In a dark world, a light is held by those who make it harder for the powerful to lie
In the summer, my friend Jess Search died after a short and vicious illness. She made documentaries, but people always eschewed words such as “producer” or “exec” when describing her, in favour of “powerhouse” and “force of nature”, and that was even before she started dying. Like anyone with a genuinely fun spirit, she also had an incredibly serious mind, and was knee-deep in trying to fix a lot of things, from the climate crisis to corruption, not just by film-making but through a galvanising quality she had. I felt a lot less hopeful about everything after she died, but it was a film she had made that gave me optimism again, if only about one thing.
While We Watched is a documentary about the Indian broadcast journalist Ravish Kumar, and it slotted into a body of her work – in filmmaking and in activism – that defended anyone who makes it harder for the powerful to lie. She was the first person I knew who recognised the danger of Slapp lawsuits, and started trying to build a fund for the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and others like her, who would, inevitably, be chased through the courts by people much richer than themselves. That asymmetry of wealth continues to have a devastating effect on investigative journalism.
The degradation of Indian politics, as told through the Kumar bio-doc, is chilling and chastening. Mainstream
Indian current affairs TV has become a blunt and violent discourse in which coiffed young anchors yell at people for being “anti-nationalist”, and reduce all questions down to the simplest yet least enlightening: do you love the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and if so, do you love him enough? It’s chilling to watch such a quick, confident descent, out of reason into blunt assertion, and it’s chastening because, if you squint, you could be watching GB News or certain members of the Conservative party, with “pseudo liberal elite” in place of “metropolitan”, and “secularati” in place of “wokerati”.
Against that onslaught, Kumar insisted on carrying on with regular journalism – going places, finding things out – with the result that between 2019 and 2021 (the period covered in the film) he was subjected to endless death threats, and his channel, NDTV, was assailed by government action against its founders and impoverished by dwindling ad sales.
It’s not a feelgood film, and it doesn’t have a feelgood codicil: after it was made, the channel’s founders resigned, and Kumar with them. He now has a YouTube channel with nearly 8 million subscribers, so perhaps that tells a hopeful story about the democratisation of the media, although
you’d need some pretty selective analysis if looking to YouTube for optimism about that.
Anyway, that’s not what made me hopeful: rather, it was a moment in one of Kumar’s last shows on NDTV, when he turned to the camera and said, “as long as there is one viewer like you, facts will find a way to survive”.
Since 2016, when the dual electoral shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump heralded a new age of what researchers have called “intense voter hostility” (people motivated primarily by dislike for the other camp), there has been pervasive and well-founded anxiety about disinformation and how it might be impacting democratic outcomes. At the start, this took the form of a generalised sense that the internet could accelerate a lie’s progress around the world, but didn’t seem to have done anything to speed up the truth getting its trousers on. By 2018, people were speculating about and later pinpointing bad-faith actors, who promulgated untruths with the specific intention of derailing election results.
After the bot farms, the algorithms: the Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa won a Nobel prize in 2021 for her careful work showing that anyone with deep enough pockets – in the case of the Philippines, state actors – could warp reality for enough of the population so that critically engaged civic life didn’t stand a chance. If we didn’t sort that out, she warned, some countries would soon have their last stab at free and fair elections.
With none of that resolved, 2023 has brought a fresh worry, AI, which can generate untruth without even realising it’s doing it, disseminate the deliberate lies of others and bundle it all up with accidental moments of accuracy, so that ultimately all information might come to us slightly tainted, slightly camouflaged, until it’s impossible to figure out which way is up.
With each new threat, the prospect of a regulatory solution has looked ever more distant, as tech interests have run rings around legislators and nations have failed to cooperate around this essentially unborderable phenomenon. Besides, there was this human problem right at heart of it: how do you make truth, which is complicated and messy, more interesting than lies, which are bold and designed to be emotionally satisfying? How do you match the exhilaration of anger? Is this just who we are now: voters at the mercy of our “intense hostility”? This, I think, is where the defeatism has crept in to the fake news question – from the sense that our news instincts are actually base.
Ravish Kumar, this ornery, tenacious, brave broadcaster, went straight to that human problem, to dismantle its core principle. Lies, conspiracy theories, bare assertions, histrionics – all these new features of the discourse– aren’t interesting; they’re repetitive and basic. The truth, as slow as it is with its trousers, is more engaging, and is irresistible, as long as there’s one viewer watching.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist