As the Israel-Gaza war boosts concerns about disinformation and misinformation on X, Alan and Lionel speak to Joanna Geary, who used to be Twitter’s Senior Director of Curation. What important checks and filters did Elon Musk strip away when he took over? Plus, author Jane Martinson discusses her new book about the Barclay brothers, two of the most significant UK media owners of recent decades, as the Barclay family seems keen to buy back the Telegraph Media Group.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity
Alan Rusbridger:
This episode has been sponsored by Q5, a global management consultancy that helps companies and public bodies improve their organisational health. If you'd like to find out more about Q5, please visit Q5 Partners, all one word, dot com.
Hello and welcome to Media Confidential, the weekly podcast from Prospect Magazine, all about the fascinating and contested world of media and how it affects you. I'm Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber:
And I'm Lionel Barber. Today how X are dealing with the Israel Gaza War compared to huge news events before Elon Musk's takeover.
Clip
More job cuts At Twitter, thousands of contracted workers at Elon Musk's company were reportedly let go Saturday, many without notice. It comes after Twitter laid off about half of its employees last month.
Rusbridger:
Joanna Geary joins us to discuss what's changed since Musk axed her curation team, and why it really matters.
Barber:
Also today we're joined by Jane Martinson, author of a new book about the Barclay Brothers, two of the most significant UK media owners of recent decades, and now the Barclay family wants the Telegraph Media Group back.
Rusbridger:
As always, Media Confidential brings you expert analysis from inside the industry, talking to key names in global media. So listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Hello, where did we find you this week, Lionel? Last week you were in New York, but I think you've switched time zones.
Barber:
Yes, I'm half-awake in Tokyo where I've been doing interviews for a biography of Masayoshi Son, the owner and founder of SoftBank, the big global media technology group, and that's filled my inbox.
Rusbridger:
I'll bet it does. Well, I've been obviously very preoccupied with the Israel Gaza War, but for light relief, I've been watching the Beckham series. I don't know if you've seen any of that on Netflix, Lionel.
Barber:
I've read little bits about it, but I haven't managed to bend it with Beckham just yet.
Rusbridger:
I was persuaded to by my daughters, otherwise, I think I might have given it a miss. But I have to say it's compelling. It's one of those things where you have a media generated impression of somebody, in this case, David and Victoria, and in this telling of their story, and admittedly they had a lot of editorial control, they emerge as highly likeable and intelligent people, and probably the truth is somewhere halfway in between the absolute denigration that the tabloids have given them over the years and this slightly polished version on Netflix, but it is a great series.
Barber:
I'll look out for it. I'll get the second half.
Don't forget, Media Confidential is on X/Twitter @media conf pod, but now we're going to talk about how that social media platform is dealing with the Israel Gaza conflict.
Rusbridger:
So now we're going to talk to Joanna Geary, who is head of content and audience at Bloomberg in New York. Until a year ago, she was the senior director of curation at Twitter where she worked for nine years. Her job disappeared the day Elon Musk bought the company, immediately dispensing with many teams, including hers and the groups that looked after trust and safety. In a recent piece for Wired Magazine, the Israel Hamas War is drowning X in disinformation. David Gilbert reported that the app was flooded with, "old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen." At a time when open source intelligence researchers would normally be scouring the network for first person accounts from the attacks, they instead had to sift through previously unseen levels of garbage. He wrote, "Rather than being showed verified and fact-checked information, X users were presented with video game footage passed off as footage of a Hamas attack, Images of firework celebrations in Algeria presented as Israeli strikes on Hamas. There were fake pictures of superstar Ronaldo holding the Palestinian flag while a three-year-old video from the Syrian civil war was repurposed to look like it was taken this weekend."
Welcome, Joanna. I should make it clear that you weren't in the trust and safety team and thus not responsible for the day-to-day moderation at Twitter and of course at Bloomberg, you are not working in editorial and we're not expecting you to comment on how your own newsroom handles the conflict. But can you comment more broadly on how Twitter used to see its duty in regard to fake information and how it now seems to handle things today?
Geary:
There are many different ways that the company was approaching thinking about misinformation, and some of that came to my team and I should probably explain a little bit about what curation was before talking about some of the ways we approached our work. Some people would call curation the other side of the coin to trust and safety. So what we did was we were human beings in the loop looking to uplift and make more visible certain types of content where we had people on Twitter wanting that to be the case and our algorithms couldn't really make it happen. So it was sort of a bridge between what people really wanted from Twitter and what Twitter could really deliver with the technology it had at the time.
What did that mean in terms of misinformation? Well, that meant that we were working very hard to establish trustworthy sources, context providing sources, ensuring that when our trend algorithms, for example, went off and spiking on certain issues, that it was clear what those trends were about and giving that context early on and then making sure that at least trusted sources were highly accessible and it wasn't just the most emotive pieces of content that were at the top, it was the content that did the most explaining as well. Why did we do that? Well, there was coordinated efforts across the company to identify areas where Twitter users were saying the product wasn't good enough. The product wasn't good enough to help us to understand what's going on and to avoid seeing difficult content, misinformation, and we would work very closely with our policy teams and the trust and safety teams to identify those and try and figure out what we wanted to do.
And the more common understanding of this is during those difficult events, we would take things down, but it was a two-way street. We would also look to what we could uplift. So we would on areas where we had agreed with the policy team, there was a misinformation issue. We'd be looking to uplift credible information and even actually get credible information out ahead of time when we anticipated that there was going to be lots of misinformation on a platform around a particular issue. We called this pre-bunking as opposed to debunking, which we found from research was actually far more effective in almost inoculating people from going down rabbit holes of misinformation when inevitably highly emotive issues drove people to post misinformation and disinformation on the platform because I think we have to be honest, right?
When we produce these tools to give people the opportunity to have a voice, people are going to use them for whatever they want to use them for. We can't stop the posting of misinformation entirely. We can't remove all misinformation at that scale. So it has to be a combination of efforts in order to try and combat what's going on, and you have to take a position. I think what's maybe missing now is that multi pronged approach to these things. I understand that there is different philosophies and approaches to moderation and to curation and how to look after a platform and how to manage speech on a platform. And if you feel very strongly about removal being censorship or overt promotion being some form of censorship, then you're going to not want to do it, and I think that's kind of the path that X has walked down.
Barber:
So Joanna, I want to go back to Elon Musk's motivation for disbanding these teams and it was a wholesale axing. Was it due to a desire for cost savings? I mean, he'd spent $44 billion for Twitter, which wasn't exactly making a lot of money, or was it actually ideological? Because he does have, as you've suggested, very clear views on the importance of free speech.
Geary:
Think it's difficult for me to get inside Elon's mind.
Barber:
You're not the only one. You're in good company.
Geary:
I was therefore... and I will be honest with you, I did not have conversations with Elon before my team was disbanded. I would've liked to, but he was very busy. So I don't know for certain, but I think the answer, if I was to personally speculate, is kind of both. He's been very public about being incredibly uncomfortable with the way that Twitter was responding to issues such as misinformation and having humans in the loop be the moderators or curators clearly didn't sit very well with him. I understand that to a degree. I personally have a very different opinion on it, but ultimately he did have a lot of money to save as well.
Rusbridger:
It's plain in the last few days that Elon Musk has not only been warning users away from trusting mainstream media on Israel-Palestine, but he's also promoting accounts which are known spreaders of misinformation. You've worked on both sides of the media, you've worked for mainstream media. You might say you are back working for mainstream media now. There's been this sort of love hate relationship between legacy media and social media. When you were at Twitter, how did you think of your responsibility towards mainstream media in the sense of were you there to pick winners and losers? Were you there to make judgements about who was reliable and who wasn't? Was that part of your role in curation?
Geary:
Yeah, this is a really interesting question. Was it theoretically? No. Was it practically? In some regards, yes. So let me explain that a little bit. One of the really interesting changes, there were a number of changes for me moving out of mainstream media into a tech company that took a lot of adjustment. One was that news and the provision of news was not central to everyone's point of view of why a product would exist. That was really hard for me because I was used to working in newsrooms and everything was about editorial. Everything was about thinking about the content that we were producing and the importance of the content that we were producing, and that just really wasn't the culture of a tech company. A tech company, especially a massive social platform like Twitter, is thinking about many, many more types of use cases, many more types of users and has a much more expansive sense of how information is being used on its platform. And so it changed how I thought about things and the centrality of news and replaced it with the centrality of the people who were using the platform and what they were doing and why they were doing it and how news fitted into that.
So I guess I had to switch from thinking news company first to user first and built a lot more empathy with the people who were using the platform. I wasn't there thinking I must advocate for specific news companies, but I was there thinking I must advocate for these people and what they're trying to do and how they understand what they're looking at, and within that came a number of different news principles that were really important. There are policies in place about what is and isn't okay to place on the platform, what to take off, but they are less comfortable with saying what is okay and what they want to promote and what type of platform they want to be in the world, which is an editorial exercise in many respects. And so in order for my team to do its work, we actually had to create that for ourselves.
So we produced what was called the, and I launched what was called the editorial standards, well, the curatorial standards team, where we would start to look at our approach towards curation and try and make it as rigorous and transparent as possible. And actually, a lot of those standards are still available online today. They still seem to exist on X's website. So if you want to see them, you can. So in that regard, we were starting to bring editorial values into the work we were doing. Was it fully editorial? I would argue no. We certainly weren't looking to commission or try and write our own content or have our own specific point of view in that regard. But we did have to take point of view on reliability and trustworthiness, which was a combination of the editorial values of an organisation and really more strongly the way that customers thought about them as well and whether they were trusted.
Barber:
So Joanna, I've read that Musk having sacked most of the moderators, is now promoting a tool called Community Notes, which is a crowdsourced fact checking tool. My question is does it work and more generally, is artificial intelligence yet up to the task of moderation at scale?
Geary:
So those are two very different questions, Lionel. Let me take them one at a time. In terms of what was originally called Birdwatch, and it's now called Community Notes. This has been a project that has been in development for a very long time and I give kudos to the product manager who started it. It came up very quickly against a lot of criticism and a lot of people who were saying there are a lot of ways that this won't work. There were more ways that people would say that this wouldn't work than it would work, and he persisted with it. And I think what has been produced is really interesting, especially for content that's very, very visible. The way that it allows for people to be able to flag where there's additional sourcing and external sourcing that people should be looking at, I think is really valuable.
I think that there's still challenges with it. I think it is, as I talked about before, when you are trying to combat misinformation, there's not a silver bullet. There's a hundred different things that you're going to have to do and keep doing as technology and bad actors evolve what they do. So it's useful. Some of the things that I think are difficult for it are one speed. There is some sort of deliberation that has to go on behind the scenes before one of these comments appears, and that sometimes takes so much time that really the full extent of how the tweet has travelled has already happened or the most impact it's going to have has already happened long before that happens.
And secondly, it is a very community driven product, which I think the only equivalent would be something like a Wikipedia or Wikipedia editors. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to go into building the community to do that sort of work. I think that's something that's going to take Twitter some time to figure out or X some time to figure out. But don't knock it. This is a really, really hard problem. I think Community Notes was a really interesting solution that most people would've rejected out of hand and is getting some results.
The AI side of things. Do we think AI is going to be able to help with moderation? Yes. Yes, it already is. There's already artificial intelligence that is being used to identify certain types of content, whether it's toxic content or misinformation already on the platform. So before I left Twitter, we were already doing that sort of work, so it does help. I think Facebook talks about Few-Shot Learning, which is a model that they use that has kind of a general understanding of different sorts of topics, and it means that you can train it with fewer examples of misinformation so it can get working faster. So these are all contributing to being able to do moderation.
I come from a very specific point of view on this. It's an arms race. If we only think of things as someone posts misinformation then someone takes it down, we are going to continue to be in this arms race where the same technology that we are using to power an ability to take things down is absolutely being used to make sure more things go up. Right? So I don't think that necessarily it's, again, there is no silver bullet. Tech companies are and should be investing in this stuff, but with a full recognition that this doesn't solve the problem. The problem does not end, and I think we all need to be cognizant of that.
Rusbridger:
Joanna, you spent nearly 10 years of your life trying to build Twitter into what we might call a somewhat reliable source of news. How would you describe it now?
Geary:
I don't know if I can describe it now because I don't use it quite as much. Obviously I don't have as much insight into the missions and the things that are driving people on the inside. What I would describe is my own personal experience and what I took away from spending nine years of my life working really hard on really hard problems that you were just chipping away at, and that is that there are a lot of smart, good people who are at the company. It's not the narrative that's generally talked about. There's a lot of talk about spoiled engineers and people being parented by the business, but if you look back over the course of Twitter, it went through cycles and more often than not, it was generally a very stressful place to work. There was usually some crisis unfolding.
You would usually be asked when you're out and about, why are you working for this company? Why is it doing the things it's doing? How can you be responsible for these sorts of things? It was a difficult place to work in that regard. And so it always attracted people who were very mission-driven and who wanted to make things better, who wanted to correct the underlying principles that sometimes encouraged this sort of behaviour. And we're all very busy doing that, and we didn't notice that it wouldn't matter if somebody else around the company that didn't think that those were important. And I think that's the thing that's really stuck with me is it didn't... ultimately you can push a button and change and undo all of that work very quickly.
Barber:
So briefly, I mean, do you expect more defections by users to Threads or Mastodon or Blue Sky and when do you get to a tipping point?
Geary:
I don't know. I don't know, Lionel. This is-
Barber:
Joanna, don't be that brief.
Geary:
Okay, I'll try. I'll try. I think it's interesting, right? Because so many of us, and very much me, built our careers on the platform. Our network is on the platform. We connect to people on the platform. We connect to the world on the platform. It is really, really hard to undo that which is a decades long process of how we connected it. And I'm not entirely sure that some of the other platforms want that. So I think Threads isn't necessarily setting itself up to just port over that sort of behaviour, that sort of network. So I think that is a different thing. I think some of the other federalized platforms have a little bit of a way to go and the user experience of those is going to take some time to develop. And so I think it's going to be a long time, perhaps never, that something is going to have a place in the world that Twitter and X have or had.
Rusbridger:
Joanna, thanks so much for joining us, and I hope your life at Bloomberg is less stressful.
Geary:
I'm surrounded by amazing people verifying content. It's wonderful.
Barber:
Well, I found that fascinating, Alan, partly because Joanna still clearly caress about getting it right and was passionate about what she was doing at then Twitter. And of course, it matters because even if the number of users may have fallen off a bit, Twitter still is a huge source of information, news and views. And on something like Israel Palestine, I mean I'm still going there to find out stuff. The platform's changed, but it's still very important.
Rusbridger:
I couldn't agree more. And I'm dismayed to see Elon Musk who has, I mean squillions of followers and huge influence. He's probably the most influential media owner in the world nowadays, actively pushing people away from mainstream media. I mean, we can all have our beefs about mainstream media and its reliability, but to be deliberately pushing people towards sites pumping out fake news at a time when this conflict is on a knife edge, seems to me the height of irresponsibility.
Barber:
This is Media Confidential and in a moment we'll hear about a new in-depth book about the secretive Barclay brothers, longtime owners of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and Spectator, until the summer.
Ellen Halliday:
Prospect Magazine not only brings you Media Confidential, but also the Prospect podcast presented by me, Ellen Halliday and some of my wonderful colleagues. In each weekly episode, we have an in-depth interview with one of our writers to shed more light on their recent reporting for Prospect Magazinea nd to give you insight into why their story matters. Today I'm joined by Nicola Cutcher, an award-winning investigative journalist. We're talking about the countryside and the places that we often think of as our green and pleasant lands.
Clip
I was just shocked when I found out that National Parks generally are more nature depleted from their surroundings.
Ellen Halliday:
To hear this episode and many more, including our recent exclusive with the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, follow and subscribe to the Prospect Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Rusbridger:
This is Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber. And next we're joined by the journalist and academic Jane Martinson, who has written a book called You May Never See Us again. I'm sure she'll tell us why it's called that, about the Barclay Brothers, Frederick and the late David Barclay. Frederick, who's about to be 89 in a couple of weeks has been in the news for three reasons, I think. One, he's involved in a very prolonged divorce dispute with his ex-wife Hiroko. The second is that he is or has lost control of the Telegraph titles, which he and his brother bought. And there's a forced sale by Lloyd's Bank, which we will hear a bit more about in a minute. And the third is that he and his brother were more or less unknown visually, if I can put it like that. There was only one known picture of them in existence until this court case in which we suddenly learned that Frederick has a penchant for extraordinarily bright red trousers that he was wearing to court.
So that's why he's in the news. And of course, because Jane has written this book. Jane, welcome to Media Confidential.
Jane Martinson:
Thank you for having me.
Rusbridger:
Lionel, do you want to kick off?
Barber:
Jane, I love the book.
Martinson:
Oh, thank you.
Barber:
You portrayed these twins, these identical twins as publicity-shy and seriously litigious. So how difficult was it to get people to talk about them?
Martinson:
Unbelievably... well, no, it was really difficult. More difficult than I think I expected until I spent a lot of time doing it. And then I think because they have, it's such an interesting story and it's an incredible story and it's surprising given how high profile they were as media owners amongst other things, how little known it was. I mean, even the good things. And I think there were people that knew them and liked them and wanted to talk. And then obviously people that had more negative feelings about them.
Rusbridger:
Were you any clearer about why they wanted to own the Telegraph? I mean, people usually want to own newspapers because they want to make money or they want to make friends, they want to influence people, they want political influence. But the Barclay Brothers seemed to be not of that mould. There are easier ways to make money, and they were virtually recluses. So what was it that made them media moguls in the first place?
Martinson:
Well, the chapter in the book which deals with the Telegraph and their media ownership is called Why then Do You Want to Own a Newspaper? And I think all of those things though I do think sort of having some influence as being owners of newspapers, but I think genuinely they loved newspapers. They've read lots of newspapers every day. They would meet in coffee shops in Monaco or in the Ritz or in the office, they would always get together. And when you talk to some of their close or people that worked with them in the early days, they would say they would test them and say, "So what do you think about this?" And they would really want to know opinions about things and were very engaged in the news. And I think that seems to be really genuine an interest.
David in particular with some of the early newspapers he bought in the '90s, the Scotsman for example, he would send faxes pretty sort of regular faxes with thoughts about the world, and he would send them and they would be marked confidential. So I think they were really engaged in newspapers. But I also think it gives you power and influence in a way that many other things that make a lot more money do not.
Barber:
We do know that both the Barclay twins admired Margaret Thatcher enormously, but in the Leveson Inquiry, they protested that they didn't really deal with politicians either Tories or Labour. What did you actually learn about their contacts and do you think that they did themselves exercise influence or was it more the paper and the editor?
Martinson:
I think it's a really good question, and I think as with so much about their lives, but also so much about influence in the media and newspapers, it's a sort of world of shadows and nudges and mist as opposed to direct orders. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, they weren't going in the back door of Number 10 all the time. They did, however, invite people to lunch at the Ritz. I think it's also fair to say that they were very much pretty withdrawn from the time they bought the Telegraph. But then all the senior politicians were invited to go to, most of the senior ones in government were invited to go to Brecqhou. George Osborne said recently that he had gone to Brecqhou the island, their own private island, which you couldn't get onto unless you were invited. So they definitely liked talking to people of great influence.
I mean, Margaret Thatcher was different in a way because they had very close relations with her. Not only, I mean, they provided the home when she left Number 10, when she needed somewhere that was big enough for her office and living in the wilds of Dulwich in South London, she felt that was too far given the feelings at the time about her premiership. So they helped or facilitated her moving into Chester Square in Mayfair. And then of course famously, they provided a suite for her when she was very ill at the end of her life. Again, something that actually people, you talk to many sort of senior conservative politicians, sort of that loyalty to her, they hold dear. So I do think that was different. But yes, I think the connection to very senior government ministers began quite early on.
Rusbridger:
I mean, their influence was a bit more direct, wasn't it, Jane? I mean, on your chapter Power to the People you detailed the multiple notes from Aidan Barclay to people in power in Number 10. And then you have a handwritten letter from Murdoch MacClennan who was the CEO of the Telegraph Group saying this to David Cameron, "We desperately want there to be a conservative government. We'll do all we can to bring that about and to give you great support for the gruelling months ahead. We're no fair weather friends. We'll be there for you too when you're in Downing Street." So these were the commercial people in the Telegraph contacting politicians to offer unwavering support.
Martinson:
Yes. I took Lionel's question too literally to talk about just the twins, David and Frederick, because the Leveson Inquiry also provided the evidence. We wouldn't know that Alan, none of this is made public. Until then, The Leveson Inquiry where all the notes between Aidan Barclay, obviously Sir David's eldest son, and Cameron and senior members of cabinet. There were dinners, there were texts, Murdoch MacClennan the letter about we are very keen to provide all the support we can, but we do have written evidence of that from the inquiry and that sort of friendship, making sure that newspaper ownership allows you to have prime ministers and senior members of government on speed dial. I mean, they were texts, they were exchanges that weren't just done through official channels. And of course, we are forgetting Boris Johnson, sorry. Boris Johnson who obviously... Thatcher, obviously there was the Cameron text and then Boris Johnson, who worked for them for a very long time and was a long time very well paid columnist at The Telegraph just before he became Prime Minister himself.
Lionel Barber:
I want to come back to the problem of covering the Barclays, and that would include Howard and Aidan, as you say, the sons who are running the business, because they were seriously litigious. They would threaten journalists who wanted to criticise them. I remember getting a call from Aidan myself, at the Financial Times when he found a reporter was doing a survey on the Channel Islands, and he actually asked me to delay publication of that special report because there was a referendum going on Brecqhou constitutional thing, and he felt reporting wouldn't help that cause. So I had to slightly disabuse him there. But what do you think they were trying to hide? Was it the fact that actually the twins were walking bankrupts for a decade?
Martinson:
I hate to say but I think it's almost more psychological than that. I think there was a lot of things that they didn't want made public. One of the early chapters involves the Crown agents, and they've never talked about that. And the untold questions that suggest that they never paid back the debt that was effectively sort of, they were bailed out. Everyone involved in that terrible 1970s scandal, the sort of financial scandal, but they didn't pay back that money and there was something very odd there that they've never answered those questions. And I think it was almost a code. I mean, I know a code of [inaudible 00:33:30] is used possibly too much nowadays, but there was this code of never speaking about it.
Barber:
But Jane, they got a very generous loan from the Bank of Scotland HBOS, to help them buy the telegraph, which they then couldn't pay back. Do you think that they were litigious because they didn't want the extent of the debt or whether they were managing to repay it or what was the issue?
Martinson:
I think the fact that they couldn't repay it, and I mean Lionel, the amount of time and it exploded. I mean, it went up to 1.6 billion at one point. And that Lloyd's, who took over the Bank of Scotland as you know, spent all those years saying to them the actual capital has not been repaid. And of course, because they took complexity. So the two reasons this is an untold story, I think they never talked about it and also incredibly litigious, but also unbelievably complex. A very, very complex-
Barber:
To avoid tax.
Martinson:
To avoid tax. I ended up thinking because of the bugging case, for example, that between each other, the family members, it wasn't entirely clear who knew what. It was incredibly complex for whatever reason. So that sort of alone meant that it was actually very hard to find out what was going on. To me, the moment though when you realised a bank, because there are lots of banks who have lent them money, but the biggest one obviously Bank of Scotland enabled them to build this huge empire from the turn of the century. Even the bank, the senior executives, couldn't actually get this money back easily suggests that something was happening. It doesn't make sense as you say. The money's obviously gone. Has it been moved around? There's an idea that obviously there's so many offshore accounts. I counted when I first started investigating this 197 at one point in all different jurisdictions, not just the BVI, but almost every offshore-
Barber:
Only 197?
Martinson:
...tax haven. Only 197. And of course, once it goes offshore, you can't chase it or really find out what's going on, you don't know what's happened to it. So journalists obviously that's very frustrating for journalists who, as we also know, there's been a crisis in the media. There aren't so many journalists anymore. We are under more time pressure to actually try to find that. That's a real deterrent. But then I realised only earlier this year that the bank themselves were finding it difficult to actually discover. And the idea that you can make sure that it's difficult to find is incredible really. A lack of transparency in this country. And also, I mean, one thing I must say that it's not just an untold story about them, and I find the sort of family and what they did fascinating, but I've sort of felt this is a story of modern Britain, isn't it? This is sort of post-War Britain, how we allowed this sort of what happened with property and people made money, but then they were able to use the system in a way that we had this sort of implosion of one of what should have been the most successful British businessmen that this country produced.
Rusbridger:
As media owners, at least in the early years of owning the Telegraph titles and the Scotsman, they got through multiple editors. There were numerous purges of journalists. I think it's fair to say they got to the digital game quite late. In fairness of them that the Telegraph titles are now making a reasonable profit. What in your mind was the overall verdict on their tenure?
Martinson:
Well, I think particularly in those early days, they had six editors in 81 years before the Barclays took over, and then there were six in the next 11 years. I mean, it was sort of crazy, I think since 2014, which is so that the editor more or less stayed the same. But also we now realise that the brothers themselves had this big bust up, and I think attention may have been passed elsewhere. I think the Telegraph definitely changed. I think there were sort of some scandalous things that happened at HSBC, we've talked about in the past, the sort of commercial pressures that were brought to bear.
Rusbridger:
That was the period when the chief political commentator, Peter Oborne walked out effectively saying this was a corrupt newspaper because the commercial department was effectively running the editorial department.
Jane Martinson:
Yeah, and he said advertising had taken over editorial. On the other hand, they also during their tenure had great stories. So MPs expenses was the time when they owned that paper. The Telegraph has still broken great stories under their, I mean, it's nearly 20 years. I think that pressure to keep the money coming in, the profits, which always seemed to be linked perhaps to debt repayment or making sure that there were sorts of covenants made. We didn't know if it was to do with bonus payments to the executives that were having to manage them. And they are renowned for having a tiny team of very loyal executives who are absolutely sort of the ones who carry out the business and carry the can perhaps. Whether that's Murdoch McClellan, Andrew Neil, of course, is still chairman of Spectator group, a tiny Handful who worked for them for a very long time.
Rusbridger:
So that was, Jane Martinson in her book is called, You May Never See Us Again. We never got from her why she called it that. But it is a fascinating story and I think it is a story that does matter. I still think it's a story that is half told. Jane was very discreet about the litigious nature of the people that she was writing about. But as we heard, we got a glimpse into the back scene, wheeler dealer-ing in politics between the commercial side and the owners of The Telegraph and the intersection between politics and political influence and those news titles. And I think that's why it's important that these kind of books are written much as the Barclay Brothers have done their best throughout their lives to deter and sue journalists who have tried to get anywhere near them.
Barber:
I was looking at this book from a slightly different angle, the business journalism angle, where you can see that Jane has done an extremely good job in explaining the favourable lending arrangements that the Barclay brothers had from the outset, from when they went into property dealing in the boom of the 1970s and then got lent a lot of money by HBOS to buy the Telegraph. The other important point, of course, is that they were very good at avoiding paying tax, using their base in the Channel Islands. And so it's a rather interesting story in the end about estate planning. One of the twins was cut out, they had a big falling out like ferrets in a sack, and in the end the whole thing was exposed, but it took an awful long time.
Rusbridger:
You've edited the Financial Times. The clue is in the name there. I'm interested Lionel, how common a problem was it for your journalists, your investigative journalists, to write about companies like the Barclay Brothers nowadays? I mean, I know there were forensic accountants who couldn't make any sense of the Barclay Brothers' companies because so much of it was hidden. But that must be a formidable problem for investigative journalists trying to do this kind of work.
Lionel Barber:
Well frankly, Alan, I was kicking myself somewhat. Why didn't we do a better job? I think the main reason, of course, is that these were private companies, so to get into the complex financing arrangements the offshore comes as it's extremely difficult. Unless you can get primary source material like you did with the other consortium through the Panama Papers, it's extremely difficult. We did do some good work, but we, along with many others, did not get to the bottom of the Barclay Brothers' financing difficulties.
Rusbridger:
And we should say that we'll play the second part of that interview, which deals with the sale of the Telegraph titles and who's likely to be the next owner, in another podcast.
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Barber:
And now there is an exclusive subscription offer for our podcast listeners. Today you can get an annual Prospect subscription for as little as £49, which gives you digital access to all the magazine's, best long reads, commentary and cultural criticism. And this is the bonus, while stocks last you'll also get a free signed copy of Breaking News. That's Alan's excellent book about the remaking of journalism and why it matters. The book alone is worth £10.99, so it seems like a snip. Sign up now at subscribe.Prospectmagazine.co.uk/media confidential.
Rusbridger:
If you've got any questions for us about the media, how it works, whether it should be regulated differently, who controls what you see and hear, and who might grab that control in the future, then please do email them to Media Confidential, all one word at prospectmagazine.co.uk. That's mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk, and we'll do our best to answer a few of them in a special episode in the future.
Barber:
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Danny Garlick.
Rusbridger:
Remember to listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts with new episodes every Thursday.
Barber:
And we're on Twitter/X too @MediaConfPod.
Rusbridger:
It's goodbye from London.
Barber:
And goodbye from Tokyo.
