RUSBRIDGER: Well, I only really know about America.
I worked for six months in the Scripps-Howard office in Washington, and I thought that even in a sort of medium-size chain of family-owned newspapers, there was a much greater seriousness about the nature of the calling. I think generally, among American journalists I’ve met, they think much more deeply about ethical issues. That can be a drawback. It can mean that they can be sort of pompous and self-important. But in a way I would rather have that than a sort of culture in which ethics are for wimps, and if you try to do something like [what The Guardian is doing] you get sneered at because you’re being prissy. I think the culture of British journalists is such that they don’t begin to think about the big issues deeply enough.
Well, a lot of it is to do with competition. It’s easier to be high-minded if you’ve got a single-city monopoly [as many big papers in America do] than if you’ve got 13 papers or whatever it is published a day. The papers in this country have traditionally been politically partisan, which makes for a much more combative, polemical style of press–which can be a great strength. It gives the press here a robustness and irreverence that perhaps some of the American papers don’t have.
Oh, yes. Possibly too much so. This government in particular. Those [recently leaked internal memos written by Prime Minister Tony Blair] showed that they’re famously much more interested in what [tabloids like] the Daily Mail or The Sun say than what The Guardian says. You get the feeling of a government that is living in fear and seeking tabloid headlines, and I think that’s bad government. But I can see it’s not pleasant being kicked to death by the British press every day.
I know, but you see, that’s why I think they blew it. A lot of that, I think, is to do with the language of politics. I think they had this wonderful opportunity to say, “We’ve inherited this terrible mess, it’s going to take us a hell of a long time to clear up, it’s going to need more money and it’s going to be difficult, and we’re not going to tell you that it’s mended when it’s not.”
I think this begins with Mrs. Thatcher and The Sun. All previous Tory prime ministers believed that the Telegraph and The Times were the papers they spoke through. Mrs. Thatcher comes in [in 1979], does the math and says The Sun is obviously the most important paper in this country. It’s an incredibly potent combination of populist politics and populist newspapers. [Rupert Murdoch’s] Sun has 11 million readers; one in two adults sees a copy of The Sun every day. In a small country like Britain, when you have the leaders and papers collaborating, it’s quite difficult to ignore the debates and the stories that they put forward.
I suppose so. Given what appeared to be a commitment to freedom of information, you kind of expected that a Labour government would handle things a bit better. But there’s been a big breakdown. You’ve got these highly controlled appearances by ministers, speaking from a script prepared by [Labour Party spin doctors]. They go on and they stick to the three points that they’ve been sanctioned to say. It sounds phony, plastic, and I think the public have now got to the stage where they just don’t believe this stuff. They don’t believe all this double and triple accounting, and this is where this revulsion against spin comes from. Spin has become to this government what sleaze had become to the last government [of Conservative Prime Minister John Major].
