Kara Swisher—maverick, rock star and tech guru—has interviewed some of the highest profile and biggest personalities on the planet, from Mark Zuckerberg to Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch and Kim Kardashian. Joining Alan and Lionel on the podcast this week, Kara unpicks the relationship between big tech and the media. Big tech, she says, have no interest in the “greater good”. They wanted to make money, regardless of how that would impact the media companies, and media companies quickly got left behind.
With no existing legislation in the USA to keep big tech in check, the balance of power has swung far in their direction. And while Kara argues that big tech firms should be held responsible for what is published on their platforms, she warns that they are acting almost with impunity. Meeting at the Truth Tellers Summit, held in memory of Sir Harry Evans, she explains exactly what she would like to happen.
Also, Alan and Lionel reflect on previous general elections they have covered as they begin to watch the media coverage of the current campaign.
This transcript is unedited and may contain errors.
Alan Rusbridger: Welcome to Media Confidential, your weekly deep dive behind the headlines and beyond the clickbait of the rapidly moving world of media with me, Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber: And me, Lionel Barber. Today, a week on, since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the date of the election, I think it's worth discussing what the media's role in this election will be and whether it's going to be different from the elections that you and I have covered. How important is it when a major media company, often usually newspapers, throws its weight behind one party? Then is artificial intelligence going to play a role? We hear a lot about it in general, but whether they've got their head around that is another matter.
Alan: We'll be discussing that over the weeks to come. Today we're hearing from a technology guru and writer who sees big tech companies playing a huge role in displacing the once-powerful media companies. Kara Swisher is known globally for her coverage of All Things Tech. Her CV is world-class; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, all feature. Now she's mainly a podcaster. Her technology podcast Pivot comes out twice a week.
Lionel: Twice a week. Don't get any ideas, Alan.
Alan: We could do twice a week, I'm sure we could. Whether we could match her earnings, which she lightly alludes to in her interview-- Anyway, she has a new book out Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. We met up with her recently at The Truth Tellers Summit here in London to talk about AI and the tech revolution.
Lionel: First I want to know what's in your inbox.
Alan: Well, I've just returned from Amsterdam where I was hobnobbing with the Dutch royal family for a rather remarkable seminar on climate change with 40 editors-in-chief. I was just wondering-- It's difficult to imagine our own royal family, rubbing shoulders for a five-hour seminar on climate change. That was interesting.
Lionel: Do the Dutch have a word, a collective word for 40 editors-in-chief?
Alan: Well, they probably do, but they speak such perfect English. I never got to-- Then I come back and the Evening Standard is about to close.
Lionel: Shocking. Shocking.
Alan: Who could have seen that?
Lionel: Even more shocking, it's not actually closing, it's going to turn into a weekly. Now, Alan, how do you turn an evening newspaper with several editions into a weekly? It's over, isn't it?
Alan: I would've thought so. There was a thing called Time Out that you may remember, it really struggled of late. I find it really surprising, a city of 10 million people, one of the richest cities in the world cannot sustain one newspaper. What does that say?
Lionel: Not much. If you look at the tube, not many people are picking up and reading newspapers. They're listening to their iPhones. It's all gone digital, that's the point, isn't it?
Alan: Which any fool could have seen. I think there's a great opportunity there for someone. If you can't make a website work for London-- It felt to me as though the Evening Standard over recent years had become interested very much in Notting Hill or Chelsea-- Kensington and Chelsea.
Lionel: A bit like the owner, Evgeny Lebedev. He was more socialite than press baren.
Alan: I'm amazed if there isn't some startup genius who is thinking how to do London in a really innovative way digitally rather than trying to concentrate on producing a weekly version of it.
Lionel: I'm a little disappointed, Alan, you haven't given your final grade to George Osborne as Editor-in-Chief of the Evening Standard.
Alan: I've almost forgotten, the brief golden period. He then appointed Dylan Jones, who was a magazine editor for a, would it be fair to call GQ a style magazine? That seemed a bold choice for a paper that was all about news. Really, its heyday would be when?
Lionel: I think it would've been Charles Wintour.
Alan: Charles Wintour.
Lionel: Maybe Max Hastings.
Alan: And Paul Dacre.
Lionel: Indeed. Obviously, the Evening Standard merged with the Evening News, that was the first claxon. An Evening Standard branded as a weekly newspaper, it doesn't make sense.
Alan: Can't see it. Anyway, that was what I came back to from Holland.
Lionel: Well, I saw a bit of interesting research in my inbox. It turned up via, I think it was Semafor that's Ben Smith's news site based in Washington. There was a piece of research that described how much copy and airtime was devoted in American media to Hillary Clinton's famous description of rural types, rednecks, as the "deplorables" and Donald Trump's description of certain people as vermin, sometimes in the Republican Party, but more in the Democrats and particularly immigrants. There's a vast discrepancy. I thought that was rather interesting. Why would everybody go 12 times bigger on Hillary Clinton's comments than a pretty outrageous comment by Donald Trump? Double standards really, isn't it?
Alan: Which echoes all the...about the disproportionate coverage of the emails, which is on who remembers.
Lionel: Well, we're going to see a verdict very soon in the Donald Trump case in New York. Then it'll be over to Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden on his legal issues. A lot to watch there in the States. I'll be off there next week in New York and Washington. I'll keep my eyes peeled.
Alan: As always.
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Lionel: Kara Swisher has been described as a maverick, even a rock star, as well as a tech writer. Her reputation precedes her. She's interviewed Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, Stacey Abrams, Kim Kardashian, and President Barack Obama. She became known as Silicon Valley's most feared and well-liked journalist.
Alan: She recently described Donald Trump as the Britney Spears of politics, "Oops, I did it again," when referring to the constant comments he makes that he meant his jokes. Her latest book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story is described by The Washington Post as a breezy memoir of a high-flying tech journalist at the top of her game. We were lucky to catch up with her when she was in London recently.
We're thrilled now to be joined by Kara Swisher, who has a rival podcast that we will give full credit to. In fact, I've even been on your podcast, Kara. That was a terrifying ride.
Kara Swisher: You managed to survive.
Alan: We're going to be much more gentle with you. What we're really interested in talking about today, Kara, is the relationship between the tech world that you cover and journalism and media. It's a relationship that feels as though it's gone badly wrong. Can you outline why it went so wrong?
Kara: It was always wrong. I think it's just that it took a while for the penny to drop for media people to understand what was happening here. To this day, they don't get it. They have vague ideas of it, and some people understood it earlier than others, but these were people who were not interested in being tools of media, they wanted to own the media and change it rather significantly for their own purposes, largely just to make money.
One of the things that media made the mistake of is they thought that their economic systems would continue till the end of time, and they just don't. I know it sounds dumb, but it's a math problem. It's revenues and costs. The revenues have declined and costs have remained the same or gone up. Media companies declined to thin down or figure out other revenue streams and pretty much ignored the power of digital. They thought of it as a sideline, they'd always put the digital people-- The Washington Post, they were across the bridge in Virginia. They never integrated it in properly. By the time they did, they were the customers of these tech companies who were very interested in owning the entire ecosystem because that makes sense, actually.
Alan: There was a period where the media companies thought, "Well, this is terrific. We can get our readers for free, none of the printing costs," blah, blah, blah, "we'll get to millions more of them." The tech companies, at one point, seemed interested in funding news or funding news organizations or funding the business of news because they were aware of the damage that they were doing to the news business.
Kara: No, that's not why. You always think they are like us. They're not like us, it's another country. They don't care. They don't care if it's cat videos, they don't care if it's dancing videos. They don't care if it's anything. The idea of a greater help to society is of no interest to them. They don't want to help local news. They don't want help people get better informed. They just want to be the vehicle for that to happen and make the money off of advertising to do so.
I think what happens is sort of by accident, did journalists and journalism companies have a higher purpose. Not everybody did, by the way, in the early days, the Chandlers of Los Angeles, I don't feel like they felt like they wanted to help people, they wanted to make money. Maybe they did as a sideline but you mistake that they are like you and they are not. They're not interested in the greater good, they just aren't.
Alan: They're not completely neutral, are they? Something has happened with Facebook in the last three years where it's not, we don't care whether it's news or dancing bears. Actually, they now said, "We don't want news, because news is--
Kara: We don't want news, because it costs money.
Alan: Talk us through what happened there.
Kara: It's too much trouble. See, that's a tell for you. It's too much money. They don't want to pay the cost of the damage they cause and therefore they're just going to get, is that the choice, can't they do it responsibly? Yes, it costs money, it ruins their bottom line. They'd rather get rid of it than figure out how to make it safe.
Lionel: Kara, you very well described, and by the way, including in your new book, you describe this imbalance of power between traditional media and the big tech companies. We thought we were more powerful because we had quality content and distribution beaten hands down. Question, how do you, or can you change that balance of power?
Kara: I don't see how.
Lionel: Legislation?
Kara: There should have been legislation 20 years ago. There wasn't any privacy legislation. There wasn't any transparency legislation. There wasn't any anti-trust legislation. Really, it is here in Europe, but certainly not in the United States at all. Antitrust hasn't been updated in 100 years. Things have changed, I don't know, it seems to me, but they get to own the way we decide how antitrust is done. It's usually pricing, but it's not about pricing, is it anymore? It's about something else. There hasn't been a real rethink. There's no Teddy Roosevelt coming. That's the thing.
Lionel: I don't see Teddy Roosevelt on the horizon, Kara.
Kara: No, there's no-- We have Teddy Doosevelt that's Donald Trump in court. There are all kinds of names for him. Donald [unintelligible 00:12:17] [crosstalk]
Lionel: What about the argument that the way to get at them is to say, look, "You are publishers, you're not just platforms"?
Kara: They are publishers.
Lionel: Take away that privilege that was--
Kara: It's to sue them, 230. The very heart of it is this law that was passed, most of which was declared unconstitutional.
Lionel: Back in '95.
Kara: Way back. Before that, I think even. I wrote about it when I was at The Washington Post. It's a law that protects them. They have no responsibility for what goes-- They act like they're telephone companies, but they're not telephone companies, they are publishers, but they have no responsibility for what's on their platforms. One of the arguments they make, which is a good one, is the newspaper only has a couple hundred articles a day, we have 5 billion. Well, too bad, don't have a business like that. If you have that business, that's what it costs.
It's like a chemical company saying, "That little company only spews a gallon of putrid stuff out, we spew 5 billion gallons. We shouldn't have to deal with it."
Lionel: Is it just a question of cost though?
Kara: Yes.
Lionel: You've got 5 billion pieces of content you publish every day.
Kara: More than that.
Lionel: You say treat them as though they should be responsible for every single bit of content.
Kara: No.
Lionel: No?
Kara: No, they're not responsible for any of it. I'd like them to be--
Lionel: No, but you would like to see them responsible.
Kara: For some of it. What I would like is for them to be sued, to be able to be sued just like-- Guess what? Let me give a good example. We had this Alaska Airlines thing. Everyone made jokes about the door blows off. They didn't screw the door.
Lionel: Off the Boeing plane.
Kara: The Boeing plane. What happened? Hundreds of lawsuits, many investigations, local and national, the CEO was fired essentially.
Lionel: Of Boeing.
Kara: Of Boeing. Everybody paid the price for that one door. No one's getting sued at tech companies, no one's getting fired, they're getting rewarded for what they're doing.
Alan: It seems to me there are three-- I'm probably missing something here, but either they're going to have to drastically scale back the number of bits of content they publish, i.e. they're going to have to become much more restrictive in what they can publish,-
Kara: That's correct.
Lionel: -which destroys the ethos of social media.
Kara: I guess.
Lionel: Or they're going to hire a million moderators or whatever it takes.
Kara: Or not people, whatever, AI, I don't know.
Lionel: Or AI is going to do it for them. Which do you think is the best way out?
Kara: I have no idea. It's not my problem. It's their business. They're always like, "We can't do it." I'm like, "Aren't you the smartest people on earth? I thought that's what you tell us all the time." If they have a business that's so deleterious to-- even slightly deleterious considering how powerful they are, they need to be responsible for what they're doing. They are literally like a chemical company that has no responsibility for what's coming out of their pipes. We don't do that for cars. We don't do that for planes. We don't do that for pharmaceuticals. You can complain all you want about too many regulations. I do, all the time. I have a small business, I get it. Too bad. The rest of us have to live in those rules, so why shouldn't they?
There was a really good scene where Mark Zuckerberg was at the hearing. One of those terrible people said, "I want you to turn around and apologize to these parents." There were parents behind Mark whose kids had bad times online and died or committed suicide or were bullied, all different stories. He has no responsibility for them legally, right? "I want you to turn around and apologize for these people." For one, I think he should apologize for never doing any legislation to protect these people, so turn the camera around, sir, and look at yourself as a terrible legislator. That's one.
Two, Mark did turn around. He didn't say I'm sorry. He said, "I'm sorry for what happened to you," as if his company never existed. Now, I don't know how much liability he has. I have no idea, that's called a court case. Why can't he be sued? Why can't those parents sue him? If he loses, he loses. If he wins, he wins. Even Donald Trump is being called to court. Whether he wins, wins, he loses, he loses, but there's a jury making that decision. Why can't tech have the same? If the ex-president of the United States is on trial, they should be able to be sued by those parents. Again, if the parents lose, they lose. That's the way it goes.
Alan: What do you think is happening with Google and news at the moment? Do you think Google is also fighting shy of news?
Kara: Yes. What they're doing is they're suck-- if you looked at Google lately, search on yourself, there's a little article about you at the top that AI has compiled. You don't even have to link to stories about you written by media companies.
Lionel: I think the shorter the better though for Alan.
Kara: For Alan, right, exactly. They are sucking every piece of information and spewing it back at you.
Alan: They're trying to come between the reader and the publisher.
Kara: They don't even want the reader to go there, not come between. They just want to serve up what someone wants, so you stay on their platform to make money for their ads. That's all.
Lionel: Kara, in your book, I haven't read the book, but I have read four reviews, I'll get around to it. Burn Book. You have some sizzling stories about your relationships, the way you've had relationships and talked to these tech giants like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Do you differentiate between, say, Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), and Google as being slightly better?
Kara: I don't decide who's better or worse. Some of them are better at times, some of them are better at different-- Elon used to be much better. Now obviously he's lost the narrative rather significantly.
Lionel: Why is that, by the way?
Kara: I don't know.
Lionel: Why has he lost the narrative?
Kara: Because he didn't seek therapy at a young age? I don't know. I don't know. He's taken too many drugs, that seems to be one of the issues. The Journal wrote some very good pieces about that and I think highly accurate. Maybe he's gotten radicalized. Maybe his parents didn't hug him enough. I don't know. I don't care. I just want him to shut up, that's all. He has enormous power. I think he bought Twitter to have power over other countries. I think it's nothing to do with his screaming on Twitter. It has to do with Tesla, Starlink, and SpaceX. I think that's what the real game is for him. Everything else is just, he gets pleasure out of insulting people. That's one of his--
Alan: If you're running a news company now and essentially big tech is turning its back on you, what's the answer? How do you regain some kind of position?
Kara: I don't know, because this is the way a lot of people get their information. We've got to be innovative. One of the problems with media, old media, is it just wasn't innovative. It was "make and bank" with the way it was. Before they were innovative, when they started, but whoever shifted to radio and then shifted to television, this happens inevitably to every media. Everything is supplanted by another media.
Lionel: Let me be counterintuitive here. Let me be even flattering. Part of this creative destruction process, it's fragmentation and it's opportunity for--
Kara: It's been great for me.
Lionel: Exactly.
Kara: I saw it coming. I was like, "Oh look, a flood. You're all sitting down there on the beach, get off the fucking beach. The tsunami's coming." I went to the mountain, that's all I did. One of the things that's thriving are small little--
Lionel: Individual brands.
Kara: Individual brands, small. Puck is interesting, we'll see how they do. They created a compilation of columnists and different things like that. A very lean group of people. My friend Casey Newton has a platform where it's him and another person. He's making I think $1 million a year. That's pretty good. He has very little cost. I have three people working on each of my podcasts. We make millions of dollars. It's just that costs and revenues meet in a really--
Lionel: The problem is news...at level though, isn't it?
Kara: Local is a whole nother problem. That has to be a charity at this point. I think government should probably fund local news organizations. Then again, we're so political in our country.
Lionel: Can we flip to artificial intelligence?
Kara: Sure.
Lionel: This is the big thing. Anybody with an AI next to it stock goes up like crazy. Advanced microchip--
Kara: Not for too much longer.
Lionel: You don't think so?
Kara: No, because it's a lot of--
Lionel: Are you calling a cell moment, Kara?
Kara: Yes. I think some of them will work, some of them won't. That's all. If you would've said at the beginning of the internet age, there were thousands of companies and then there were 10, that's where it's going to go here. It's going to go here the same way.
Lionel: Just imagine just for a moment that you're not Kara Swisher, but you're editor-in-chief at The Washington Post. How would you apply artificial intelligence?
Kara: Interesting, The New York Times today, they have their new AI team dealing with it. They have two engineers, a reporter, and a designer, I think. Pretty much an editor and designer. I thought, "Oh, what a sad little crew against AI. Good luck, New York Times." It was funny. They're very smart. I'm not insulting their intelligence, but you've got to figure out where it applies and what you can use it to make your business more efficient.
Efficiency is what it's going to bring in. How can you apply it to your business to save costs? I think there's probably a lot of opportunity in advertising targeting. I think there's probably a lot of opportunity in figuring out subscriptions. You have to start using it and you have to have your reporters use it to understand.
Imagine back in the 1990s, I was there, I used email before anyone else, and they're like, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm talking to my readers." They're like, "Why would you want to do that?" I'm like, "Because you're going to have to in the future because that's--" Or, "Use the internet." Everyone was like, "What's a worldwide website?" I was like, "Just use it and you'll figure out what works for you." I would try all kinds of experiments.
Lionel: It's interesting you go back to that period because of course there was the deal between mainstream media and big tech-
Kara: Yes. Facebook.
Lionel: -on distribution.
Kara: I didn't take their money-
Lionel: No.
Kara: -just so you know.
Lionel: You're still, by the way, editor-in-chief. Would you hand over all the content or lots of content to LLMs?
Kara: I might if they gave me enough money, but probably not because why would I?
Lionel: What's enough money, Kara?
Kara: I don't know. I probably wouldn't. Why? How would it help me? When Facebook came and they were wanted-- Remember everybody, they wanted to put their-- I had much more content then.
Lionel: Yes. We refused at the Financial Times.
Kara: I was like, "What's in it for me?" Cheryl Sandberg actually called me. "What's in it for you?" "Well, more distribution." I'm like, "What do I need you for? What am I getting? You're giving me money to give you this stuff. It's not very much money. You're buying your friends. It reminds me of buying your friends. Why do you need to buy me? I don't understand." It was so like, "Why am I painting your fence?" I kept thinking it was better for them than for me. I thought, no, it's not a really good deal for me. I did just fine. People found me other ways.
One of the things you have to do is you have to equalize. Again, it's math; revenues, and costs. That's it. If you have fewer costs than revenues, you're great. That's my feeling. I think what's good about a small organization is you don't need that much. Even the big organizations, The New York Times, for example, it's really investing in Wordle. Everyone made fun of that. I was like, "Brilliant. Wordle, brilliant." All the news people, all had their noses out of joint, "[groans]."
Guess what's keeping people on The New York Times on a daily basis? Plus they're reading the news. What do you care? It's none of your business that they like Wordle and Connections and whatever.
Lionel: Spelling Bee's quite good too, actually.
Kara: Spelling Bee, I don't like Spelling Bee. In any case, so what if they like cooking? So what if they like whatever,-
Lionel: Completely right.
Kara: -the podcast?
Lionel: They needed to build those extra businesses.
Kara: It's none of your business what they like. You're just going to have to get used to the fact that maybe they don't like the news and it's kind of grim. Maybe they want to have a Wordle Day or something. Things that keep you there are what's important. It's a full package, that's what's important.
At the same time, The New York Times isn't that big. I keep pointing this out. The CEO always yells at me when I say this, but it's a $2.4 billion company or whatever. It's not very big. It's very small. It doesn't make that much money. It really doesn't. Go, look, it's a couple of hundred million, or maybe. They're doing good, they're doing well, but it's a small company compared to Facebook throws that off every hour or whatever, every week. How do you compete with that? In fact, they're not even competing with you. They're just getting in your way with Threads or Instagram. They're taking the time of people who might be your customers. That's all.
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Lionel: This is Media Confidential from Prospect Magazine. After the break, we'll have more from Kara Swisher. We'll be right back.
Alan: In this week's Prospect podcast, deputy editor Ellen Halliday, takes a snapshot after the first week of electioneering in the UK with Pollster, Peter Kellner. Ellen is then joined by Peter Fabricius as they discuss the South African election, where the results are being counted as we speak.
Peter Kellner: It's been a terrible few days for the Prime Minister, starting with ludicrously wet in the downpour when he announced the election through to a retiring Tory MP saying votes reform. There's the president of the young Tories in Birmingham, who switched to the Liberal Democrats going to Belfast and doing a presentation in this museum of the Titanic, where we say, "Are you the captain of the Titanic?"
However, I'm not sure any of this in the end makes very much difference. Summer and the Labour campaign have been much slicker. They've got their messages out. It's been done competently. They've had this useful thing in the Times where 120 or [unintelligible 00:26:15] business leaders have said, "We think it's time for change and we like what Labour's doing." Again, whether that'll matter in five weeks' time when people cast their votes, I'm not so sure, but it helps to build up the picture that Labour is cautious, careful, and responsible.
The other point I make on which the Tories have picked up and criticized Starmer for is pretty well no new specific policies coming out. It's muse music stuff.
Alan: Follow the Prospect podcast wherever you get your podcast. Why not take out a digital subscription to Prospect? You'll enjoy a one-month free trial of our digital content. I recently tweeted that we had done a summary of all the pieces that Nick Davis has written about, the Murdoch organization's criminality. That took him hundreds of hours of research, never mind talking to the lawyers and getting it all through the fact-checkers. That costs money.
If you want to support that kind of journalism, then please take out a subscription to Prospect. There's no commitment. You can cancel at any time. You just have to go to our website or to your favorite search engine and search for "Prospect Magazine subscription."
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Alan: Welcome back to Media Confidential. Now, more from Kara Swisher.
Lionel: Looking outside into your country, it seems to me that the big problem is just mundane news. Deciding what is true and what isn't true, and getting people to agree on what is true. Is that battle lost? Can AI help there or are we reliant on old-fashioned human beings to do that?
Kara: It could help. I think technology tends to be very neutral, much more so than people. The issue is who's using it. What people are using it to manipulate people? It's a tool or a weapon, and it can be a very good tool to figure out what's not-- Especially if we, say, have a rule that requires where the providence is from. Where did this come from? A trail of information. It's a whole lot better than, "How did this reporter get this quote?" Are we sure this reporter's telling the truth? How do we know? We don't. In that case, we don't unless they taped it, et cetera.
You could have a requirement by government that you know where it's from. We have that for meat. Every time someone gets sick from a hamburger, we know where that meat came from, it's labeled. It's tracked from where the cow was killed to how it gets to the McDonald's. We know. We don't know where any of the information comes from, so why not require that? Why not require how they put it together? What did they put in it? There are all kinds of rules we can have.
Lionel: That would require legislation.
Kara: That's correct. We have legislation for meat. Why can't we have legislation for information, like grade-A information?
Lionel: Congress, at any point could have repealed Section 230 which is the question about whether it's a platform or a publisher.
Kara: There's a recent effort to do that.
Lionel: Why have they never done that? What has stopped them from doing that from [unintelligible 00:29:28]?
Kara: It has real implications. It was started to protect these companies and allow them to grow from their nascent stages and not be sued to death. At this point, it's gone too far. Maybe they can be sued a little, maybe they start to take pieces of it off. Certain things have liability. They keep going, "It's a slippery slope," and whatever. It can be. That a Supreme Court case where they tried to blame Google for an attack. Is it really Google's fault? I don't know, but I think they should be able to be sued because then you can figure it out in court. I just feel like I'm of the sue the bastards' point of view and then we'll sort it out and then we'll know.
Lionel: Kara, you left Washington in the late '80s. You went out to Silicon Valley. You were there present at the creation, so to speak. You went through the internet, became a big tech guru, and then you decided to come back, to leave Silicon Valley. You had enough. In the next chapter, do you think we're going to actually have bright sunny uplands again or is it all dark?
Kara: There could be. No, uplands where? In terms of the Silicon Valley?
Lionel: Yes.
Kara: Oh, the AI stuff. San Francisco's back, baby. You know what I mean?
Lionel: Just a better world though because they're desperately promoting that.
Kara: I don't know if it's the better world. Of course, they are. By the way, there could be. My next book is about that, like cancer research. There's all kinds of stuff around mental health. There are all kinds of things around climate change tech. Once again, it could go a good way. It's a question of how we get it to go a good way. The most important quote in the book is from Paul Virilio, who's a French philosopher. It says, "When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash. When you invent electricity, you invent electrocution." My question in this new era is, okay, we've got the ships, all the rich people got rich off the ships that were doing all the trade. The shipwrecks are everywhere. Guess who pays for that? Us, not them. Why aren't there any lighthouses? Where's the lighthouses? Where is the radar on the planes? Why aren't they required to have radar? They get to benefit and never get to pay.
Then the last thing is electrocution, why are all the wires on the ground and why do we have to touch them? Why aren't they in the air? That is the role of the government to do that. Even if it's flawed, they need to get in there. The problem is, these companies now are so wealthy, they have managed to get so big and so wealthy and so influential that it's going to be very hard. We did it in the United States with Trustbusters. It was a rich guy, Teddy Roosevelt, rich elite guy, broke them up. Guess what? America was innovative again. This new AI era being controlled by four to five companies is terrifying to me.
Lionel: On an optimistic note, Kara, bring back TR. Thank you.
Kara: Bring back TR. I don't know who it's going to be, but at some point, we have to. By the way, Europe's done a very good job trying, but I'm sorry, it doesn't matter what they do in Europe, it matters what they do in the United States of America. Our legislators are up at a porn trial trying to defend someone who has some issues with women. Right? Some very-- That's what our legislators are doing, sitting doing PR for a person who paid off a porn star. America. Welcome to America 2024.
Lionel: Thank you, Kara.
Alan: Thank you so much for joining us.
Lionel: Thank you for joining us.
Kara: Thank you.
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Lionel: Alan, that was a pretty unsentimental view of big tech from Kara Swisher.
Alan: She takes no prisoners.
Lionel: What should media do? Are we going to be all crushed under the elephant's foot again?
Alan: I think it's serious. As we discussed, Facebook is really turning its back on media, Google is trying to do everything in search and they are scraping vast amounts of content and the danger is that they are coming between the publisher and the reader. They don't want us to go there. They're losing interest. The media is just trouble, we're legal trouble, we're reputational trouble, we're political trouble. There's nothing in it for them unless media can get together and do some kind of big deal with this, particularly about AI.
Lionel: I think this is really the key question. What are the terms of engagement between the major media companies and the likes of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company, ChatGPT?
Alan: We saw I think it was last week News Corp did their own deal.
Lionel: Yes. They claim $250 million over 5 years. I'd like to see that five years down the road, but there we are.
Alan: The danger is that they will pick off piecemeal. They get all the big players off one at a time. There's something about this that makes me feel it would be better if there was a united front for all media because this is a big moment.
Lionel: There is an industrywide grouping in America, but as you say when push came to shove News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's organization, Robert Thomson being the CEO, struck a deal over five years. Interestingly, The New York Times is still in litigation over AI. Financial Times has done a deal although the terms are-
Alan: Undisclosed.
Lionel: -undisclosed, yes.
Alan: The other thing to come out of Kara's interviews, this whole thing about Section 230, this thing that designates the tech companies as, effectively pipes, they can't be liable for the stuff that is sent down their pipes. It always was controversial. There's a tension there, to my mind, between the ability of social media at its best to give a voice to voiceless people. Billions of people have a voice who never had before. If we're literally going to ask Facebook and Google to be responsible for every bit of content in the same way that you and I were when we were editing newspapers, that seems to me to destroy the idea of social media.
Lionel: It does. How many thousands of people do you think it would be necessary to moderate your comments?
Alan: My comments alone.
Lionel: Well, indeed. No, there is an interesting divide of opinion, if you like, between Twitter for example, now X, as a forum, a public square if you like, for the dissemination of information, or just hue and cry opinion. I'm personally more interested in the first than the second but then I'm an unashamed elitist, aren't I, Alan?
Rishi Sunak: Earlier today I spoke with His Majesty the King to request the dissolution of parliament. The king has granted this request, and we will have a general election on the 4th of July.
Lionel: Alan, last week we saw a bedraggled Prime Minister standing outside 10 Downing Street, announcing that he was indeed calling an election for July 4th. It was a bit sad. No raincoat, no umbrella, Rishi was drowned out, not just by the rain, but also by things can only get better with Labour's 1997 campaign song. Let's dig over that and a few other things related to the election and media coverage.
You covered more elections as an editor than I did. I think I did 2010, '15, '17 and '19. You got me there. Yes, I'm a baby in the woods. Didt do some American ones, but that's another matter. I think what interests me is, what are main media organizations going to do in terms of standout coverage. What's going to make a difference? Catch the attention, be original and how are they going to deploy their resources? Remember, it's a six-week campaign, so it's not a shorty.
Alan: It feels strange so far because the papers that you might think of as traditionally Tory papers feel a bit muted really. They haven't got one big drum that they can bang. There are two things that you thought they might have wanted to talk about.
Lionel: Which of the Tory newspapers that you're really having in mind?
Alan: The Mail, The Telegraph.
Lionel: The Times?
Alan: The Express in brackets because it's less of a newspaper than it used to be. The Times is in a strange position now because it really I think has moved remarkably to the right of the last two years at a time when the country seems to be moving to the left.
Lionel: Under the editor Tony Gallagher, ex-Telegraph son.
Alan: Brexit is of course the big elephant in the room. If you think back to 2019, that was a whole campaign about, "We will deliver Brexit." You can argue about whether they delivered Brexit or not. It's very strange that five years later it's the great unmentionable. Nobody wants to talk about that. They thought they were going to make a great campaign about Angela Rayner, but they've had the rug pulled out from under them. You've got front pages over VAT on private schools. All these headlines that are coming out, Sunak will do this and everyone knows Sunak's not going to do any of these things. Starmer is a difficult man to make out into a Corbyn-style bogeyman. I can't feel the blast furnaces that you normally feel during a British general election-- are not firing on all cylinders.
Lionel: Do you think that they are anybody apart from The Telegraph? I think The Telegraph did open up its front page as it was almost like 1945, end of the war, or maybe in '39 or whatever, take your military metaphor. That was big and they gave him space and he's running a presidential campaign. They do have that sort of to go with, don't they? He's made these big announcements.
Alan: "Does anybody in this room?" He said looking at the four people in the room, "Does anybody think we're going to have-
Lionel: We've got a lot of listeners out there.
Alan: They'd only be four people in the room. -any form of National Service," it's not going to happen. I forget what his pledge was. What was his pledge? Then there was, "I'll look after the pensioners." but everyone knows he's not going to be Prime Minister, so these seem rather empty things to go with.
Lionel: What about the BBC's coverage so far?
Alan: I haven't watched enough of it, to be honest.
Lionel: Again, they've named Clive Myrie and Laura Kuenssberg as the presenters for the night. They have some quite important questions, I think, to answer about how much space to give Nigel Farage. It seems to me he's getting a lot of air time. He's a good media performer, but remember, he's not even standing for a Reform Party, for a seat, so I have some questions about whether they should be doing that.
Alan: Yes, he's hanging around like a bad smell, isn't he? As you say, not standing. He hasn't really got an official role within the Reform Party, but he's very good TV.
Lionel: If you were editor, what would you be telling the troops now in terms of organizing the coverage? Have you got any good ideas?
Alan: Good ideas? It's ages since I've had a good idea.
Lionel: I always thought that bringing foreign correspondence to the UK, having a fresh pair of eyes is rather good, and that's not to denigrate the Westminster lobby system. I was never much attracted to it, but you do have specialist political reporters, they've got excellent sources. They're following the day-to-day campaign, but having some fresh pair of eyes in corners of the country that we don't normally go to, I think that's a plus.
Alan: A couple of elections I got Michael Kinsley, the great American journalist, to come and cover. Just having that outside view, a bit like Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, writes very interesting pieces about Britain because he comes to it from completely outside, so that is a good idea.
Lionel: I think the second thought I have is people really now need to go up to Scotland and report what's going on there. You've seen the collapse in support for the SNP, they've been running the country for 20 years. Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell are facing serious police inquiry. Is there going to be a big Labour comeback? What are people saying? Has independence really gone away for a generation? There's a big story there to be written about it seems to me, in terms of the campaign.
Alan: Our old friend fact-checking. There are going to be wild things being thrown around on both sides, and it's in a way, a tiresome business having to go around checking the facts of others. I think that becomes an ever more important role in media. The way that social media can amplify anything that anybody says about anything. Occasionally, just somebody speaking in a quiet voice saying, "Actually, that's not true." There was a good thread on X/Twitter the other day, a paper, and I can't remember which one, had gone big VAT on private schools and somebody who wasn't a journalist, just quietly said, "Actually, let's look at this school." It was been failing for about 10 years. It more or less hauled up the white flag. It's completely dishonest journalism to pin this all on the threat of VAT and that kind of role, ironically, not done by a journalist, I think is where journalism should be scoring.
Lionel: I'd also like to know a little bit more about the people advising who's in the inner circle in Starmer's-- good portraits, what kind of access, how that system works because often these are the people who are going to be calling the shots if and when we have a Labour government under secure Starmer. One last thought, for somebody like the Financial Times, it's going to be very interesting to see- because I'm sure they will, I have no inside information- but I'm sure they will back Starmer. They will back Labour, that will be the first time since 2005, the last endorsement of Tony Blair.
They'll have to make a case for it, but they've got their business readership. "Businesses" largely seems to be coming around to Starmer, but still, they've got to have just a little bit of holding feet to fire. It does remind me, of course, in 1992 when the Financial Times actually backed Neil Kinnock to the astonishment of the city. Richard Lambert later said he was worried about being fired. In fact, with editorial impendence, the chairman-- there might have been a slight, "[coughs]" but nothing happened, and Neil Kinnock didn't become prime minister.
Alan: Despite the FT's backing. I find that hard to believe.
Speaker: Yes.
Lionel: It was probably the wishiest, washiest editorial in recent memory actually, but worth digging out that 1992 half endorsement of Neil Kinnock in the FT.
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Lionel: That's all from Media Confidential. Thank you to Kara Swisher for joining us. We'll be back next week to report on the latest twists and turns in the election campaign.
Alan: You can send any questions or comments to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk, or get in touch on X, formally Twitter, where we are @mediaconfpod. Remember to follow Media Confidential wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer today is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
