2024 is a crucial year for liberal democracies around the world, with over 50 nations voting in general elections and up to 4.2bn people casting their votes. In this episode, Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber discuss why media election coverage will be more important than ever, as key campaigns spill over from conventional, legacy formats such as print, television and radio and onto a wide range of social media platforms. Will fake news and misinformation become even more widespread, and could artificial intelligence have a decisive impact on outcomes?
Alan and Lionel also unpick the importance of a key AI lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft. And then there’s Twitter, or X. How will the social media platform perform with the challenges that it faces on a daily basis since Elon Musk took over the reins?
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The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Alan Rusbridger:
This episode has been sponsored by purpose-lead communications agency Higginson Strategy. B-Corp certified Higginson Strategy creates campaigns it truly believes in. If you'd like to know more, please visit www.higginsonstrategy, all one word. .com.
Hello, happy New Year and welcome to the first episode of Media Confidential of 2024. Media Confidential is Prospect Magazine's weekly exploration of the contested world of Media. I'm Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber:
And I'm Lionel Barber. In our last episode, we look back on 2023 and the big stories that hit the headlines. So today, Alan, I thought we should look at our first episode 2024, looking forward to the coming year. 2024 of course is shaping up to be a year that will put liberal democracy as we know it to the test.
Rusbridger:
The figure I've heard, Lionel, is that something like 80% of the world's population is going to be going to the polls this year, but certainly the UK, the USA, and maybe, I don't know, 40 or 50 other countries holding elections. So it's going to be the year of elections and we'll be exploring how the media will be covering these votes.
Barber:
If you think about 2016, that was a big one, wasn't it? Brexit, the election of Donald Trump. That proved that democracy is a target for sowing confusion. You obviously have outside agents, Russia, interference, but also the insurgents inside, the populists. So I think it's going to be very interesting how social media plays and how prevalent misinformation and fake news will be.
Rusbridger:
And the question is to my mind, A, whether the regulators, people like the Electoral Commission in this country, are remotely prepared for the way that these elections are going to be fought. I think they are going to be fought in traditional style or they're going to be fought on Twitter or TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, and where this leaves the so-called legacy media.
Barber:
Yeah, I think the editors have also got a big job. You can't cover these races just as horse races, who's up, who's down. And the other aspect I suppose is artificial intelligence. It was the story in 2023, AI was the word that entered the mainstream. We'll have to see how AI is used as a tool, a weapon, in these elections.
Rusbridger:
Of course, we've got the ongoing lawsuit between The New York Times, which has at the end of 2023 sued a multi-billion dollar suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. And more mundanely in this country we've got the rumbling battle over who's going to end up owning the Daily Telegraph and what's at stake there. The BBC is always in the headlines. It's going to have a new chair at some point this year. And over the water we've got a couple of British players in Will Lewis and Mark Thompson at the Washington Post and CNN.
Barber:
Lots to discuss, Alan. Anyway, listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode at Media Confidential is on X/Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Rusbridger:
And I should mention that there's a new seasonal subscription offer for Prospect Magazine. We're discounting the price of the annual digital subscription by 50%. To take advantage of this great deal, please search for “Prospect New Year offer” or visit subscribe.Prospectmagazine, all one word, .co.uk/ny, and the offer ends Friday the 19th of January.
Barber:
Now, Alan, you'll be very impressed, I do follow you on Instagram, so I gather you've been doing some building during Christmas?
Rusbridger:
I was very pleased with my log shed, since you asked. Thank you for mentioning that Lionel. It's one step up from Lego, i.e. it was sort of a pre-packed, it's like a outdoor version of Ikea. But I am now the proud [inaudible 00:04:16] of a log shed.
Barber:
Congratulations. Nothing similar to David Cameron's effort though.
Rusbridger:
No, I think that was a Shepherds Hut. This is a different venture altogether. How was your Christmas and what did you see or watch?
Barber:
Well, we had the children, they're actually in their 30s, and a grandchild over for Christmas in London. And then off to Marrakesh for four days where it was warm, it did not rain. And I was completing the last pages of my upcoming biography of Masayoshi Son, who is the founder and CEO, multi-billionaire, of SoftBank, the great media investment house based in Japan.
Rusbridger:
I've had an inkling that you've been working on this for some time. Is this finally going to see the light of day in 2024?
Barber:
I expect to have publication date organised in America, in Britain, either right at the end of 2024, or if things slip, January '25.
Rusbridger:
A bit like the general election.
Barber:
Well, it is a bit like the election, except I hope to be a winner.
Rusbridger:
We all want to be winners in 2024.
Barber:
So let's get right into this, Alan. I've been doing, by the way, a little bit of research on this subject. Are you impressed?
Rusbridger:
Well, [inaudible 00:05:36] has always been my secret name for you. Tell me more.
Barber:
Well, I have been looking at my old newspaper news organisation, the Financial Times, and two interesting articles published. One by Alec Russell, the foreign editor, under ... A long read about Can Democracy Survive in 2024. Interesting, he's grouping these elections, could be more than 50, into groups.
So one is the election in tyrant states. I mean, looking at Russia, Belarus, Venezuela. Then he's looking at a group of elections in countries which are democracies but where democracy is fraying. You can think about India, most populous country in the world, you're thinking about Mexico. And then you've got elections in established democracies, liberal democracies, like UK, USA and EU.
Interestingly, Alan, Alec is, and the Financial Times in general I think, is a little bit worried about the state of where we are and the threat to liberal democracies, but Janan Ganesh, the opinion writer, he's a lot more sanguine. He says let's not get over excited. If you think about where we were midpoint last century, 2.5 billion people or so, 1.8 were in autocracies. And so really you've got to measure it in terms of time. And it was an extraordinary period in 1991, end of Cold War, when that was liberal democracy, its height. And so although there's been a bit of decline, it's relative.
Rusbridger:
That's a very useful overview of this year. In terms of media, let's start with America. The big dilemma last time around, and it'd be interesting whether you think the news organisations there have thought this through any more clearly of how you cover Trump. You've got this figure quite unlike any other leader America has seen in modern times, if not ever.
And the question a lot of American journalists were answering was you normalise it by treating it as though this is a routine thing. Or is this somehow an exceptional figure who can't be accommodated by the normal rules as Americans would see it, objective journalism?
Barber:
Yeah, it's a big test, and of course they somewhat flunked it in 2016. I'm thinking particularly on through the television media, the networks, because Trump was such a divisive but charismatic audience-drawing figure that they gave him a lot of airtime, and he was a master of the medium. There were papers like The New York Times which tried to scrutinise his record, but essentially I think they gave him something of a free pass.
Then, during his time as president, they saw themselves as the defenders of democracy and almost went too far in the opposite direction, and meantime didn't do a good job of understanding or reporting on why people were actually voting for Trump, what were the economic circumstances, what were the big social questions, immigration, things like that. I think they're trying to do a better job of that now.
Rusbridger:
It'd be interesting if you try and put yourself in the shoes of the editor of, I don't know, the Washington Post, The New York Times. You've got someone who habitually spews out lies. Is your responsibility just to report those or how do you flag up to the readers that these things that he says are simply not true at scale?
Barber:
Well, I do think you need to fact check, and the Washington Post actually did do that from 2016. Dan Balz talks about in his book, and I think that's useful, just to state plainly where he's obviously telling blatant lies. But I think it's also important to write about the state of the Republican Party and to give voice to those people who are coming up with different points of view, challenging Trump.
Lynne Cheney for example in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's daughter, was a very important figure. She needed to be given airtime so you're not squeezing out people who are moderate voices, a reasonable voice. And you're not just giving airtime, copy space, to the noisiest people in the room, like Trump.
Rusbridger:
Traditionally it's also been a tremendous bonanza financially for the legacy news organisations. I mean, billions go in advertising or have in the past. Do you think that's going to happen this year or do you think that that money's going to go elsewhere?
Barber:
I still think a lot of money is going to go into television and of course Les Moonves, then head of CBS, remembered in the famous quote in 2016, "Trump may not be good for democracy, but he sure as hell good for the networks." A low point I would suggest. I think other forms of targeting, not just the TV adverts, are going to be very important. I think this is through Facebook, social media, and of course the other way is through AI.
Rusbridger:
I mean, the holy grail of campaigning with AI, and I'm not sure if we're there quite yet, is the entirely personalised bubble. That they can come up with personalised messages for every single voter. Cambridge Analytica were beginning down that road. You can imagine the salivating anticipation of campaign directors being able to achieve that holy grail. Are we they yet or is that some time off?
Barber:
No, I think that microtargeting, as it's called, has been around for at least 10 years. The issue is that it's just become so much more refined. And of course Trump, with some of his communications advisors, had been absolutely brilliant at condensing a message. I mean, the one in 2016 was Make America Great Again. A lot of people laughed at it, but actually it captured the mood of the moment, in the same way that Barack Obama with his slogan, Yes We Can. Simplicity works.
Rusbridger:
The other criticism, which I'm not sure any news organisation has truly got over, and you'll be familiar with it, Jay Rosen at NYU has been raising the seam of how you get beyond the horse race. Who's up, who's down, who's ahead, who's behind, into the issues themselves. I don't know, I mean, that sounds like an entirely worthy aim, but we all get caught up in it, don't we?
Barber:
We do, but we do need to remember that this election is essentially going to be decided by as few as 10 states, mainly in the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, these are the battleground, so-called battleground states, so Ohio. So all news organisations really do need to spend time in those states figuring out what are the issues that are playing. And I remember in 2016, we were late in really getting deep into Ohio, but once we started reporting there it was clear that Trump was going to be very strong.
Rusbridger:
What about the UK, because it's likely that we're going to have an election at some point in 2024. Do you think that legacy media is going to have less of an impact? Certainly voters under the age of 40 are said to be much more swayed now by the stuff they're viewing on social media, on alternative channels. But I guess we would both agree that the legacy media still have a pretty important role to play.
Barber:
I think so, and I just want to make one more point about the American election because we haven't talked about the economy. And clearly pocketbook issues, how well people feel off, are things getting better, that's going to be really the decisive issue. There are these cultural issues as well, wokery, but really comes down to how are people doing. And so for news organisations, I think they really need to focus on the middle class, people who feel squeezed by inflation, and what are their sentiments. And that obviously plays in the UK where we've had higher inflation than other European countries. We're in a tighter spot, although the economy nominally is doing slightly better.
I mean, obviously I come from that background, but I think the legacy media should focus on it. How influential will they be? I think newspapers still matter because even the Daily Mail, even in the post-Dacre era, it sets the news agenda in the minds of the politicians and also, dare I say it, the BBC, and they will often follow where the tabloids are going, particularly the Mail.
Rusbridger:
I agree with that. I've never thought the actual pre-election editorials that people spend so much time on, they might matter at the margins, but it's the general framing of the election and the issues that matter. And legacy media still, for better or worse, do that very well.
Barber:
God, I'm so glad I'm not having to do that. Bring in the college of cardinals and discuss who we're going to back, ponderous interventions, mainly by me. Actually I hardly ever said anything and then I just talked to a couple of other people and say, "Do you know what? We can't possibly back X." You're quite right. The editorial in favour, it was always difficult for the FT as well because we weren't really party political at all.
Rusbridger:
Did you have to consult anybody? Did you have a publisher that you had to talk to about who you were going to endorse?
Barber:
Never talked to the publisher at all. When we came out for the conservatives in 2010 I had that in mind. I thought when I took over in '05 that we'd become at the FT a bit too Blairist, and I thought it was time for a change.
Rusbridger:
I remember in 2010 we had a big meeting of, must've been about 150 members of staff, because The Guardian's a paper with ... I mean, in its history it's endorsed all three major parties, but it's always had a torn identity between its Liberal history and its Labour history, and it's never a foregone conclusion which way it's going to jump.
Barber:
The last election that I did was 2017 and it was just grim, because post-Brexit, could you really endorse the Conservatives. On the other hand, Jeremy Corbyn was a 1970s Trotskyist.
Rusbridger:
And remind me how the chips fell at the FT on that?
Barber:
I'm afraid they fell in very scattered fashion in favour of the Conservatives, but boy, did I sweat over that.
Well, Alan, what do you think about fake news outbreaks in the UK? Is that really going to be an issue?
Rusbridger:
I think it's bound to be. I mean, we're seeing a bit already, these deep fake videos. I, as you know, sit on the Oversight Board, which was set up by Facebook, now Meta, and we've done a number of cases recently. We're doing one at the moment about a doctored Joe Biden video. It's a video of him touching a young girl's chest and it's doctored in the sense that it just repeatedly puts this on loop to suggest he's a paedophile. And the question we're being asked to deliberate on is whether that is acceptable or not.
But we're looking at these kind of election trickery and the limits of free speech in elections around the world. It's one of the most interesting aspects of our work.
Barber:
This is Media Confidential's preview of 2024. And coming up, where do we think AI will end up taking us next, and how can it be ensured that AI is working for us rather than at odds with us?
Rusbridger:
Well, there's lots to unpick here, Lionel. First of all, tell us about this lawsuit, which happened over the holiday season with the announcement that The New York Times Company was suing OpenAI and Microsoft for staggering sums of money, I mean, billions.
Barber:
Yeah, this has been coming, it's in the pipeline. There've been talks between the major news organisations in the States, Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's stable, The New York Times and others, with OpenAI and Microsoft, which is the major sponsor. And the issue really comes down to copyright, because obviously to generate artificial intelligence at scale you need to draw in content. And the issue that The New York Times has, and others, is they feel they should be compensated for in essence allowing access to their great stores of information. If you think of what The New York Times archive must look like, I mean, they have 2,000 plus or so journalists producing content every day about every subject under the sun. This is goldmine for AI.
Now, just one other point here, which is it's vital to remember this and you will remember it very well, that back in, say, '99, 2000, the issue was whether news organisations should allow all their content to be freely accessible on the internet. Guardian's a big proponent of this obviously, and other news organisations charged for content. Now the hope was the internet would provide the advertising revenue to compensate for that handover of intellectual property to search organisations, et cetera, but it didn't really materialise.
So the key point here is that The New York Times, that's why they've sued for so much money, is not wanting to make the same mistake that happened 20, 25 years ago.
Rusbridger:
Is this a question of slamming the stable door a bit late? I mean, these large language learning models have been at work for years now, haven't they, plundering this stuff. Is it late in the day to be suddenly saying, "Hold on a minute, you should have been paying us."
Barber:
No, I don't think so, Alan, because they don't want to make the same mistake as last time, and they're aware that 2023 was a step jump in the development of these large language models and everything is beginning to accelerate. So they feel now really is the time to take a stand because if you wait any longer, then you really have ... The horse is out of sight.
Rusbridger:
I think OpenAI have already reached a settlement with Axel Springer and with AP. Are these for large sums of money? I mean, hat do you think is going to be the realistic value of these treasure troves of content?
Barber:
Well, I don't know the exact number that Axel Springer, which is the German media group headed by Mathias Döpfner, who we interviewed-
Rusbridger:
We interviewed last year.
Barber:
... just a few weeks ago, where he failed to mention that he was going to settle for a certain ... I've been told that it's not a large, large sum, so it's not 50 million, 100 million or whatever. It's certainly not billions, but it'll be a decent number to help the bottom line.
The way I'm reading it, and full disclosure, I've not talked to Joe Khan, the editor of The New York Times or indeed the publisher, my sense is that this is what I think is technically known as the shakedown. I mean, they really want to put the pressure on and get a decent amount of money, and then have some rules on future usage.
Rusbridger:
And is this baked into the price of OpenAI? I mean, I just saw a market valuation of something like $80 billion.
Barber:
I think it's now 90 billion plus.
Rusbridger:
But is this baked into their assumptions that they are going to end up having to pay for this stuff?
Barber:
Oh, I think that that number of 90 billion means that anything they hand over to The New York Times is chicken feed. And the settlement, I could be wrong here, I hate to make market predictions, but I don't think it will affect the valuation at all. I mean, obviously OpenAI, Microsoft's interest, is not publicly quoted. So this is a private company. In a way, Alan, I think the valuation will be settled and it will be good for the valuation if there is some legal certainty.
Rusbridger:
If you were OpenAI, is there some merit in just playing a long game and saying, "Well, we'll see you in court." Because from what I can see, the American courts are not guaranteed to side with the publishers.
Barber:
It's possible. I mean, bad publicity, I think legal certainty would be preferable to fighting in the courts.
Rusbridger:
Where does the public good lie in all this, Lionel, from your point of view? I mean, we can't uninvent these machines. AI is with us for good and it's in all our interests that the content that it is processing is good content, because you can imagine a world in which all the so-called good content was walled off and there was a standoff between legacy producers and these new companies, in which they end up training on bad content that suits no one, that benefits no one.
Barber:
Well, I tend to be a guarded techno optimist here. I think that AI can be quite useful for dealing with what we used to call commodity stories, so stories that don't really have any value added, it's not deep research. The kind of wonderful investigations that The Guardian did over the years. I mean, AI is not just not going to be able to do that. So commodity news, fine, you need to disclose when you're using it, so that's a plus.
I think the danger in looking at other media is, say, advertising, where, and I see my son in LA talking about this, where you can put together an ad, a video ad through AI, and it'll do the direction, it'll do the photographs and everything. So I think that sector is definitely ... You'd be a bit worried about.
And then lastly, I'd just cite a very interesting article on Bloomberg in the new year by Adrian Wooldridge, formerly of The Economist, he's a great columnist. And he made five predictions, one of them around AI. And he said the big thing to look at in 2024 is AI is the perfect digital assistant. I mean, it really can organise you, organise your meetings, calendars and that kind of thing. It's the essential assistant. That will be a big thing. And he thinks some of the other advances may be a bit over [inaudible 00:24:41], a bit like Y2K in 2000, if you remember.
Rusbridger:
Well, it's the obligation of news organisations to tell readers. I mean, I can imagine you're editing a local newspaper, times are hard, you haven't got the staff that you used to. Somebody tells you you can feed in the council minutes and this machine will produce a perfectly serviceable story on the basis of the council minutes, will turn it into copy. That would be very tempting. Or you could feed in the stats from a football match and it'll produce a football report. I mean, this isn't make or break stuff. It's useful, it's time-saving, it's money-saving.
The temptation is going to be to go for this, isn't it? But what are the rules around transparency and frankness with the reader?
Barber:
Well, if I was sitting in a regional newspaper I would definitely use it, but I would disclose it. And I would be very clear saying at the bottom of the story, "This has been AI-generated." I'd like to say that there's also proofed, a second pair of eyes on the story with an editor. Football matches could be done, I guess. I'm not an expert. You have to make sure that the machine wasn't an Arsenal supporter when covering the Tottenham match, obviously.
But seriously, I think I would use it. And what resources you've got, you'd be looking at, "Okay, this council minutes are there, but what's the story behind the story?" That's always what I said at the FT.
Rusbridger:
So what I like about this world, do you remember the Jeff Jarvis saying from years ago, "Do what you do best and link to the rest." So that was the idea. There's going to be an awful lot of commodity journalism that everyone can do. You can link to that, you can now produce that through machines. That should give you the time to do these so-called enterprise journalism, the stuff where you really make a difference, and differentiate your product from what everyone else is doing.
Barber:
I believe that passionately, Alan. And I think that one of the terrible things that happened during the internet age is that people started saying journalism is finished because it's all citizen journalism, or journalism is in total decline. And reporting became de facto downgraded.
And this is a complete mistake because actually, in an age where facts are challenged, in an age where people are too much in a hurry, actually stopping and thinking, "Here is the story behind the story. Here is something really to be worked on," which requires time, and then you produce it, I think that could lead to, I'm not going to say golden age of journalism, but certainly a rebirth. That's where I would be putting the emphasis
Rusbridger:
In this week's Prospect podcast, Prospects Contributing Editor Isabel Hilton talks to Elizabeth Green. Elizabeth's a researcher focused on Chinese politics, cross-strait relations, and security and defence issues. She's been watching China and wondering if they're gearing up for a war with Taiwan, but also claims that they're currently applying so-called grey zone warfare tactics in the region.
Elizabeth Green:
Grey zone warfare is a strategy that involves using a range of covert and non-traditional tactics to achieve national objectives without triggering armed conflict. That typically includes cyber-attacks, disinformation, economic pressure, political manipulation, a range of different activities that fall in a spectrum between peace, cooperation on one side, and war, armed conflict on the other.
So the grey zone is everything that falls in between. And these actions are deliberately designed to remain below the threshold of open warfare, and that makes these actions difficult to attribute to particular actors and it complicates states' ability to respond.
Rusbridger:
So catch that wherever you get your podcasts.
So, so much for AI, Lionel, what about social media? 2023 was the year that Twitter was either going to implode or blow up or be reborn. Probably none of those things quite happened in the way that people dramatically predicted. What do you predict for X in this year ahead and are the so-called rivals, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and so forth, is this the year they're going to break through?
Barber:
I'm less optimistic about those rivals. I think they're either less easy to use than X, formerly known as Twitter. There was a lot of talk about it of course immediately after the Musk takeover.
I mean, for me it's all about X. It's all about Elon Musk. You were saying Alan, that in the election campaign, quite rightly, there's going to be a lot of advertising dollars. Well, how much will X get? I mean, if you look at the raw numbers, Alan, since Musk's takeover in October 2022, monthly US ad revenue declined at least 55% year-on-year each month. That's according to data provided to Reuters. It looks, if not terminal, it's very serious.
Now, Linda Yaccarino, formerly of NBC, an ad industry veteran, was brought in by Elon Musk as CEO, and she's trying to pick up the pieces. She has very good advertising relationships, but in my view, I think she's really struggling. She's being undermined by Musk with his big mouth. And I think he told advertisers remember late last year to go and F themselves, not helpful really in terms of cultivating relationships. So I wonder whether Yaccarino's going to survive in 2024.
Rusbridger:
We didn't talk about that at the time, what did you make of that? That was such an extraordinary interview, wasn't it, with The New York Times. I remember the interview, I was sort of dumbfounded. He didn't really quite know what to say, and then Musk doubled-down and he told them to go and take a running jump, except in more colourful language. I mean, it was like a death wish.
Barber:
It's extraordinary. I mean, sometimes his EQ is not great, but he also bears deep grudges. He feels underappreciated as an innovator and entrepreneur, and he doesn't like it when he gets criticism public or private from individuals, his rivals. And I think he has a particular dislike at the moment to Bob Iger at Disney, who's having his own problems with streaming and streaming revenues.
Rusbridger:
There's this whole tipping point question, isn't it? I mean, I'm on Threads, which I find fine. I hadn't realised until recently that you couldn't get it in Europe because of the various GDPR issues, privacy issues, though I think they're about to solve those. Bluesky I like, it's a much more congenial and benign community than X. But I've got something like 2,000 followers on Bluesky as opposed to 220,000 on Twitter, so I can't make that leap professionally.
Barber:
Yeah, I'm disappointed frankly with my X experience. I have around 113, and it's gone steadily down since Musk took over. I have no idea why. I don't use it so much.
But I mean, the serious point is, you don't have as many broad sources. It's not as rich a medium as it was pre Musk. And therefore I do look at it, especially if there's a big news event, and there are some favourite commentators, either witty or insightful, but overall it's a disappointing experience. And if that's me-
Rusbridger:
Is Musk going to do something so repellent and repulsive that people are going to say, "Actually I can't bear to be on this platform any longer."
Barber:
Alan, I really don't know. I don't use Bluesky, maybe I should take a look. But my feeling is that you just have a rather decaying X, and you need something really exciting and different to take its place.
Rusbridger:
So us X still going to be here this time next year?
Barber:
Definitely. It's just going to be lowercase.
Rusbridger:
There might be some defining event, which might be election related, which just makes people just back up and think, "Actually I don't want to be here any longer."
Barber:
Alan, you were talking about Mark Thompson, his first year at CNN. I mean, thinking about opportunity. This really is the moment, the American election. This is the opportunity for CNN to reestablish itself as an absolutely top news brand. And I'm sure Mark will be thinking really seriously about who he's going to have, which stars are going to come forward. And if they do really well, they're going to eat some of X's lunch.
Well, Alan, I'm really looking forward to England carrying off the trophy in the Euros this year, in the soccer.
Rusbridger:
But how likely is that?
Barber:
They never quite do it, but it's got to have something of a chance. Certainly Gareth Southgate's last moment I think to show that he really can take the top prize. What are you looking forward to?
Rusbridger:
Well, I'm hoping that the BBC might rediscover its nerves this year. It's had a rough few years. I'm not sure after Samir Shah's subpar appearance before the MPs that he's going to be the vitalizing force. But I suppose the best you can hope for the BBC is that it's going to survive this Tory government and an incoming Labour government will find ways of insulating it.
You'll be amazed to hear, Lionel, I'm working on a magazine piece which should be out at the end of January, about what I've been discovering about the BBC. And it's in, I think, a worse state than I had realised. So my hope for 2024 is that Labour come in and love the BBC in ways that I think they should.
Barber:
Seeing as we're in the sports metaphor world, Alan, and I talked about football, my curveball is that Rishi Sunak will lose the election and he will go off to Stanford, California, for a new life post-politics.
Rusbridger:
Which would suit him, I think, better than his current life. Barber:
It may be.
Rusbridger:
I've got great hopes of Thangam Debbonaire. She's the Labour Party Shadow Spokesman on Culture, Media, Sport. She's actually a professional cellist. And I was interviewing the composer George Benjamin, and he had not clocked who she was and I said, "Well, go and listen to her Radio 4 programme on Beethoven." And he texted me about half an hour later and said, "My God, we've got a culture secretary who's actually knows about Beethoven and culture." When you think that the Tories have had something like 12 culture secretaries in 12 years, to actually take this field of media and culture and the creative industries in this country and take them seriously and nourish them, would be just such a change.
If you've got any questions for us about the media, email them to mediaconfidential@Prospectmagazine.co uk, and we'll answer a few of them in a future episode. We've got a little bank of them building up.
Barber:
And we're on Twitter/X too, @mediaconfpod.
Rusbridger:
And remember to listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll have brand new episodes every Thursday throughout 2024, so be sure to follow us, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It's going to be quite a year, and we'll be on hand with analysis and interviews all along.
Barber:
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
