Journalists are often taught that “when a dog bites a man, that is not news; when a man bites a dog that is news.” But, according to former Guardian journalist and professor of sociology at Manchester university Gary Younge, sometimes events are newsworthy because they happen often—journalists just need to get curious about the reasons why. For example, after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a US justice department report revealed that every time a police dog bit someone in the city of Ferguson, the victim was black. Perhaps dog bites man is the story after all.
This week Alan and Lionel speak to Gary, who recently gave the inaugural Rosemary Hollis Memorial Lecture, about the lack of diversity in both race and class within the journalism industry. Broadsheets, he says, are the “internal memos of the upper class”. So, what can be done to open the field and make the industry more inclusive?
Journalist and writer Simon Nixon also joins Alan and Lionel to discuss the latest twists and turns in the story about who will buy the Telegraph, as Jeff Zucker and Andrew Neil get involved in a war of words about the control of the newspaper empire.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity:
Alan Rusbridger:
Hello and welcome to Media Confidential, Prospect Magazine’s weekly dive beyond the clickbait to analyse what’s really happening in the vital and contested world of media. I’m Alan Rusbridger. I’m here in London at Prospect HQ, and it’s that time of week where we ask, “Lionel, where are you?”
Lionel Barber:
Ah, I’m here in Fredericksburg, deep in the heart of Texas, that’s about 100 miles from San Antonio, and I’m just working on my Lone State accent.
Alan:
We can only see your head, Lionel, but if we could see your whole body, would it be clad in gorgeous lycra?
Lionel:
I am indeed in MAMIL mode. That stands for middle aged man, or maybe late middle aged man in lycra. Yes, I’m cycling here with some American friends.
Alan:
Today the latest ongoing shenanigans surrounding the future ownership of the Daily Telegraph and we’re going to be joined by journalist Simon Nixon. He’s been the chief reader writer at the Times and his career includes stints at the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. He’s written an interesting article for his Substack, which also appeared in the Independent, in which he asks what really lies behind this campaign against the Middle Eastern-backed bid for the British newspaper.
Lionel:
Also today, internal memos of the upper class. That’s how former Guardian journalist Gary Younge described broadsheet journalists when he delivered the inaugural Rosemary Hollis Memorial Lecture at City University. He’ll be joining us to discuss how the media is out of touch.
Alan:
A packed show, and remember, follow us wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode, and follow us on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Lionel:
Alan, you’ll be pleased to know that I got up very early this morning at quarter to six and doing my background reading, and the story that I’m focusing on is the congressional vote in the House of Representatives today in Washington, trying to, and I think it’ll go through, block—excuse me, ban TikTok in America. TikTok has more than 150 million viewers in America. It’s very popular in the younger generation, but both Democrats and Republicans say that it’s owned by the Chinese company, ByteDance, and it’s an instrument of influence in America and we want to ban it.
Effectively, I think the tactic is try and get a forced sale. President Biden’s behind it. Trump was behind banning it, but has now, because Biden’s in support, has changed his mind. I think this is a very important story, a big story about media and big story about foreign investors, which we’re going to come to in Britain.
Alan:
Would that end up in front of the Supreme Court?
Lionel:
Well, there is a first amendment case, here, that TikTok is a media platform, but I think that just general xenophobia in America in the political class is so strong that really they’re not wanted. The issue is, could you break out the TikTok operation from ByteDance and have an American-led takeover? It’s really up in the air, but I’m sure it will be challenged legally.
Alan:
What you’re missing here, Lionel, although I’m sure you’re reading about it there, is this bizarre attempt by the palace to dampen down on speculation about the Princess of Wales, which they did in an extraordinary way by issuing a photograph, which was then later withdrawn on the grounds that it had clearly been manipulated. Two interesting media angles here.
One is whether we’re living through a 1936 moment, as it were, where there is a truth about the royal family that we’re being denied except through sort of nudges and winks here and there and the things that are being discussed on social media. The second is this question of media manipulation and the picture agencies acting very firmly and saying at the moment they realize that these pictures had clearly been doctored, it is said by the Princess of Wales herself, that they withdrew them because we’re in an age of AI and fake news. If you can’t trust the pictures that news agencies are circulating then we’re in dead trouble.
Lionel:
It’s all we were talking about at dinner last night in Fredericksburg, Texas, Alan. Fortunately, wearing my old editorial hat where I’ve tried to keep on top of royal coverage, I was able to offer a few insights.
Alan:
Did you want to share them with the Media Confidential audience?
Lionel:
No, I don’t want to engage in any conspiracy stories. You almost got me there, Alan.
Alan:
Did you ever doctor a picture?
Lionel:
Never. I did use a picture which caused a little bit of hesitation after Brexit when we decided we were trying to find a good picture for the front page and it was such a huge moment. I did approve the use of a slightly old picture of David Cameron looking absolutely aghast because I think it caught the moment. I did hesitate because it wasn’t on the day, and perhaps we should have disclosed that in the caption. That was as far as I got on using a questionable picture.
Alan:
We did doctor a picture once in 2004 after the Madrid train bombing. In fact, a lot of newspapers did, because the picture itself was gripping. You couldn’t not use it. There were an awful lot of human limbs scattered around the tracks. Most newspapers just photoshopped the limbs out. We drained the colour out. We were all done for it in the sense that readers noticed. I think it was a watershed moment in British media, because I think we all realised that it was unacceptable. It was a question that we were making pictures lie. You either use the picture or you don’t. What you can’t do is manipulate it.
[music]
Alan:
Dog bites man. That’s not a story, but man bites dog, that’s a story. Anyway, that’s how the old adage goes, but sometimes dog bites man is a story. That’s how Gary Younge framed part of his speech at the inaugural Rosemary Hollis Memorial Lecture last week at The City University in London. Gary has suggested that a lot of journalists have similar backgrounds or are from the same social class as the politicians they cover. He argues that their comfort zone is narrow and if they take an interest in an everyday story, something seismic must have happened to demand their attention.
Lionel:
Gary joins us now to delve deeper into what lies behind the problems that result in the lack of social and racial diversity amongst journalists and the impact that has on society as a whole, and how media progresses in the coming years.
Alan:
We’re really pleased to be joined by my old colleague, Gary Younge. Gary, you gave a fascinating lecture last week at The City University, the Rosemary Hollis Memorial Lecture. Can you very briefly summarise what your main argument was?
Gary Younge:
My main argument was that issues of diversity, for want of a better term, usually go to HR, and they should go to editorial. That the lack of diversity, and here I’m talking at least as much about class as anything else, is a real problem for our journalism because we have this revolving door. You have Boris Johnson goes out of writing a column into being PM, then he goes back to GB News, you have George Osborne, and a range, it’s not just Tories, by any manner of means.
This creates a very fetid atmosphere where the social class of the people who are writing and the people who they’re writing about is pretty much the same. There was a Sutton Trust report that showed that columnists in British newspapers were more proportionally likely to have gone to private school and Oxbridge than were Lords or senior High Court judges. I think that’s a real problem for our journalism and for our politics, actually.
Lionel:
Gary, you’re making a point, though, about opinion. You’re talking about columnists. Can we talk about reporters? In that context, I wanted to just quote what you were saying about you don’t believe in objectivity. When we examine a moment, a person, a scene or event, we all stand somewhere. That place constitutes a vantage point. It’s different for everybody. The outlooks of other journalists are no less informed by their experiences. My question is, do you think that bias, which you’ve identified amongst columnists, also applies to the reporters in the newsroom?
Gary:
It applies to everybody. I only mentioned reporters right at the end because it’s the most graphic, but I think 54% of British journalists went to private school and in the country it’s 7%. The point about the vantage point is that everybody stands somewhere, everybody comes to journalism with something. We don’t come as a blank slate, and so that shapes our understanding of the world. Shapes, doesn’t determine, but shapes. So as many different vantage points as you can get will be an advantage to the product that you produce.
I use as an example in the piece, I don’t think she’ll mind me mentioning this because I’ve talked to her about this before, Amelia Gentleman, who went to St. Paul’s and went to Wadham College in Oxford and is the sister-in-law of Boris Johnson and is married to Lord Johnson and who broke the Windrush scandal. This vantage point is only that, it’s a vantage point. You still need empathy, you still need research, you still need courage, you still need all of these things that journalists should have, but when you’re talking about a small number of people coming from a fairly small social base and experience, that’s a problem.
Lionel:
Well I’m glad you mentioned Millie, because she did break the Windrush scandal. You’re not saying, in other words, that, say, African-Americans can only cover African-American affairs in America, where I am right now.
Gary:
I literally say in the lecture, “That way madness lies,” but madness also lies in a moment where you only have white people writing about Black people and you don’t have any Black people who are allowed to write about themselves, and so on and so forth. That’s a principle that I think is very important to hold on to, that anybody should be able to write about anything, but there is a distance that needs to be traveled, and I think Amelia Gentleman would tell you this herself, that not everybody can make the journey or not everybody does make the journey.
If you read her book, there are these moments where she has to rely on the research where she’s like, “They’ve got no bank account and they’ve got no passport. Is this something real?” and she goes to the finance desk and they say, “Oh, yes, it’s something like six percent of British people don’t have any of those things.” That’s not within my experience, either.
Lionel:
Gary, obviously this is a problem that’s been pointed out before, though the statistics, I think, are hard to budge. I think the point you’re making is a certain lack of self-awareness, that yes, this data is known, and yet in the stuff that you’re reading and the attitudes that come across there seems to be a complete lack of self-awareness of even the nature of the problem that you’re pointing out.
Gary:
Yes. I think that the more powerful your identity is the less likely you are to acknowledge it. So nobody asked me, “Well, when did you realize you were straight?” because straight people never get asked that, or “How did you balance being a foreign correspondent and being a parent?” because men are never asked that. That lack of self-awareness actually leads to, I think, what have been some pretty poor journalistic interventions. I think that journalism covered Trump, Brexit and Corbyn very badly.
What I’m saying is that journalists should have supported any one of those things or come out with a position on any one of those things, but that in each of those things I think what was common was a distance from the forces that were making them happen, which encouraged journalists to be mocking and dismissive and insufficiently curious. Some of that’s commentary, but some of that’s reporting. Where are these people from? Who are these people? Why do they want that? Instead of, “Look at these stupid people. They’re nothing like us.”
I’m not just mentioning those so that I can somehow hide my politics in this. In each of those, which I did report on, and wrote columns on, as well, I found a lot of the journalism just quite disappointing because it already made up its mind about who these people were and what they wanted, and didn’t seek to just go that extra mile or two or three to say, “Okay, you live in this town, the EU have subsidized this factory. If we leave the EU then this fact-- So why don’t you like the EU?” and to actually listen to their answer instead of just saying, “Well, obviously this is bonkers because you rely on the EU for this, so why are you so daft?”
Lionel:
It’s a very powerful point, Gary. I think we at the FT made a mistake. We were half blind because we looked at it purely through rational economic terms and we missed what was happening outside of London. I just want to pick up on what you were talking about, the way the media class is drawn from the same social strata as the political class. My father became a journalist, he left school when he was barely 15 and rose up from copy boy, in effect. That path no longer lies. One of the problems, of course, is a lot of people have gone to university and that’s seen as the prerequisite.
Gary:
Yes, you’re right. I think that there are real reasons for this that predate the inequalities that we have, in terms of the pathway. All three of us went to university. Probably, because I am younger than you guys, I would be alone in not starting at a local paper, maybe. I’m not sure about you, Lionel, but I know Alan started in Cambridge.
Alan:
I did. The Scotsman.
Gary:
Instead I think I’m like you two, doing a postgraduate diploma. Another part of, I think, this equation is the decline in local newspapers and the struggle to actually make local newspapers pay and work, because that was the route through which people came. I think you did get more working-class people as a result of that.
Alan:
You acknowledge the fact that most media outlets are commercial enterprises, and you say the more a story costs the less likely it is to bring in readers and therefore revenue, the less likely institutions are to invest resources in it, but you say that’s not the only factor and probably not the most important.
Gary:
Yes, I think that in my reporting, for example, on gun deaths in America there was a general sense that, well, that’s where things like that happen, so we really needn’t spend a lot of time down there, which wasn’t driven by commerce, it was driven by a an abstraction or an alienation from that place, that, well, these things happen. I mentioned in the speech that there aren’t actually more Black people being killed by police in America. That’s not the story of this last four years. There is a growing awareness that Black people are being killed by police in America, and that has to be, to some extent, a failure of journalism.
Alan:
That’s the classic, dog dogs were biting men all the time, but we didn’t notice it.
Gary:
Man bites dog is a story, dog bites man is not a story, but sometimes you have to ask yourself who owns these dogs and why do these people keep getting bitten? I found it quite, when I was full-time journalist, a quite rich vein in this was trying to draw out what the problem is with what we’ve come to view as ordinary. New technology plays a role here, I think. That George Floyd’s murder could be caught by someone other than a journalist-- It’s not crazy there was no journalist there at the time, why should there be?
That there was someone who could document this and amplify this, but had there not been then I think that the press desk in the Minneapolis Star Tribune or elsewhere, the people who work on crime would have seen the press release that said there was an incident and in the scuffle a man was killed, nothing to see here, just a few paragraphs, and they’d have thought, “Oh, well, yes, that figures,” and they wouldn’t have followed it up, and actually that’s what’s been happening for quite a long time.
That’s just one example. If we look at Me Too then this damn breaks, and suddenly we’re all talking about something that women have known for decades about this routine, systemic, systematic sexual harassment. It becomes a story in a way that it really wasn’t before, and we have to ask ourselves why.
Lionel:
Gary, you’ve eloquently described the problem in many aspects with practical examples, the latest been what you’ve said about the Me Too movement and the way the media reacted. I completely understand that, but what can be done to change things, to actually move things on for the better?
Gary:
Well, that, I guess, comes back to the beginning point. I think part of it is about who you have in the newsrooms and understanding that that’s not an act of charity, it’s not an act of benevolence. It’s actually to make sure that you are as relevant as you can be. In a tough market, that relevance, I think there’s a premium on it. So I think it’s partly about hiring, and then retention and all the stuff that goes with that.
I think it’s also, though, about, and here we get a bit more philosophical, but it’s about a different sensibility as to what news is, particularly given new technology, that where the immediate moment is probably going to be caught by someone with a cell phone and where the immediate news, as such, will probably be transmitted by people who were there, and our job is to verify, to check and all of those things, but that maybe there is more to news than that. Well, I think there is more to news than that, in terms of really digging a bit deeper into what’s going on and why these things are happening in a way that doesn’t just rely on the immediate moment and the more sensory and sensational aspects.
I’ll give you an example, would be knife crime. I did a year-long series for the Guardian on knife crime, and one of the things that became clear, one of the reasons that we wanted to do it, or I wanted to do it, was because with knife crime in Britain they cover the death and they cover the sentence, and otherwise there’s not a lot there. A particular murder that I covered which happened outside a school, the murder was in all of the national newspapers, so when I went to cover the trial I thought that they’d be there, but they weren’t.
In the trial what you learned was that the boy who had killed the other boy, they were both 15, that his mum had written to her MP saying, “Please save my son,” that she had done parenting classes, that she had tried everything she could and had been unable to stop this disaster that she saw coming. She told social workers, “Either he’s going to end up dead or someone else is going to end up in a body bag.” She saw it coming. I didn’t know that that was going to happen. It happened right at the end of the trial, but it became, in part, a story about austerity and child/adolescent mental health services and all of the thresholds that he didn’t meet, because the thresholds change because of resources.
For that, you do have to stick with the story. I know that newspapers, you can’t stick with every story, but quite often when we’re not sticking with that story, my experience was people were doing weather stories or they were covering whatever immediate distraction was taking place at the time. So I don’t think that a news organization that wanted to be economically viable could do that consistently with every single story, but I think that they could do it with more stories than they do, just to stick with something.
Like domestic violence or school exclusions, they’re not going anywhere, and somehow we report them either when they are particularly gruesome or when somebody has done a report into them, but we don’t do the report into them ourselves. I think there’s real value in that, in occasionally, determinably, unfashionably sticking with something beyond, “We’re going to do a special report for two weeks.”
Alan:
Watching the media over the last month, which has been about an extremely fractured debate about Islamophobia, racism, Gaza, free speech, the bounds of protest, from your vantage point, how has this enshrined social bias evidenced itself in the media coverage of these kinds of topics?
Gary:
We’re seeing the inequalities-- Is that the wrong word? The lack of representation of certain groups, certainly, and we’re suffering for that. We’re also seeing this issue of, because of the lack of representation, I think, of Jews as victims or as or as advocates, Black people as victims, Muslims as victims or anyone being part of some special pleading, as opposed to-- I would love to see, and it could be that I’ve missed it but I don’t feel that I have, and I’m just going to take this as one example for all of those, I think it must be really hard, regardless of where you stand on the issues of Gaza, to be Jewish at the moment.
You have the rise in antisemitism, but you also have a conflict within the Jewish community, a debate, a discussion about the role of Israel, the issues of protest, the issues around security that I don’t think they are necessarily splitting up families, but I know for a fact there are discussions within families and within communities about these things. I’d love to see a textured report that wasn’t life in the hell of antisemitic London, but Jews do support the Palestinians, here they are, but that looked at the challenge of being Jewish in this moment.
That can be done without actually, “Do you support Gaza or not?” but, look this is our life, this is our world, and we are not here as Jews you can use for either this lobby or that lobby or whatever. This is a very real challenge that we have, regardless of where we sit on that particular issue, or maybe because of where we sit on that particular issue. So that would be an example of, I think, something that we can do. I’m sure in Muslim communities there are real worries about radicalization in this moment, as well as fear of a McCarthyite backlash if you say too much or you say the wrong thing or you don’t know what the right thing to say is in a particular moment.
Alan:
Gary, thank you so much. You’ve given us so much to think about. Academia’s gain is journalism’s loss, but I know you’re still doing a lot of journalism, and that was a great lecture. So thank you for coming on to talk about it.
Gary:
Thank you.
[music]
Alan:
Well, Lionel, Gary has always been a lodestar of sense and really constructive challenge on these kinds of issues. As I said at the end, it’s great that he’s now a professor at Manchester University. Journalism needs him and he needs that voice.
Lionel:
He was so thoughtful. For me, the most important point he was making was sticking with a story. I always used to talk about deep and original reporting. This is the point, you just don’t go for the immediate click or the noisiest story of the day. Stick with it, and you’ll find out things that people never imagined. He’s a great example of a great reporter.
Alan:
He doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks it, as well. He did a remarkable book about every killing in America. He just took one day and looked at all the people who’d been shot and did what he’s talked about. These were things that would’ve been one paragraph and he just told the human story behind all those. Just a great, great reporter.
[music]
Lionel:
This is Media Confidential, and coming up we’re joined by Simon Nixon to discuss the ongoing saga of ownership of the Telegraph. We’ll be back soon.
[music]
Alan:
In this week’s Prospect Podcast, Ellen Halliday is joined by journalists Samira Shackle and Jonathan Tan from the charity Greater Change to discuss solutions to a growing problem of homelessness, successfully tackled during the pandemic.
Jonathan Tan:
There was an Office for National Statistics stat that really keeps me up at night. 42% of UK households have fewer than three months savings, which is, I think, really, really scary. I think when you know that and you put it in context of rising economic challenges in the UK, I think it’s, sadly, unsurprising. We know that far more radical measures are needed, really, to address the crisis as it is today. That’s the, I think, slightly depressing thing that we have to start on, which is that this is a fight that we’re losing.
Alan:
Be sure to follow the Prospect Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re listening to the podcast, why not take out a digital subscription to Prospect and enjoy a one-month free trial to our digital content? You’ll immediately get full access to rigorously fact-checked, truly independent analysis and perspectives. There’s no commitment, you can cancel at any time. To take advantage of this offer, visit our website or go to your favourite search engine and search for Prospect Magazine subscription.
[music]
Lionel:
Now back to the Daily Telegraph, and it’s been quite a week. A claim was made by Jeff Zucker that Andrew Neil demanded that he be chair of a combined editorial trust board for the Telegraph and the Spectator when he was discussing the job at the Telegraph. He also wanted more money, allegedly. Then Andrew Neil appeared on Newsnight claiming that potential buyer Jeff Zucker had no knowledge of Britain or newspapers or magazines.
What’s more, he continued, Zucker is a left-wing Democrat, though Zucker has actually never revealed how he votes, who, Andrew Neil said, had dragged CNN to the left and was bound to do the same to the Telegraph and the Spectator. Simply put, Andrew Neil doesn’t think that Jeff Zucker is a fit owner of these two vital centres of mainstream centre thought, I quote.
Alan:
Where does that leave the Redbird IMI bid, and why does it really matter if the Telegraph is partly owned by Sheikh Mansour? I should just say that we recorded this interview just before the UK government announced that it was planning legislation to stop foreign governments from owning UK newspapers. We’re really pleased to be joined now by Simon Nixon, the former chief leader writer at the Times, who has somewhat swum against the prevailing conventional tide on this story, both in a column that he’s written on his own Substack site and in the Independent. Simon, explain why you take a contrary view of this bid.
Simon Nixon:
I think it’s being misrepresented in terms of the structure of the deal. People talk about Abu Dhabi essentially taking control of the Telegraph as if it was a conventional takeover in which Abu Dhabi would own 75% of the equity. This is a private equity deal, and that’s a rather different proposition. In a private equity deal you have general partners and limited partners, and the general partners have control of the business. They’re the ones who source the deal, they come up with the business plan, and then they effectively manage the investment.
The limited partners are purely passive investors. They have no rights over the management, they have no rights, no control. It’s a purely financial investment. The only decisions they get to make are whether to put more money in if asked or whether to sell the asset if the general partner suggests it. Beyond that they are purely passive investors. The idea that Abu Dhabi is going to be in any way in control of this asset from a pure corporate finance point of view is just not right.
Alan:
The general partner here is Jeff Zucker and his, for want of a better phrase, his American company.
Simon:
Yes.
Alan:
The limited partner who’s putting up the money but has no control is Abu Dhabi.
Simon: Yes, and I think that that’s a point here that also has gone missing in the reporting of this, too, which is that Abu Dhabi and Redbird, the American private equity firm, did form a joint venture called Redbird IMI. In the initial version of this deal, Redbird IMI was going to be the general partner, but at a late stage in the deal, just before Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, referred it to Ofcom and the competition commission, that deal structure was changed and now Redbird is the general partner and Abu Dhabi is the limited partner. There is no Abu Dhabi money in the general partnership part of this deal. Abu Dhabi is purely a limited partner.
Just to be really clear about the limited partner, this is from the gov.uk website, and it says on this website, “What are limited partnerships and what are they used for?” It says, “Limited partnerships are business associations made up of one or more general partners and one or more limited partners. General partners are partners who have responsibility for the management of the business and do not have limited liability. Limited partners do not have any control over business decisions or the operations of the business, but their liability is limited to the amount that they contributed to the partnership.”
So there you have it on gov.uk. That’s the problem that the government has, actually, which is that whatever Andrew Neil and Fraser Nelson and the Telegraph columnists are putting up, the reality is that Abu Dhabi will not, as a point of law, under English law, have any management control.
Lionel:
Okay, Simon, that’s very well explained on the financing. Before we look at whether this bid is in trouble, let’s just examine the implications of what you’re saying, is that Abu Dhabi really is looking at this as a way to make a serious return on their investment. The Telegraph Group would be an investment lasting, what, five, seven years? That’s the usual cycle for private equity, and then they’d be out. Is that right?
Simon:
That’s right. Yes, that’s right. Redbirds are slightly different to a normal private equity firm, in that they have a longer investment horizon. I think it may be slightly longer than five to seven years, but it’s certainly not seen as a sort of buy and hold in the way that the Barclay brothers bought it and the current owners bought it with a view of holding it forever, or Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of The Times.
This is a financial investment that will only be realized when it’s sold. Certainly Redbird, the American private equity firm, which manages billions of dollars of investment from private investors all over the world, absolutely has a very strong incentive to generate a return on its investment and then sell it within a period of time.
Lionel:
We’ve heard very little from Abu Dhabi. We’ve heard quite a lot from Jeff Zucker. You really do believe that the idea that the Gulf investor, the UAE, is interested in using the Telegraph Group as an instrument of influence over the government, it’s just for the Birds?
Simon:
Firstly, I think, it seems to me that if Abu Dhabi wanted to influence the British government, it has many, many levers it can pull, and owning a newspaper wouldn’t seem to be the most obvious one. In fact, there are, it seems to me, from what I understand, a non-stop succession of Tory MPs and government ministers beating a path to Abu Dhabi for various reasons.
So I don’t think that buying a newspaper would be the right vehicle for them to do that. I think, more importantly, there’s no way that you could kill this investment more quickly than for Abu Dhabi to be seen to be interfering editorially. It seems to me that at that point the entire investment proposition collapses. On the assumption that the Abu Dhabi entity is not utterly naive, you must assume that it’s not intending to interfere editorially.
Alan:
You’re seriously saying if, for the sake of argument, the Telegraph ran a series of leaders highly critical of Abu Dhabi, that there’s no way that they could put pressure on the Jeff Zucker bit of the operation to say, “Look, come on. This is not why we’ve put our money in and we could equally well take our money out.”
Simon:
Well, they can’t take their money out. They can only take their money out when Jeff Zucker decides to sell the business.
Alan:
They must have other-- Are you saying they have no levers, no power levers if they were displeased by what the Telegraph was writing about them?
Simon:
Certainly not legally. They wouldn’t have any management ability to do that. To me it doesn’t make sense.
Alan:
What, for you, explains the really fervent hostility to this bid from the upper echelons of the Telegraph? We don’t know what the lower echelons think, but the upper echelons of the Telegraph and the Spectator have really gone out on a limb over this.
Simon: I suspect that many people may not appreciate the issue of the limited partnership and how that works. I think that’s probably an important part of it. Beyond that, clearly there are other bidders who want this asset and people who will have their own view of who that preferred bidder may be. As we know that most of the big UK media groups have their eyes on bits of this--
Lionel:
Well, let’s talk about that, Simon, because there was an important meeting, wasn’t there, between Jeff Zucker, Daily Mail representatives, and even Rupert Murdoch, who we know has got his eyes on the Spectator. Do you think that was a sign that the bid is in serious trouble, because of the effectiveness of the campaign that Alan was just describing, or do you think it was just scavengers circling?
Simon:
I’m told by a source that that meeting didn’t happen, that that’s nonsense. It may be that The Mail and the News Corp met.
Lionel:
What, it was made up?
Simon:
It may be that the Mail and News Corp met, I’m told, but only by one source, so I may be wrong, but a good source, that that didn’t happen and that that discussion hasn’t happened. Clearly, the bid is, you would have to say, must look in some trouble, just politically, with apparently Labour has come out against it. It wouldn’t be surprising if people were starting to circle again and think how they could take advantage of it.
Lionel:
Let me just cut in, here. I don’t know whether the meeting took place or not. There seems to be a lot of disputatious accounts at the moment, not least between Jeff Zucker and Andrew Neil. I think what I didn’t understand is why would The Daily Mail, for example, be a limited equity holder in the Telegraph alongside Zucker. I can understand why Rupert Murdoch might want to peel The Spectator away from the, or out of the Telegraph Group and in effect have a break-up. I get that.
Simon:
To my mind, it didn’t make any sense to me either. Jeff Zucker has, clearly, a very ambitious business plan, which is why he is doing this investment, but The Mail has a UK media consolidation plan, which is a totally different proposition. Presumably it’s looking to take costs out and run these two media businesses somehow as a single UK business.
Then I think Rupert Murdoch’s interest is solely in The Spectator. Bringing Rupert Murdoch in and selling him The Spectator doesn’t in any way help with whatever regulatory or political issues Zucker may have with the UK government. It didn’t make any sense. As I say, I’m told that the meeting didn’t happen. It’s possible that meetings took place between bankers rather than principals. Who knows? I’m told that it didn’t happen.
Alan:
What do you make of the report this morning in the i newspaper, of all places, that Andrew Neil is signaling that he will play no part in the future business-- Just to catch up, because a lot has happened since our last podcast, Zucker claimed on a rival podcast, The News Agents, that Andrew Neil had been angling for a job with Zucker and was just negotiating over the money. He claimed, significantly, that he knew Andrew Neil would deny this, but there was another witness or somebody else who had knowledge of this. Andrew Neil promptly came out and did deny it and called Zucker a liar. What do you make now of Andrew Neil, if it’s true in the i newspaper, is signaling that he’s not going to be part of The Spectator’s future?
Simon:
It sort of struck me as a statement of the bleeding obvious. He clearly burnt his bridges with Zucker. It sees highly unlikely that Murdoch would keep him on if that’s how it played, and he’s already fallen out with Paul Marshall, who’s bidding in the background, as well. It didn’t seem to me that he was correctly reading the writing on the wall.
Lionel:
Simon, I know that you were chief leader writer at The Times. You write a really good blog on Substack, The Wealth of Nations. Try to be a prophet rather than a leader writer, and tell us what do you think is going to happen, especially with this weak government? Will there be a decision before the election or is it going to be a long punt?
Simon:
It’s a really difficult situation, because I’m sure that the government would like the situation just to go away and for Zucker and Redbird to go away. Britain is still, despite the best efforts of the Tories over the last five years, it’s still a country with the rule of law, with institutions that have fiduciary duties and responsibilities and are accountable. Ofcom and the competition authority can’t just manufacture a politically convenient excuse to see this bid off to give the government cover. They have to come up with something that’s legally watertight, that will survive appeal and judicial review or whatever else.
If I’m right, and I think I am, that the limited partnership is legally watertight, and adding in the various levels of editorial guarantees that Redbird is proposing, then it’s going to be very difficult, I suspect, just to see it off, see the bid off, which is presumably why Redbird is sitting reasonably tight.
It may be difficult for the government to see this off, which is probably why the opponents, The Spectator and Telegraph journalists, have now switched their focus to trying to push this amendment through Parliament to try and see it off that way by making any deal subject to a vote in Parliament. I suspect that may reflect the fact that it will be, I suspect, quite difficult to come up with a very legally watertight case for seeing off the deal on regulatory grounds.
Lionel:
Thank you, Simon. I think my view on this is that if we see any change in legislation around blocking this deal, blocking a foreign takeover, it will be just one more sign to foreign investors that Britain is closed for business.
Simon:
I totally agree. That’s why I think this situation is bigger than just the face of The Telegraph. The FT had a headline a couple of days ago saying stock markets globally are soaring. There’s one stock market in the world that is absolutely flat over one year, five years, and it’s the UK stock market. The UK has a very serious problem, perception problem, with international investors. This will send a very bad signal.
[music]
Lionel:
Alan, I think that was a valuable contribution because Simon was homing in on, okay, not the politics, but the financing and drawing this distinction between general partner and limited partner in private equity bids and explaining that not just convention, but also under the law the limited partner, and in this case this is the Gulf investor Abu Dhabi, does not get involved in operational matters. He’s saying that essentially the campaign that suggests that this bid would effectively nationalize the Telegraph group is actually bogus.
Alan:
We invited Andrew Neil to come on and speak, but he was unable to do so, because we are rigorously neutral in this. It strikes me, it’s going to come down to the least worst option, isn’t it? None of these bidders is great. I can’t see that it’s desirable to give either Rupert Murdoch or The Daily Mail even more of a slice of the monopolistic pie of newspaper ownership in this country. Paul Marshall, his ownership of GB News and what he’s done with that raises really serious question marks about why he wants to own this paper and what his motives are. We’re not left with any great options.
Lionel:
No, but it’s useful to have the other side of the story. The latest thing I read very early this morning was Suella Braverman writing in The Telegraph saying effectively we cannot possibly have a UAE part owner of The Telegraph and putting the UAE in the same basket as China. It’s quite extraordinary, the heat in this campaign against the joint bid by the Americans and the Gulf investors. It was good to hear the other side of the story.
Alan:
Both Jon Sopel and Zucker implied that actually there was a split between the hierarchy of The Telegraph and The Spectator and the troops. Who knows that? If any of the troops want to come onto this podcast, they know how to find us. Lionel, are we expecting you back on these shores next week or are you on further travels?
Lionel:
Breaking news. I think I’m going to be in London with you, Alan, back from America after my two week trip. Hold that front page.
Alan:
You’ll need [laughs] a cultural reintroduction course. We look forward to seeing you. Thank you all for listening to Media Confidential, which is brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
Lionel:
You can send any questions or comments to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Alan:
Remember to listen and follow Media Confidential wherever you get your podcasts and join us next week for more invaluable analysis.
