WHILE I was researching a book on the BBC during the Second World War, I had a look at George Orwell’s file. I found the enormously long document that he was required to sign when he joined in 1941, which made it almost impossible for him to say anything at all, in an article or a speech, without the approval of his bosses. It was almost exactly the same document as the one I had to sign when I joined, nearly half a century later, and things have got even stricter.
To give this talk, I had to fill in a form requesting permission, and one of the questions required me to lay out: “How can you demonstrate this event complies with the guidance and guidelines around impartiality and conflicts of interest?” Thinking that this would be an uncontroversial answer, I put down that I was going to talk about telling the truth. How wrong I was in my premise, because, in the months since, the concept of truth-telling has become hugely controversial, and it really does appear that many people — people of weight and importance — don’t think truth really exists.
Every time I sat down to marshal my thoughts, I found they’d been dramatically overtaken by events. I had a bit of time at the beginning of September last year, and then hurricane Helene blew up across the Atlantic and wreaked havoc in a raft of southern states, from Florida northwards, killing more than 230 people. And a Trump-supporting member of Congress argued that the hurricane had been deliberately dispatched by Joe Biden’s government in Washington, and, shortly thereafter, weather forecasters started to get death threats from people who were convinced they were responsible for the hurricane.
I had another go at the turn of the year, only to be confronted by a headline telling me that the man who runs Meta, which includes Facebook, had decided to give up fact-checking, in the hope that this would endear him to the then President Elect, Donald Trump — the implication presumably being that the soon-to-be President preferred a world where facts are not checked.
Only last week, Trump claimed that Ukraine, not President Putin, started its war with Russia. And, I confess, I almost gave up at that point, because this stuff is so wacky, and the questions it raises are so deep and big, that they feel above my pay grade and very difficult to deal with without getting into trouble on those BBC impartiality guidelines.
The only thing I could think of doing that might be useful is to address the subject from the slightly narrow perspective of my own experience, exploring whether people who do what I do — people who spend their working hours trying to tell you things that we think you ought to know — can make a real difference. And that area is trust — the trust that we need to earn from you, if we are to have a healthy, truth-telling culture.
BACK in the 1970s, I had applied for a BBC News traineeship, and, at the time, I rather fancied my ability to think on my feet. So, when the interviewer asked me whether I could manage an ad-lib, I confidently said, of course. And he pointed to a framed picture on the wall above his desk, and said, “Talk about that poster for three minutes”. It was a blown-up version of the Tube map. And I was completely stumped. These days, the map is recognised as a masterpiece of 1930s design, but, to me, it was just a way of getting around London, and I fish-mouthed furiously with nothing coming.
Edward Stourton
And then, last year, I had a “eureka” moment. I suddenly realised the answer I should have given at the time. The Tube map is an illuminating metaphor for telling news stories. The map’s designer, Harry Beck, was an electrical draftsman, and he based his design on a circuit diagram. In doing so, he took great liberties with geography. If you lifted the whole of London up and had a peek underneath, it wouldn’t look anything like that, but the map is accurate and true because it matches our experience of using the Underground. Reality has been simplified so that it makes sense, and that’s what we do.
When we craft a news story, we choose what to put at the top, which facts you need to know to understand what’s happened, and why it’s significant. We edit out information which is confusing or redundant, just as Beck shortened the distances on the Northern Line. We keep it tight, focused on essentials, and a well-told news story — especially one written for broadcast news — has the spare simplicity of that Beck design. Our ambitions are that it make sense, and, above all, that you recognise it as true.
This metaphor recognises that truth isn’t a lump of gold that we simply pick up and pass on to you. We gather information and we do things to it before we offer it to you. We mine the gold, we shape it, and polish it.
Of course, the stories we tell you include things like figures and dates — the inflation rate in June this year was X or Y. But accuracy is only part of truth-telling, and the real test of a healthy truth-telling culture is that editorial process; it relies on an unspoken compact between you and us. You have to trust us to make the right judgements in the course of fashioning that circuit design, and you have to believe what we tell you with the same confidence you feel when you change from the Victoria Line to the Bakerloo Line at Oxford Circus, in the expectation of reaching Paddington.
WHEN I first began in broadcast journalism, that compact was so widely accepted that no one discussed it, or even thought about it. That comfortable, confident broadcasting culture, I think, had its origins in the part played by the BBC during the Second World War. The BBC was not universally trusted at the beginning of the war, and many people believed that it was a government propagandist. In many ways, it was: for example, the news-bulletin scripts of the withdrawal from Dunkirk survive in the BBC archives, and you could literally see the scribbles where the censors have teased up the story and crossed things out in the hope of putting a good spin on what was happening.
But, in the course of the war, the BBC earned the trust of the nation — partly simply by telling the truth with reasonable consistency; partly by developing the techniques and principles of broadcast journalism, which scarcely existed before Richard Dimbleby joined the corporation in the late 1930s; and partly by persuading their political masters that the existence of a national broadcaster, a single source of news that everyone believed, could play a hugely important part in forging and maintaining a sense of shared purpose.
A measure of how successful the BBC was are the audience figures for an extraordinary programme series, War Report, which went out almost every night, from D-Day right through to VE Day in the spring of 1945. It attracted audiences of between ten and 15 million listeners every night.
A sense of what kept all those millions listening and believing can be found in the message that A. P. Ryan, the BBC Home Controller, said to his correspondents as they prepared to head up the beaches with the troops on D-Day: “You handful of men have been chosen to undertake the most important assignments so far known to broadcasting. Describe the events of which you are a witness as accurately as you can. Give credit for gallantry and generalship.
“Let pride in the achievements of our armies come through, but never jazz up a plain story. Events will have their own drama. You are not dramatists; the play and the persons in the play are ready made for you. You are broadcast reporters sent out to observe and tell us what you’ve seen.”
I really can’t think of a better description of the part played by the reporter. The wartime story also illustrates the way that progress in journalism is driven by technology. Richard Dimbleby first made his name covering the Fens floods in 1937, and one of his innovations was to record and broadcast sounds like the gurgling and sploshing of water. And, to do that, he had to have a converted laundry van to fit all his equipment in. Seven years later, the War Report correspondents were equipped with such lightweight recording machines that some of them carried them on their heads as they waded up the beaches of Normandy.
Festival of Faith and LiteratureEdward Stourton with Nick Spencer at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature in Winchester Cathedral
But technology can create challenges as well as opportunities. Today’s digital landscape offers us an abundance — a superabundance — of sources for information, something unimaginable in the 1940s, and, indeed, in the three-television-channel world I joined in the 1970s. If we’re offered several versions of the truth, it is only natural to prefer the version which best fits our views and prejudices, and that’s a real challenge facing us in what’s sometimes called the mainstream media.
So, how do we meet that challenge? There are plenty of things that old-school, mainstream media people like me can’t do. I can’t legislate to introduce new controls on the way social media operates. I’m not an MP. What I can do is look to my craft and how I practise it. We should firstly recognise that, for a long time, we have, quietly and without really letting on to our audiences, accepted the idea of multiple truths as a reality. You could, indeed, argue that unravelling different truths is an essential part of reporting.
My time as Washington correspondent in the 1980s coincided with Ronald Reagan’s last years in the White House, and it was, to borrow those famous words of Jane Austen’s, a truth universally acknowledged in the newsroom back at home that the American President was bonkers. It was equally true that Reagan was immensely popular in the United States. He had a masterly rhetorical touch in perfect harmony with American sensibilities, and he could genuinely lay claim to solid strategic instincts as the Cold War drew towards its close.
At one level, my job was simply to reconcile those two versions of the truth, and, to do that, I had to shape my stories in a way that made them palatable to audiences at home. The need to do that means that we are always, to some degree, colouring in the bare facts of a story.
And the way I covered American politics for a British audience was, of course, very different from the way my American colleagues covered it for a domestic audience. There’s a really important factor at play: truth is very closely tied to values, and our values can dictate the way we tell it.
I was back in the United States for the election in November, and, on election night, my producer and I went to what became the victory party given by Republicans in Atlanta, Georgia. And as the results came in, I gathered “vox pops”, short interviews with ordinary people. When I asked one Trump supporter for his reaction, he said he was pleased, because Kamala Harris was “a horrible human being”. Instead of asking him what he meant, I immediately challenged him over whether it was right to speak about a political opponent like that.
It was an instinctive response, and I reflected afterwards that I did so because my values and, despite everything people say about the coarsening of political discourse in this country, I suspect the values of most of my audience would hold that it’s wrong to use that kind of language about a political opponent. His values are very different, as he then demonstrated by reciting, without any sense of embarrassment or restraint, a colourful rant on the personal failings of the Democratic candidate.
This, of course, is where we can be vulnerable to accusations of bias. It’s very difficult to lay down rules about this. We have to be continually alert to the danger of allowing values to slip into prejudices, because, if we do that, we will rightly forfeit your trust.
The confident broadcasting culture that I was lucky enough to enjoy when I began was sometimes a sloppy broadcasting culture, and sometimes exploited by people who were not too bothered about truth-telling.
Serious, deliberate deceptions were made possible by the fact that, in the days before digital technology made it so much cheaper and easier to cover the world, you quite often found yourself alone in the field when you were dealing with a difficult story. For example, during the Balkan wars, one of my ITN colleagues came under anti-aircraft fire when flying in a UN helicopter. Once it had landed, he tried to persuade his cameraman to stay on board a little longer so that he could film while artfully shaking the camera, simulating the chopper pilot’s evasive action. An eloquent example of what A. P. Ryan, in his memo to correspondents on the eve of D-Day, called “jazzing up” a story.
Today, the whole process of verifying information has become much, much more rigorous — precisely because of the way that the digital world opens up so many sources.
Some of the [BBC] systems that have been put in place are truly impressive, and reflect a recognition of the reality that an organisation like the BBC can survive in a world of multiple sources only if it retains trust. That challenge has forced us to go about the business of verification with renewed rigour.
My wife, Fiona, who worked as a BBC television producer and programme editor for many years, and is now freelance, collaborated last year with an Iranian director on a documentary about the wave of protests in Iran that followed the mistreatment of Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died in police custody after being arrested because of the way she was wearing her hijab.
Because no foreign journalist had been able to cover the story from inside Iran, they worked almost entirely with social-media footage, much of it recorded by the demonstrators themselves. It was incredibly harrowing stuff, very moving, and an innovative way to report on a country which is closed to outsiders. In that regard, it was an advance for telling truths that a repressive regime didn’t want told.
But social media is, of course, notoriously unreliable, and an uncertain source, and they set off on the project in the sure and certain faith that, if the Iranian authorities could challenge the accuracy of anything, they would. With a story of that kind of extreme sensitivity, one mistake can undermine the credibility of everything. So, every single frame had to be verified three times over: digitally, circumstantially, and visually. The digital footprint of each post was checked to ensure that it matched the time and place claimed by the person who’d posted it. The scenes shown by each post were checked against the public record of events.
For example, if there had been a big demonstration in Tehran on such and such a date, then the images of a demonstrator being beaten by police on the same date were judged to be that bit more credible. Each image had to be checked visually by someone familiar with the towns and cities where the protests took place. The team were able to verify some footage of Mahsa Amini’s funeral through the pebble in the corner of the frame, and the check of a man’s suit, both of which had appeared in other images of the same event.
Coming up with strategies like that is a dynamic process, because technology keeps creating new ways of lying. My most alarming example — and again, I’m indebted to my wife’s work in television — this is something called, in deference to Mary Shelley, “Frankenbiting”. It means taking individual words from an interview and assembling from them an entirely new sentence and paragraph, and running that as if it had been said.
It is sometimes used in documentaries, and the producers will tell you that the interviewee did use those individual words, that they know the interviewee’s thoughts on a particular subject, and that they’ve merely helped her or him say it better. I think that’s so obviously and outrageously on the wrong side of the line. But, again, the need for humility kicks in, because it’s true that, in radio, we have practised a very mild form of “Frankenbiting” for years. It’s far from unknown for a sentence to be cleaned up by moving a word or two from another sentence in the same interview.
It used to be common practice to record interviews on the phone, and then dub in your questions in the studio afterwards. If the words are the same, does it matter? Well, my answer now is, Yes, it does, because tone and mood can matter as much as language, and because you’re not being entirely straight with the listener. The business of truth-telling has become infinitely more complicated than it was when I began in broadcasting, and I confess I’d rather relish the challenge. The fun of it is that you have to keep recalculating where the line is all the time.
The American thinker Timothy Snyder brought out an inspiring book, On Freedom, last summer, and he makes a compelling connection between freedom and a truth-telling culture. He writes at some length about the collapse of local journalism in the United States, which, he says, undermines local democracy. I hadn’t really appreciated quite how complete that collapse has been, until I went back to the States last November for the elections.
In the past, one of the joys of American cities, particularly on the East Coast, was those glass and metal boxes on the sidewalk full of newspapers. You put in a nickel and a dime, and out comes the Boston Globe or the Washington Post. In downtown Atlanta in November, I was completely unable to find a newspaper. My hotel looked at me as if I was slightly deranged when I asked for one at breakfast, and, after scouring the streets, I finally gave up when I found a shop called “newsagents”, and even they didn’t sell a newspaper.
Snyder writes that to “resist the few big lies we will need to produce millions of little truths”. And I think that that is the one way that truth can survive in a digital world. It made me think again of my wife’s Iranian documentary, and that pebble in the corner of the frame, because, I think, in the end, the pebble is where the fight-back begins.
Edward Stourton was speaking at the Festival of Faith and Literature in Winchester Cathedral on 28 February 2025.
