worry is that news organisations will find reasons to not provide financial and other support to their journalists when they come under attack. They will be afraid of the consequences. They will find loopholes and excuses to not do the right thing. 

This is what happened to me. I faced my nightmare alone. But we cannot let that happen to other journalists. Because a threat to one journalist is a threat to all. A threat to one news organisation is a threat to all. 

There is a curtain of darkness that is falling across the world, a blanket of fake news and lies is smothering the truth and we know where that leads. We simply cannot afford to let this happen. 

Thank you.

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If you’ve got to the very end of this, it must be because you care about press freedom and the future of journalism. If you want to express your opinion on any of this, I’d urge you to write to observer.readers@observer.co.uk or to me carole.cadwalladr@theguardian.com. With thanks, Carole