 a dydyddi Caerdydd yn ôl am fawr o ddyn ni i yw'n chyfannau cyfnod. Mae gerdynaeth Faechry a'u wneud i ddangos i brifioio cyfnodd y Llyfrgell John. Felly genious i'ch ei chyfnodd, cerddon ti'r ystod y byddaiwn i chi am ei gweithio Llyfrgell, sydd wedi gweithio Llyfrgell, neu fyddio��ai ac ei hi'n gweithio allan, i ddigonio ni'n gweithio i Llyfrgell, alemi nhw'n ond felly rydyn ni'n ddwy i cerddydd iawn. Felly, mae'n adrodd ar y cymdeithasol i mi allan o bobl na dda i amser y llyfr mewn ond. Felly, mae'n adrodd arall iawn i amser ond yn y ddweud o gael y blynyddiadau. Gweithio ar poli Rusill, ac mae'n yma'r rhwng Llyfrgell Cymru ar y Llyfrgell Brifysgol. Mae'n rhaid i'r awdurdod o'r rhwng Llyfrgell Cymru ac'r Llyfrgell Brifysgol, ac rhaid i'r awdurdod o'r rhwng Llyfrgell Brifysgol, Roedog Heating, gan bobl o'r rhwng Llyfrgell. Y Echolls Centr was set-up in 1991 with a generous endowment by Mary and David Echolls. It was set-up to foster and encourage scholarship and learning about the Americas using the British Library's world-class collections and I just want to take a moment at this point to thank all the partner institutions that we work with, our amazing fellows, our friends, the American Trust for the British Library and of course the Echolls family who support all the work that we do. The Echolls Centre works really closely with colleagues across the British Library to deliver a whole host of activities. We sponsor researchers of all types from all over the world. We fund two really significant writers awards worth £20,000 each for unpublished works of fiction and non-fiction. We create activities and services for students and teachers and we also do a huge amount of programming of events and I like to think that if you are interested in the Americas we would like to hear from you. Tonight's event, The Bryant Lecture, is one of our most important events of the year. The Bryant Lecture has been run since 1995 and was named after Douglas W Bryant. Douglas Bryant was born in 1913 and studied at Stamford. He served during the Second World War as an officer in the Marines in the Navy and after that he went to work as an associate librarian at Berkeley in California. In 1950 he was drafted into the US Foreign Service to work with British American libraries in Britain. He came back after two years and he went to work at Harvard but over the many decades that he worked in Harvard in the library there which he became the director of he remained very close to British librarians and academics and in 1979 he set up the American Trust for the British Library which he served on as trustee and executive director and then the president from 1990 until his death in 1994. In 1995 our annual lecture was then named after him in recognition of all of his work and support of the British Library. So The Bryant Lecture is a really important event in our calendar. It gives us an opportunity to showcase and explore debates about the USA and its relation to the world with some of the world's leading experts. Former Bryant speakers have included Lonnie Bunch, Gary Young, Lisa Doucette, Gordon Carrera, Kimberly Crenshaw and I'm absolutely thrilled that we're going to be adding John Sople's name to that fantastic list. John's going to speak for about 45-50 minutes and then he's really happy to take questions so do think of anything you'd like to ask him. If you're watching online you can add a question at the bottom of your screen and I'm now going to hand over to the chief executive of the British Library, Rowley Keating. Thank you everyone for coming and thank you as ever by the way to the Eccles family it's lovely to see John, Diana Catherine here tonight, really wonderful long-standing supporters of this institution. The British Library, as Polly says, I mean we are among many other things one of the greatest collections to do with America and the Americas in the world and over 30 years now the Eccles Center has really transformed understanding awareness and sometimes simple enjoyment of the collections that we hold. We could not be more delighted tonight to be welcoming to deliver this year's Bryant Lecture, John Sople. John I think probably everyone here knows has had a really remarkable long distinguished career at the BBC although he left he just told me two weeks ago and of course that career culminated in an unforgettable seven-year tenure as the BBC's North America or America editor and that included of course all the turbulence of the Donald Trump presidency, the transitions at either end of that and all the debates that flowed about a radically changing society that affects us here and indeed the whole world. John's theme is titled tonight is falsehood, fakery and the threat to free speech and that theme I guess is relevant and timely for countless reasons I don't need to enumerate here tonight but we have war on mainland Europe and all the propaganda associated with that and the fears and concerns that people of all generations around the world have are very much embodied in many of the debates we have around news and news reporting. So the theme also links to our major exhibition that we have at the library at the moment called Breaking the News which traces some of these questions right back through the centuries through centuries of news and news media right back to a very cunningly spun account of the Battle of Flodden in 1513. It's on until 21st of August seven days a week so if you haven't had a chance to see it yet please do make time if you can to come back to the library and visit Breaking the News and if you are watching this around the country I'm pleased to say that the exhibition has versions in many of our partner libraries around the country who come together under our living knowledge network so if you can't make it to London I hope you'll see a version of it near you. I will be back on this stage in about 40 minutes or so to join John and to host some of your questions but now it is my pleasure to welcome to the stage to deliver this year's Brian lecture John Sobel. John. Good evening thank you so much for inviting me I'm absolutely delighted to be here as Roli said I left the BBC two weeks ago on the 10 o'clock news I would get 50 seconds to have 40 to 45 minutes seems an unbelievable luxury and I have no idea how I'm going to time myself but we'll see how we get on. I'm delighted to be here in the Echel Centre and you know having spent seven years in the United States trying to explain to a largely British audience some of the subtleties about the US and the relationship between the UK and the US I know that the work that the Echel Centre has been able to do over the years has been so important. There was a time I guess when calling the President of the United States a liar or the British Prime Minister untrustworthy was simply unthinkable they were after all the holders of distinguished public office but Trump did lie and Boris Johnson has well a long and rather troubled relationship with the truth of which Party Gate is but the most recent example so what happened did they become a reflection of our values or have we stopped caring about what is truth and what is fiction perhaps the more important question is how has this happened and what can be done to turn the tide on falsehood and disinformation and the seriousness of the consequences if we can't and that I think is what I'd like to address this evening. The focus of the lecture was going to be on the events that led up to the 6th of January arguably the most precarious day in the history of United States democracy but after the invasion of Ukraine I said I felt we couldn't simply focus on what happened in the United States alone while ignoring the tanks trundling into a sovereign country and the missiles that are raining down on it as we speak. So when we agreed that there would be a bit of Russia as well I started thinking about what are the commonalities between the United States and what happened there and commonalities with Russia. There's a drama I've been watching on TV about America's first TV chef and it's set in the 1960s and the problem they have in this Boston TV station some of you have clearly watched it as well is you've got a 25 minute transmission but if you're making a birth bourguignon it takes three hours so how do you cut from one to the other and just make sure that well here's the one I prepared earlier and then it occurred to me that this is to some extent what we've seen in Russia and America. In the US on January the 6th we saw the raw chopped ingredients an untrue message from an outgoing president that they'd been widespread ford a support base numbering tens of millions that believed everything he said a polarized media that would churn out Donald Trump's claims unchecked and social media whose algorithms amplified the most far-fetched conspiracy theories but then you come to Russia so Jeremy Fleming the head of GCHQ gave an interesting lecture in Australia recently in which he talked about Putin's modus operandi I quote he seeks brutal control of the media and access to the internet he seeks the closing down of opposition voices and he's making heavy investment in their propaganda and covert agencies this is the beef stew fully cooked after hours in the oven Russian media has spoken with one voice there is no dissent messaging is utterly consistent this isn't an invasion this is a special military operation the regime in Kiev is full of Nazis even though its head is Jewish genocide has been committed in the Donbas though no evidence has been supplied to the United Nations of such a claim NATO is hell bent on invading Russia though it is a defensive alliance Vladimir Putin has been able to carry out this war of choice knowing that the overwhelming majority of the population would never doubt his rationale for doing so every night on the TV news trusted anchors repeat these lies likewise the newspapers any voices of dissent are shut down and threatened to 15 years in prison and if any opponent of course gets too big for his boots there's always novichock to be clear I'm not comparing Russia with the United States look there's all would never been a great history in Russia of a free press robust protected by the First Amendment nor am I seeking to suggest of course that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin though frankly at times I thought maybe he would quite like to be but a free press able to criticise its elected leaders is a vital element of our democracies and a vital check on would be on wannabe autocrats and dictators I was at the news conference that Putin and Trump held in Helsinki together after their summit it was unbelievable the US president looked to be in raptures to be sitting next to his hero when asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election the US president said that Vladimir Putin had assured him it wasn't happened I don't see any reason why it would be Russia Trump said President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today that despite all the US intelligence agencies speaking with one voice that Russia had intervened and so given a straight choice between believing his own intelligence agencies and believing Vladimir Putin Donald Trump chose Putin now when I was in Washington there were those Republicans who would argue that Donald Trump had been tougher on Moscow than any other president I always said provide me the quote where Donald Trump is critical and it doesn't exist criticism of Theresa May that was to a penny just in Trudeau it was everywhere Macron the same Merkel well he couldn't barely disguise his contempt for Angela Merkel but Putin nothing and it was almost as though the more authoritarian you were and the more you could intimidate opponents and the press the more Donald Trump admired you Erdogan in Turkey, Xi in China, Duterte in the Philippines but primus into pares Vladimir Putin in Moscow so like the strong men he so rever Donald Trump did try at certain times to ban journalists from the White House the BBC was once banned from a briefing anyone who caused him displeasure he tried at times to limit their access but with its written constitution and the sanctity of the first amendment he failed so how is it in a country where there is a free press and there is huge diversity of opinion that so many came to believe that an election had been stolen and were prepared to invade congress and come to washington fully tooled up I just want to rattle through a few facts of the 2020 election when I say the election was not stolen that's not me saying it that is every person who was entrusted by the constitution with the counting confirming and verification of the results the trump campaign brought 63 court cases to challenge the results 62 of them were thrown out wholesale the attorney general William Barth fiercely conservative who believed in almost unfettered executive power for the president said there had been no fraud and that would alter the course of the election and has since said that trump had surrounded himself with sycophants and I quote whack jobs from outside the government who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories the election security head said it had been the safest election in American history he was appointed by donald trump and is a republican 50 secretaries of state validated the results the vice president mike pence would have nothing to do with an attempt not to certify the white house general council told donald trump the game was up but donald trump with an ever shrinking coterie of well whack jobs to use bill bars descriptor maintained the lie that the election was stolen and he invited his supporters to descend on the capital on january the sixth with a tweet promising it was going to be wild on that it was promised made and promised kept it was wild but despite the total lack of evidence astonishingly a majority of republican lawmakers in the house of representatives voted against certifying joe biden's clear election victory now all but a handful knew absolutely that joe biden had won fair and square but they were terrified of incurring the wrath of donald trump and the harm he could do to their reelection chances if they voted against there should be a whole separate lecture maybe next year on the power of fear in politics this is mackie of ellies it's better to be feared than loved although with donald trump he loved to be loved as well so let's talk about america today 16 months on there's now a commission of inquiry into the events of january the sixth that shed a lot of light on what unfolded and why let us be in no doubt there was a concerted effort by a small and powerful group of trump supporting acolytes to overthrow a free and fair election the house of representatives investigation sent some initial findings to a district judge to see whether he thought the law had been broken potentially by donald trump and those around him the district judge david carter wrote that donald trump and others undertook a coup in search of a legal theory a coup in search of a legal theory think about that for a moment the most powerful freely elected leader in the democratic world standing accused by a US judge of a coup attempt and some of what was explored by the team that had now coalesced around trump was frankly the stuff of banana republics and totally frigging bananas but it failed largely down to a lack of organization some have argued it showed the robustness of the US constitution and the separation of powers i'm not so sure it was very close to a full blown constitutional crisis so where have we got to now good news first um latest poll figures suggest that around 60 percent of republicans still believe that the election was stolen but 40 percent don't well let's say that's an exaggeration say it's 50 50 that means there are still 37 million adult americans who believe that joe biden is an illegitimate president that he shouldn't be in the white house and these are people whose faith in democracy having been fed this diet of untruths and downright lies is now diminished on the back of no evidence to state the obvious we live in deeply divided societies though i'd argue that britain though it's had its moments brexit was deeply divisive is not in the same place as the united states i could give endless examples but i'm going to give one before i left washington there was an election for the governor of virginia virginia had been democrat for a number of years uh the republican was doing well by kind of sort of being trumpian but never mentioning donald trump's name um a poll just before the election found that the democrat had a 14% lead amongst those people who'd been vaccinated most people in virginia had been vaccinated he lost the election and what it meant was that virtually everybody i mean like everybody who hadn't been jabbed voted republican how whether you'd been back your vaccination status was an indicator of your likely voting behaviour slightly frightening things may be bad here but they're not like that there's a fascinating piece that's just been published in the atlantic magazine after babel it's called by a social psychologist jonathan height it invokes the story from the book of genesis and the tower of abel where god is so angered angered by our hubris he scrambles our languages height sees a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue in other words republican and democrat but within the left and within the right as well within universities companies professional associations museums and even families in the past 10 years he writes something went terribly wrong very suddenly we're disoriented unable to speak the same language or recognise the same truth and he worries and i quote again that if we do not make major changes soon then our institutions our political system and our society may collapse maybe that's a bit apocalyptic but you can see where he's coming from so let me go back to the question i posed earlier about why so many voters still believe that the election in the us was stolen and i think this goes to something fundamental as we've become more polarised over brexit trump ukraine you name it so an increasing number of people tune into the news or maybe more particularly click on stories on their timeline not to be informed but to have their views affirmed i find that frightening there's a growing intolerance to viewpoints that are not their own on the right and on the left and in identity politics and frankly everywhere early in that 2020 election campaign i went to the mexican border to interview steve bannon for the today program the abuse i got from the left on social media was off the scale this is not a nobody let me say that again he is not a nobody he was trump's campaign manager in 2016 and went into the white house on an equal footing as the chief of staff he was in many ways the intellectual underpinning of trumpism unless we forget donald trump had been for four years the most powerful elected politician in the world and leader of one of the two global superpowers but people complained in their hundreds that i was a fascist enabler did people die in the gas chambers so i could interview this nazi and on and on it went i'm sorry to ignore donald trump or anyone else you don't like doesn't make them go away i did reflect that in the mid 1990s at far too young an age i'd been invited to present the today program did a few shifts and one day sitting opposite me in the studio was radovan caraditch now serving a life sentence for war crimes for his role in the atrocities in bosnia he was in london and he was in our studio for the bosnia peace talks i think we have to listen to views that we might find repellent and people like myself must challenge those views robustly toughly fairly but we can't pretend they don't exist cancelling people from your curated timeline from your university lecture theater from your consciousness may make you feel better but it's counterproductive we need to listen to people we disagree with because if we don't we'll never understand the support they command and why so i took up my post in washington in 2014 the last two years of the obama administration and when i moved from london i thought of cnn as a bit like the bbc small l uh liberal but with donald trump's election victory that shifted i remember vividly his first presidential press conference he's arrived at the white house he's in the east room and i was there he was in a feisty and confrontational mood and i kind of had my hand up he said you and i said john's hopeful bbc where are you from and i said bbc news another beauty and i said well uh we're free fair and impartial yeah just like cnn and and i thought i am not going to rise to the bait which is what he wants you to do he wants you to start slugging back um i wanted to push back i wanted to be firm but it seemed important to me to be polite and respectful full even if he wanted to treat me with disdain it seemed important not to be provoked but i have to say large sections of the us media were provoked by donald trump he kept on calling us fake news liars the most dishonest people he'd ever met and with those chilling sort of Stalinist overtones enemies of the people it suited trump's purposes for us to become the opposition to him it fired up his base he had a deliberate strategy believe me there was a lot that donald trump did that was just winging it and seeing how it landed but on this he had a deliberate strategy and that was to undermine confidence in the media so that people wouldn't believe us they would believe him and the fake news taunts have been picked up with a lacrity by autocrats and dictators around the world as a means of suppressing a free press which they have done last week saw the publication of the world press freedom index it charts each year countries that are performing well and those doing badly and it makes depressing reading a record 28 countries are rated very bad and of a total of 170 countries which warns that autocratic regimes are increasingly willing to crack down on independent media outlets i should say britain was a respectable 24th on the list but even here when politicians get a tough question there seems much more willingness by the parties to say oh well you're just a conservative cipher or you're just a labour supporter when we are doing our job and i think the politicians who try to suggest that we are asking them difficult questions because we're partisans i think they should know better and should be ashamed of themselves in the us i'm afraid too many news organizations took the bait to become trump's enemy and the president rubbed his hands news anchors on cnn and on msnbc we're always in competition with each other to find new ways to describe donald trump as an idiot and imbecile a liar and a cheat and embarrassment and source of national shame i remember after one evening rally it cut back to this cnn presenter uh don lemon in what we call in television an mcu a mid close up shot and it cuts back to me this studio it's just going one embarrassment i mean one embarrassment for our country to have him as our president i mean by all means get guests on who want to say that and but when the anchor who is meant to be holding our hands and kind of telling us what's happening in the news is saying that i think that's not a great place uh to be initially i think that was born of frustration with trump what he was doing about the ban on people from muslin countries the building of the wall etc but then it morphed and this is important it may have been a misguided editorial reflex at the start but it soon became a business model in essence monetized the anti trump sentiment just as fox news oann newsmax were seeking to cash in on support for donald trump so it seemed that there was be a race on the liberal side to be the most anti trump and then i went to a baseball game at wriggly field in chicago and the guy i was with was the editor-in-chief of a number of newspapers he was like oh yeah i just don't think we're cashing in properly on the anti trump sentiment and we need to get more good anti trump writers um the new yw yw York times its edit its comment editor commissioned an article by tom cotton who is a republican arkansas senator he was forced out for having done that because maybe this new yw York times thought the readers were too sensitive to read the views of one of the hundred elected senators to the upper chamber of the u.s congress extraordinary and this sort of censoring goes on today on both sides as i say news here is a commodity to sell and you know your market and you give them what your market what they want a firm don't inform the other point to make and this might seem kind of trivial and compared to censorship is that good journalism relies on nuance the best reporting is when we say this might look black and white an open and shut case clear as day but yes this would appear to be a trump slash disaster for donald trump joe biden borris johnson but it's a bit more complicated than that and this is why but populists are those who do their bidding don't paint with a quantity brush in little shades they just slap it on with a broad brush in primary colours and i think that that doesn't help understanding either the manner in which we do this job is important if we sound like we're the opponents to a political decision or political party then don't be surprised if his or her supporters migrate away from your tv channel or radio station and go to one where they hear what they want to hear we're not the opposition to anyone in america today the republicans are the opposition to the democrats labour is the opposite official opposition to the tories we have and that we don't have and shouldn't have a dog in the fight in so far as we're journalists but we have to report what to the best of our endeavors we have proved to be true with facts with judgments and due diligence and we must do that fearlessly and firmly as daniel patrick moiner and a politician who worked for both jfk and richard nixon said you're entitled to your opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts and we must also report impartially i think under the framework of the regulator offcom it's seriously what marks us out for the better from the us until 1987 it was similar in america but during the deregulation of the reagan era the federal communications commission ditched the fairness principle for tv companies um and that allowed companies like fox to come in and correct what they saw as the liberal bias in the media but we must never equate impartiality with weakness or wishy washiness impartiality doesn't mean that journalism is bland or insipid it can't be he says she says only time will tell some people say two plus to his four some people today two plus two is six only time will tell john sobel bbc news wherever two plus two is four we need muscular impartiality and i say this to my bbc bosses as well on day one of the trump presidency my former bbc bosses sorry i'm just kind of mind sir on day one of the trump presidency i was at the white house doing a live for the evening news and it was suddenly shawn spicer the president's first press secretary calls a news conference unusual for a saturday i go and in he comes and he says you've got it all wrong the crowd for donald trump's inauguration was the biggest in american history well it wasn't and you just had to look at the photos from 2008 when barack obama's inauguration took place or 2009 rather and you could see that hundreds of thousands of more people had turned out on the mole uh for him than for donald trump and that posed us in the bbc with a bit of a dilemma were we going to say shawn spicer claims this but the photos suggest that there was some discussion but we said no we're going to call this as it is it's not true now of course it brought criticism from partisans that we were engaged in trump bashing that we were biased that's not right because to have said anything else would have been a more serious crime and that is going in for truth bashing and journalists must never do that there have been times however that i have been a little more uneasy with some of the bbc's reporting and i've never spoken about this before prior to the brexit vote in 2016 when barack obama came to london i was traveling with him on air force one by the way if any of you have thought about what is the quickest way to get from stancid airport into central london and you've debated do i go the m11 or do i go take the train into Liverpool three can i commend you to a us marine corps helicopter parked at the side of your plane which whisks you into the back garden of the us ambassador in regents park it took 15 minutes no need for passport control or anything like that really excellent um i digress uh the news desk wanted me to file a piece on obama's arguments about brexit and why it shouldn't go ahead and so i filed my report and the editor in new broadcasting house said nice piece john but it's got no Nigel Farage in it i thought about that for a minute and i thought i'm going to go for passive aggressive rather well i said i didn't get to the very front of air force one secret service wouldn't let me but as far as i could see Nigel Farage wasn't on the plane um i'm sorry you've got to include some Nigel Farage in it because every piece has got to be internally balanced um i just didn't think that's good reporting um and i made my views known to the bosses that be and i was told that was the way it is that's a cop out it felt like a policy to appease to get rid of bbc critics i don't think that is going to get rid of bbc critics and this isn't me making a pro brexit or anti brexit points it's then saying that to go in for false equivalents is not good journalism if 10 noble prize winning economists say that brexit may be a disaster do you give equal space to that view than from the lecturer from knees and poly who says no no brexit's going to be a huge success or if all the leaders of the top footsie companies say it's going to be a disaster a bloke who runs a pub chain does he get the same amount of coverage for example um or in the just hypothetical or in the war in ukraine do we say on the one hand ukraine calls this an invasion of their sovereign territory but on the other russia says it's a special military operation and leave it at that no we have to call it just as the un secretary general said that russia has breached international law by violating the sovereign territory of another country to use a phrase from a previous visionary director general of the bbc john bird that shows a bias against understanding but perhaps the greatest bias against understanding is coming from social media right now which is the greatest source of misinformation the 2016 presidential election which brought donald trump to power was remarkable for all sorts of reasons too many to go through in this time but we saw in all sorts of ways the proliferation of disinformation on facebook from seemingly reliable sources of stories that were to use the technical term total horseshit pope backs trump according to one radio station that didn't exist hillary clinton wanted on murder charges no um the post election analysis showed there were some pretty weird and less than wonderful actors in all of this for a start the russian state was seeking to so discord and do whatever it could to undermine hillary clinton's election chances and by the way just at that news conference that i was talking a moment ago in health sinky vladimir putin said in terms yes we wanted donald trump to win and we were doing what we could to harm hillary clinton but bizarrely there were kind of students in macedonia who found it was a good way to pay their tuition fees you write clickbait stories of pure absolute nonsense people click on them and you more dollars you get and there were of course the people who either wanted to skewer donald trump or skewer hillary clinton there was one particular story i remember vividly about a paedophile ring alleged at the heart of the democratic party involving john podesta who was hillary clinton's chief of staff then and of course hillary clinton it all apparently ascended on a pizza restaurant in washington dc about a mile or two from where i lived in northwest washington um there was a dungeon in the basement of said pizza joint and the children were being taken there and imprisoned and then abused by said democrats now this was a piece of total invention that started out life on the furthest reaches of the internet and ignored by everyone who came near it but then a few people decided oh this could be useful so they gave it a push it and migrates to one of the message boards i think it was reddit and before you know it bad political actors pick it up and it is on people's facebook feeds harmless well one guy read about this and the poor children and he loads his ar-15 assault rifle into his car from north carolina and drives the hundreds of miles to washington dc where he walks into the restaurant fires a round from this uh high velocity round into the ground and said i am here to free the children from the basement well unfortunately the pizza restaurant didn't have a basement there were no children and he ended up in prison for his troubles but this in essence was the start of q anon q allegedly being a senior official working in the government who was going to expose the pedophile ring at the heart of the deep state it was going to be like the second common and anyone who believed in q anon believed in donald trump most memorably the shaman on january the sixth who stormed the capital in his horned helmet and the fur pelt and the tattoos all over his body um and who got three and a half years in prison for his troubles if you haven't listened to gabriel gatehouse's astonishing podcast series the coming storm i do recommend it um it is really unbelievable way that it chars that the more fanciful the story you tell the more likely it is to be picked up by people who want to believe it in conspiracy theories uh my old friend david oron of it you now writes for the times and does all sorts of wonderful things wrote an excellent book about conspiracy theories uh called voodoo histories it predated donald trump but its essential thesis was that those who believe in conspiracy theories are the marginalised the outliers of society the alienated the dispossessed but that's changed today donald trump is not what you call one of the marginalised but he's promulgated theories that barack obama was an illegitimate president because he was born outside the united states untrue the america america muslims were filmed in new jersey celebrating after 9 11 untrue and right through to the stolen election untrue not as bad as marjorie taylor green i don't know whether any of you have come across marjorie taylor green she is the republican congresswoman from georgia's 14th district um who argued that the californian wildfires were started by wait for it jewish space lasers i don't know how a space laser is jewish or why but apparently it involved george soros and the rothschild's family and everything else in between i don't know whether she knows its nonsense but it's picked up by thousands of people who let this stuff up the algorithms of social media mean that the wacky outlandish absurd conspiracy theories get fed into your timeline as no fact they get posted on message boards and are disseminated to communities of like-minded people who are exposed to no other opinion a more terrifying will hear no other viewpoint the facebook whistleblower frances horgan produced thousands of internal documents seeming to show that social the social media giant and the company's internal culture prioritized profitability over its impact on the wider world and she warned that instagram like facebook which is owned by meta and used by millions of children worldwide may never be safe for preteens and she said much of the blame for the world's increasingly polarized politics laid with social networks and the radicalizing impact of services such as facebook groups she wrote i'm deeply concerned that they have made a product that can lead people away from their real communities and isolate them in these rabbit holes and these filter bubbles what you find is that when people are sent targeted misinformation to a community it can make it hard to reintegrate into wider society because now you don't have shared facts again shared facts now of course the social media companies say they're seeking to deal with this and i know that many are working incredibly hard pulling down thousands of fake videos that are online about what is happening in ukraine but a lot of them are very sophisticated there was one a week or two ago that had bbc encryption all over it the bbc font size was right it all looked absolutely pucker bbc put out by the russians and it was fake to down to do down the ukranians and it takes a long time to identify some of this stuff so i think there is work that is going on and that things are moving slightly in the right direction and it's true that the social media companies have rules for their communities and they're doing going to take more responsibility for egregious material that appears both facebook and twitter kicked donald trump off their platforms over the repeated force claims around 2020 but now we have elon musk about to buy twitter who says that donald trump will be welcomed back and that this is a platform for free speech i am all in favour of free speech i think it's absolutely vital but there are limits to free speech someone comes into this theatre now and shouts fire that is going to cause problems and it would be against the law so you can't just say it's it's fallacious to think that you can just say whatever you like whenever you like the social media challenge i realise i've dealt with somewhat scantly but i was talking to eric schmidt last week the former CEO of google and he says that there's an awful lot more that the companies can do themselves in the way that the algorithm works in the way that stories get amplified and there are also the attempts of governments to legislate in this area like our government is doing with the online harms bill which would give off compowers to demand information and data from tech companies including on the role of their algorithms in selecting and displaying content so it can assess how they are shielding users from harm i think there are attempts to deal with this but i think we are in the foothills of the misinformation battle and the deep fakery that goes on there's a really wonderful exhibition about news here which really spoke about in the british library which you know it takes a 500 year view of some of the things i've been trying to address this evening and one of the sections is where the transfer of information today is so fast that things go viral in the click of a finger if the story seems too good to be true it probably is although waggate and wag of the christly that is pretty good um we need to learn to take a breath as well as journalists rather than following the latest tweet or the latest thing that has been posted maybe do we just think for a little bit is this true maybe we actually find out if it's true because that is a way out of the tidal wave of the nonsense out there it's far easier to set out the problems than the solutions i have loved my nearly four decades as a journalist i honestly think there has never been a more difficult and challenging time to be a reporter and never a more critical or important time my grandparents came here as refugees fleeing persecution i found out only last year that one branch of my father's family decided to stay behind and they ended up in Auschwitz britain and the other liberal democracies have their problems sure but we must never take for granted all that we have here free speech due process open and fair elections equality before the law the peaceful transfer of power and a media free from state interference and yes we can go on and talk about an education system and a health service free at the point of delivery i've never seen it as my job to tell people how to vote if you want to vote labour or Tory or pro brexit or anti brexit that's absolutely fine by me i fully accepted intelligent reasonable people can reach totally different conclusions and viewpoints on the best way forward for society but i do care passionately that people who go into the polling station are doing so with good information on which to make their judgment to use that phrase from frances horgan again that people have shared facts not their own truth the first half of my life was in the shadow of the cold war and the slightly comforting feeling that mutually assured destruction gave us the commies wouldn't blow us up because we could destroy them and vice versa then just over 30 years ago the world changed the iron curtain fell away and with some historians declaring that the end of history had arrived liberal democracy and western capitalism had triumphed there would be an endless peace dividend i feel today there are no certainties for the next 30 years the values of liberal democracy are not immutable we saw the vulnerability of a democracy as sturdy as america's last year we've seen the respect the russians have for sovereign nations with the invasion of ukraine we have seen the potency again of populist leaders with control of the media promising simple solutions i feel we need to shout from any platform that we can find that democracy will perish without a well-informed electorate and that in part requires strong robust independent journalism to me this feels like the battle of our times the stakes could not be higher and i believe it's a fight that can and must be won thank you thank you that was that was fantastic it was inspiring and disturbing in almost equal quantities and i suspect we're all just computing and digesting what some of what you've been sharing with us i think we should have the lights up because we've got about 20 25 minutes for for questions and conversation with john it's a rare privilege so um uh let me see in this beautiful red glow that i've been given um uh okay i'm going to take a first question in the orange shirt just there fourth row back uh yes just there yeah i can hear you fine that was i can't see that so i'm doing that that was absolutely amazing um the question i really wanted to ask was relating to your description of balance and equity um because it seems to me that that has been a major problem especially for the bvc the idea of giving equal weight to truth and let's put it this way things that aren't exactly the truth or might well be absolutely outright lies and do you think that for that it's caused a lack of faith and trust in the bbc because that's how i have felt i have felt that i can't trust them as much anymore especially over some of the treatment of say a particular individual that was in control of his party at the time and the kind of press he got and there's a difference as well i think would you agree there is a difference between the the newspapers and the the um uh television journalism etc yeah um so thank you very much and it's a really big and important question i mean the last bit first i think that yeah of course the newspapers are totally different i and but i think that newspapers it's easier i mean some of them blur the lines of course but i think you know you've got the comment pages when on television you get somebody who is just outright giving their own point of view and how do you know when it's become news i'm watching the telly this bloke told me it was the case so it must be true um i think it's very difficult to to go between comment and journalistic reporting impartial reporting um i i don't like the idea of false balance i you know i kind of remember during the you know the bosnia war going back a few years and that you know it was just like oh there's a symmetry of guilt they're all as bad at each other i mean it's just lazy and i think that the senior journalists not you don't want every journalist making a judgment because i think that then it stops to be reporting but i think it is my job to say well this isn't true and i think that if you if you are convinced of something and you've seen the fact you don't say he says she says well let's let's see what happens in as it we go along you've got to say this isn't right and i think that maybe there have been issues that broadcasters have ducked when they shouldn't have ducked and i but i but the corrective to what i would say and and you know i i i think the bbc is still a fantastic organisation and i and i'm not going to be one of those who leaves the organisation and a taxi because i think it's wonderful i think that there that as we have become more polarised unless we hear the view that we want to hear about you know you think boris johnson has done something terrible well i want to hear the bbc tell me it's something terrible or you want to you believe boris johnson has done something fantastic i want to hear the bbc tell me it's something fantastic um and i think that we kind of we now get impatient and i was trying to argue that about you know we we become intolerant unless we hear what we want to hear and i think that's worrying thank you um more questions and i should say if you're watching um at home or online you can also put questions in the chat where i will try and pick up one or two um yes i want to make sure i don't miss any at the back but yes hand up there and then i'll come to you sir thank you thank you so much for such an interesting talk i was wondering um without necessarily giving away your political leanings um what is your news diet i mean do you watch breaking news do you follow news online or do you stick to radio bulletins and newspapers oh god it's it's i mean i kind of read any old rubbish um i mean i i i'm you know i'll be honest i'm not on the far furthest reaches of one america news network and newsmax um but i but when i was living in america i watched everything because it was important and actually i would i would i would i'd watch ms mbc which is the most let's say the most liberal i think oh god i can't bear this and then i'd go to fox news and shawnt how to do it i can't bear this either and then you kind of think i've got nowhere to go and that's a really bad thing because i think that people just didn't expose themselves to anything that didn't confirm their own bias so i read a lot of newspapers um my wife who's here this evening would spend i would confirm that i spent far too much time on twitter um and yeah guilty and uh but i tried to read as much as i can from different because i think it's important that we get diffuse viewpoints uh second row down here i think and then more hands up please thank you john my name's glenn tarman i work for a fact checking charity called full fact good for you um thank you i wanted to just speak about um the rules you spoke a lot about media practice and expectations of how the media operates you spoke about the online safety bill unfortunately the bill that mp's are just about to look at will allow misinformation at huge scale we're deeply worried about it tomorrow we're publishing a letter with francis hargan uh to the prime minister because charities won't be allowed access to the data of what's really happening on these problems on these platforms we think children's charities and others should know it shouldn't still be a secret so there are problems there it isn't looking as good as it should be and part of the objection is the free speech advocates i mean we're for freedom expression we think the good information should be available to people but they are scared of regulating they don't want to be seen to be regulating what would stop bad information circulating so i just wondered if you had any views on what more rules could be in place we've seen in parliament ministers are supposed to correct false claims prime ministers made claims repeatedly and no he's not held account to actually correct the record off-com they've got rules for news impartiality and so forth but that's based on a law 20 years ago there's a whole tv stations called something news right now that don't have to fulfil those obligations so it seems like the rules aren't keeping up as well as the practice so i just wondered if you saw anything that yeah so i don't i've been back in the uk six months i don't want to start going into the zeta of legislative policy in britain about what needs to be done because i think i'll be out of my depth pretty quickly um it's undoubtedly true that the social media companies have grown at a rate that policy and law has not been able to keep pace with and i think and i think with ai we're going to confront that as well over data collection and what it means and and you know you look at some of what is being done in the field of artificial intelligence and you realise that it could become you know it could be a great force for good but it could also be used by bad actors and there is no regulatory framework it seems to me that's in place to deal with any of that i think that there are there are rules that are there but are not being applied as well as they could be and you know just as i've called for muscular impartiality in in in that lecture i think that there should be kind of that you know governments around the world need to be a bit more muscular about some of these things but i think that you know you sometimes think well is this are they being muscular because they are dealing with the wrong of misinformation or is it because they feel that you know that the government is not being very nice to them and the social media companies have got enormous power and it's you know there is there is i i kind of salute anyone who's trying to deal with it now um where the nadion doris has got everything absolutely right i'll leave that hanging thank you um i'll come back to the room in a moment but i think maybe let's take an online question polly this is a question from tim mountford uh john mentioned gable gatehouses excellent podcast the coming storm listening to that series it struck me that the elephant in the room that gatehouse avoids explicitly calling out is a resurgence of supernaturalist religious explanations for human events is religious opinion the last to booth and otherwise secular news journalism won't touch for a fear or offense that's interesting i think that i mean one of the interesting things about you know my job in america is that here you have a country where there is a strict separation between uh church and state yet no politician could get elected without discussing their relationship with god in the iowa caucuses um and and they do and they go to bible study groups to show how much they've studied the bible and you know can you imagine i was i mean just let's leave can you imagine boris johnson doing you know his relationship with the bible as part of his campaign in hillington i'm struggling somewhat um but but i mean even any other political leader i mean blair was very religious but he never wanted to you know discuss god um you know that's the camel famously saying we don't do god um i think that is something that is a very big difference between the us and the uk which was one of the things that fascinated me you know where i lived in georgetown there are about 21 churches within 400 meters of where we lived and god is big business in in america um and you know an awful lot more people much higher percentage than in the uk would describe themselves as religious compared to here thank you um polly will come back maybe with another let me know but let's have some more hands up in the room and um well let's first go to the row behind yes just there second row thank you uh peter gordon i'm um trusty the voice assistant reviewer which is a charity which is promoting a public service broadcasting after the tragedy so anyway if anyone wants to give us any money feel free our question is um um you mentioned a couple of things um do you think the problem in the us started like with media deregulation in 1987 or whether um social media is more to do with it and really on that how do you actually solve the problem do you think the problem can be solved or is it a genius after the bottle in other words if social media changed algorithms would that help will people simply go and get sources which which reinforce their beliefs if you change the you know if facebook changed their uh their algorithm become this so so so so you go elsewhere it's other words the problem was to exist i mean great questions i think that um it's not i i really don't want my speech to be a council of despair i want it to be hopeful because i genuinely think that you know if if people could get back to some decent reporting that there is a sense of trust that the people you are hearing from are not kind of all evil venal people um that we can have a shared truth again um then you know we can get back to a more regular dialogue and i and i would love to think that america frightened itself on january the sixth uh last year i'm not sure it did and that worries me but i kind of think that there is a very interesting to see what will happen because i think that there are arguments that you know donald trump is still a hugely influential figure and he has not moved on from the election was stolen and that anyone who says otherwise i think there is a bit of a peeling away from that and certainly among the republican leadership there is a feeling that okay we've done that now joe biden has been the president can we talk about what america looks like after 2024 and that's the way we'll win an election so i think it's possible that some of it comes back um and i think that the social media companies you know that look they are there to provide a return for their shareholders that's their principal thing and they know that the algorithms that pump more and more weird and wacky stuff into people's timelines is what is going to get keep people looking for longer um at their output and so i kind of think that but i think there is a recognition as well that among the social media companies that the status quo is not good enough and i said you know there are big efforts being made i know to pull down fake videos from people i know in that industry they they are taking it incredibly seriously is it an uphill battle yes is there a long way to go yes do i think it's hopeless no thank you um uh more hands up i'm up this row and just four rows from the back let's take hand up there hi john uh mark shanahan from redding university i'm feeling suitably educated informed and entertained who have ever used a slogan like that who knows quick question should donald trump be given a second chance on twitter can be elon musk's advisor here yeah um well he said he doesn't want to go on twitter that's was almost that i kind of felt myself doing that answer and thinking i'm a politician now i'm just completely that's a very important point but let me ask a complete answer to a completely different question um i think that there are you have to accept there i mean look the danger has gone now the the election has been certified and joe biden is in the white house but it was a pretty hairy moment and you've got to say what price american democracy what price this you know the shining city on the hill as america likes to describe itself as this sort of you know the kind of filament of democracy in a written constitution and all the rest of it um i think that let me put it another way i'll answer a different question like politicians do and yeah should the people who abused the england players who missed the penalties be allowed to just express what they want to without sanction and free to go their own way i kind of think that's an abusive free speech and i think that there is you are encouraging hate and you're encouraging falsehood and i think there have to be some parameters now the thing that um erich schmidt said to me the the former ceo google was you know look if we just didn't amplify this stuff then you know it would be there but it wouldn't get the same number of clicks and likes and otherwise and there are ways that you can fix it like that so you know you have at real donald trump back on twitter but you don't have it getting quite the prominence uh that it did i'm not sure i've quite answered your question because i don't uh i sort of i i i think there are limits to what should happen and if people are undermining democracy and by falsehood then i think that you've got to call that out time for some more questions in the room but we're going to take another one um online first i think that's one slightly linked this is from craig and he says as modern politicians in the uk continued to flaunt tradition does the lack of a british constitution put our free speech more at risk than north americas well i i i i try to argue that i think that actually we're in a better place here than we are there but we can't take anything for granted um i think an unwritten constitution has broadly speaking served this country well and i'm not sure that having a written constitution and the three co-equal branches of government and all the rest of it um and it's a brilliant document the u.s constitution i'm not sure that's what saved america the constitution actually turned out to be very brittle and it kind of almost got to a snapping point and but for the actions of a few good people who just thought that their their primary responsibility towards towards the constitution and not donald trump it could have been a very different story and i'm yeah i'm thinking of the kind of the secretary of state in georgia who donald trump rang up and brown raffensperger who said you know give me another 11780 votes which was the margin that joe biden had beaten him by um you know that is now being under investigation for election interference which would be an imprisonable offence and donald trump is under investigation for that so i don't think that having a written constitution necessarily saves you from bad actors i think it is the kind of the will of the people to stand up for what you believe to be right that is really mattered and politicians behaving responsibly and accepting you know it was clear to me in 2020 that donald trump only believed there could be two possible outcomes to that election one was that he won the other was that it was stolen from him he was never a countenancy defeat and he still can't accept it we've got about five minutes left so i'm keen not to get as many questions as i can in i'm going to take um well one right at the back because they was missed out otherwise and then i wrote three from see this is how democratic the british library is that it does the cheap seats as well thank you hi um i wanted to know what direction do you think the republican party are going to go in uh in 2024 with the then nominee do you think it'll be donald trump again um what type of competition do you think he'll have in the primaries okay i i i will i will shoot that's a great question i will shoot the breeze on it without kind of i i personally i come back to me in two years time when i'm completely wrong i think the high water mark for donald trump has been i think that for various reasons he will end up not standing again i think the people who will stand against him will be very different from the group who fought him in 2016 because then in 2016 the ted cruises and the marco rubios and the jeb bushes had no idea how to deal with donald trump and i think they would do so now but i do think that whoever the republican candidate is will be trumpian because i think that the base of the republican party is still very much there look as things stand if donald trump runs he wins because the support is there but i think that there has been appealing away from Pompeo his secretary of state the governor of florida very interesting guy who's almost outflanking trump in some of the populist measures but is very shrewd and smart much more disciplined than donald trump was so i i think it will be a trumpian person i don't think it will be trump and i think that the republican leadership in the senate they just want this to go away i you know as i said no one believed or very few people believed that the election was stolen but they want they just didn't want donald trump to destroy their careers and it's interesting what's playing out in america at the moment where there's some mixed results where people that donald trump is backing for primaries the extent to which they're winning or not winning will be a kind of important indicator of how much trump still has thank you uh third row um from the front here just if you pop your hand up we'll get the microphone to you in just a second perfect thank you for getting close to the last question now but please go ahead more respect than the phil davies fellow here at the echo centre thank you so much for your talk i strongly agree with you about the need to interview and understand uh try and understand uh people that we disagree with but i wonder what you thought about the argument that in 2016 in the campaign the media gave trump an unfair advantage by giving him so much free air time especially impacting the primary yeah and it and just just imagine for a minute you know you're an academic but you're not a tv producer but you're a tv producer and in the in your gallery you've got a bank of screens and one's got boring old jeb bush and one's got boring old marco rudio and they're all about to give stunt speeches and one's got tow cruise and the other one's got donald trump about to speak there was jeopardy with trump you didn't know what was going to happen next and so you put him on endlessly i think just to say that the media gave him too much attention and that's why he won is to kind of simplify what i happened to think that hillary clinton was an awful candidate and she couldn't explain why she wanted to be president whereas trump would say i'm going to build a wall i'm going to keep muslins out i'm going to renegotiate trade deals and i'm going to treat veterans better and people are okay it was clear and hillary clinton could never answer clearly what the reason was there was then the reopening by the fbi of the email you know all the rest of it so i think the reasons were complex i think donald trump was a better candidate in 2016 and he was more powerful and i don't know there's a play on at the old vic at the moment called 47 have you seen him yeah so it's fantastic but what you realize is you you you're sitting most on the edge of your seat when donald trump is on stage the guy who's playing donald trump and when it's somebody else you when it's biden or or carmel iris you go you know trump was electricity and there was and so yes the media did give him too much free coverage he hardly has spent anything on advertising he was also interestingly i'm sorry i'm getting on i'm wasting time in no no and why i thought it was fascinating particularly in the primaries was that you know you always thought the in american politics it's all about money trump hardly spent any money compared to jeb bush and trump absolutely triumphed jeb bush and i think that you know there was just something about trump and that moment in history that people wanted change and was you know screw everybody else screw conventional politics yeah did he molest women i don't care i mean i didn't pay taxes i don't care he's a non-politician politician and they gave him incredible attitude and i think whether the tv companies have given him a lot of coverage or not i don't think would have affected the outcome i'm going to steal time for one quick fire question if anyone has a final one um where are we yes front row here thank you thank you what if any similarity do you see shepardine donnellchub and bowie john jen thank you harry a quick fire question john to conclude us i think the fascinating thing is that there are there look there are undoubtedly similarities between trump and boris johnson but there are also very big dissil and similarities um and i think that when trump there was a story about boris johnson having left his car outside carries flat when they were getting together and that his car windscreen was just splattered in parking tickets that he'd never paid and it had never probably occurred to boris johnson that he couldn't park on a yellow line and there were rules that applied and he didn't know them i always felt that donnell trump knew that he couldn't park on a double yellow line but did it anyway i think that i think trump was more con i think it's a sort of i mean i'm trying it's a trivial example but i think a serious one i think trump was conscious of what he was doing and i think he did it for darker reasons where if boris well i can just do what i like and say what i like whatever i like and it will be fine and i think that there's um a big difference there and boris is much better red and he's you know and i think that i think the heart boris is a sort of broadly speaking social liberal um and sort of does care a bit about the environment and does care about these things whereas i don't think trump did john thank you i'm afraid the clock is against us and we're going to have to leave it there um and i've been going to ask are you optimistic or pessimistic but i think what i've taken from you i think cautiously cautiously i'm hearing a bit of inspiration that if we hold to certain values yeah just let's not lose sight of those values so let's yeah so i think on that cautiously optimistic note could you please both thank the echo centre and john