News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World, by Alan Rusbridger

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World By Alan Rusbridger Canongate £18.99

‘Who on earth,’ asks Alan Rusbridger in the arresting opening line of his preface, ‘can you believe any more?’

The timing of this faintly despairing enquiry verges on the exquisite. On the day I read the book, Barack Obama was speaking about how ‘you can’t put the genie back in the bottle as to how people get their information … Truth doesn’t even matter … Not having a consistent baseline of facts is the greatest threat to democracy.’

Many more lives will turn on how they answer Rusbridger’s question, as many have already been sacrificed on the altar of tragically misplaced credulity.

Some who trusted Boris Johnson’s cheery defence of hand-shaking during that visit to a Covid-plagued hospital will have died as a result. God knows how many Americans committed suicide by blind faith, by trusting Fox News and Donald Trump, the Nobel laureate in Bleachology, over CNN and the infamous huckster Dr Anthony Fauci.

At the time of writing, the President continues to claim victory in defiance of such pedantries as the vote count. Some 50 million Republican voters apparently share his stated conviction that Ernst Stavro Biden, languidly stroking the white cat in Delaware while his minions fixed Detroit polling machines, stole the Oval Office.

The threat posed by misinformation – to the survival of individuals, democracy and the planet itself – is nothing new. It has whispered at us since social media first began bringing together those we once casually dismissed as Jasper Carrott’s nutter on the bus. The megaphone has amplified the whisper to an eardrum-shattering shriek.

So what in sanity’s name is the answer? Rusbridger, who edited the Guardian for 20 years (and was my boss there for 15), is too smart and nuanced a cookie to offer glib reassurance that there is one.

But nor does he succumb to the defeatism on show during a lunch back in the mid-noughties, when he summarised the future of printed newspapers in the elegant two-word projection ‘We’re fucked’.

What he does, in an engagingly readable and thoughtful A-Z guide from ‘Accuracy’ to ‘Zoomers’, is mingle portraits of serial anti-truth offenders with

mini-tutorials – targeted at young and would-be journalists – on how to establish and present facts.

The greatest offender, that Dalek Supreme of manipulative misinformation, is treated with judicious restraint. Rupert Murdoch, the author acknowledges, has spent hundreds of millions sustaining newspapers (and the careers of countless fine journalists) when no one else would.

But he also dwells on Murdoch’s poisonous influence over various governments, most notoriously Tony Blair’s, and the nakedly deceitful reporting used by those working for the Führer to enable such triumphs as British involvement in Iraq and later Brexit.

Ranting about Murdoch is a futile exercise best devolved to dummies like me. Rusbridger is no dummy and no ranter, though he does drop the odd bucketload on some of our age’s premier buffoons.

That said, James Delingpole’s bespoke take on climate change is of less concern to Rusbridger than what it reveals about declining standards that such supposedly mainstream outlets as the Spectator, Mail and Telegraph have seen fit to publish Delingpole’s articles.

For centuries, the English corruption has been the relationship between politicians and those tax-shy proprietors who deploy their titles as weapons of bribery and blackmail to further their commercial interests.

Rusbridger writes as well and succinctly about the anciens régimes as about the ethical quandaries facing the titans of new media. As both a longserving print editor and the guy who pioneered giving it all away online, he straddles the two worlds.

If some of his more technical stuff reads like an instruction manual for undergrads, they represent the future and will find it useful.

The problem, with respect to his ambition to help shape that future, is that he is preaching to the choir. Almost everyone who reads this book will already broadly share his perspective.

So how do you reach those who remain adamant that climate change is a lefty tax-raising scam, that migrants caused the 2007-8 financial crash, that Boris Johnson has a clue what he’s doing or that President Bonespurs won the recent election BY A LOT?

I guess you could tour the Appalachians, Borat-fashion, giving recitals in the hope of a mass epiphany.

But the folks in the MAGA caps know whom they can believe, and nothing on earth – not even their own dying breaths from COVID – will disabuse them of that.