 I'm Samira Ahmed, I'm a journalist and broadcaster and in fact I present a program called NewsWatch which is all about BBC viewers getting to put their concerns about news coverage to BBC editors. I'm Kurt Barling, I wanted to be a journalist when I was six. I became a journalist for nearly 30 years for the BBC and now I'm a professor of journalism trying to encourage young people to think of this as a trade which is worthy of pursuing. And we've known each other for I think about 30 years. About 30 years. Journalism brought us together. That's one way of looking at it. And it's kept us together. So we're here in the British Library where both of us have been involved in the advisory board pulling together this exhibition Breaking the News and I must say there's something both marvellous and weird about seeing our trade turned into a kind of historical exhibition, the history of news, going back 500 years. One of the things that appealed to me about getting involved in this project is sometimes you need to stand outside of the craft you've been immersed in for decades to actually understand the full context of it and to see it going back 500 years and to think actually there's a link between all the people who've practiced this craft over 500 years and the link is we're trying to tell stories, we're trying to get at the truth. The truth. I think that's what's really interesting because when you take it all the way forward and you know we're sitting near displays about Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, you know the idea of alternative facts, the idea that the more outlets of news there are, the more disputed and the more confusing it becomes, I don't think you and I could have predicted that 30 years ago when the Cold War was raging. We were worried about the propaganda of you know the Soviet bloc. But in our society and in other societies like ours, like the United States, like Germany in post-war in France, we have an expectation of the media, we have an expectation of journalism that actually it will tell us stories which are verified, which are authentic, which tell us something that we can't know ourselves and help enrich our view of the world. Not distort our view of the world but give us a true picture of what the world beyond our familiarity is actually like. It's interesting the displays around the 1930s, you know sort of in the run-up to the Second World War. You know there's an image from the Daily Mirrors archive of the Blitz when St. Paul's was sort of looked threatened by flames and that wasn't allowed to be printed, that certain images which had a kind of uplifting effect only got through. But equally there's the spread of two different coverages of the War of Cable Street when Oswald Mosley's fascists were trying to march through the East End and one is his paper you know insisting that actually you know they did pass and obviously the other side say not. So I'm quite interested in seeing the different versions that were around at the time which perhaps we might have forgotten about and you'll get that all by coming here. Yeah and you'll get that sense that there isn't one size fits all and I'll tell you a funny little story actually. My grandfather worked at the Daily Mail. He was in the print room of the Daily Mail. He was a communist and he used to read The Morning Star, that was his paper of choice. He brought home the Daily Mail and he distributed the Tribune which was the organ of the Labour Party for the Labour Party. That's three different views of the world and that was placed on our breakfast table every morning and so right from a very young age I recognise that the truth is in the eye of the purveyor of that truth if you like and I think this exhibition gives you a flavour of that however behind that there is always that important distinction to be made about how we try and verify the information that we present to the public and of course we're in an age where some people make no attempt to verify what they put in the public, hence we talk about misinformation and fake news and disinformation, but the reality is the people who've been contributing to the exhibits here over those years are broadly speaking people who've been searching for the truth or giving a certain reflection of the truth that they see here. You see for us it's particularly interesting to have an exhibition at the British Library celebrating and exploring the history of news but what do you think about its relevance and why it maybe matters now to come see an exhibition like this? I think it's important that people can see a history of why news making matters, where it's mattered, sometimes it's turned up things which we perhaps feel they didn't tell the story right or it was a bit inappropriate but actually fundamentally news information and sharing news information matters to the quality of the societies we live in. We're living right in the middle of a war between a power which does not want people to have good quality information and access to it and other societies that are wrestling with how do we tell this story in a way which makes sure that we get the kind of resolution that is just and journalism is at the heart of that conversation and journalism matters because without journalism we won't be involved in that conversation it'll be down to the men with tanks and it is nearly always men, it won't be down to the way in which we reflect our anger and anxiety about something which is fundamentally wrong and that again can bring us back to the very beginning it's about truth, truth matters. Truth makes the way in which we engage with the world matter, journalism is a source for truth it doesn't always happen but we hope and we aspire to make it happen and that's why this exhibition is a valuable interjection into today's public debate.