Vice and BuzzFeed were once at the forefront of the digital media revolution—Vice alone was once valued at nearly double the New York Times! But now, both firms have shut their news operations, Vice has closed its flagship site, and further cuts to staff numbers are expected. BuzzFeed’s former UK editor Janine Gibson, now weekend editor of the Financial Times, analyses why these millennial media giants became so troubled.
Plus, writer Peter Pomerantsev chats about a forgotten master of Second World War propaganda and discusses contemporary information manipulation, touching on Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, Ukraine and Donald Trump.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity:
Alan Rusbridger:
Hello, and welcome to Media Confidential, Prospect Magazine’s weekly dive beyond the clickbait to analyse what’s really happening in the fascinating world of media. I am Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber:
And I’m Lionel Barber. On this episode, what accounts for the demise of millennial media’s big beasts, Vice and BuzzFeed?
[News clip]:
Vice’s CEO said the company will no longer be publishing content to its vice.com website. The changes come less than a year after Vice filed for bankruptcy and was then sold for $350 million to a group of lenders.
Alan:
Vice alone was once valued at nearly double the New York Times, but now it’s to lay off hundreds of staffers amid big changes to its business model. BuzzFeed, already a shadow of its former self, is cutting 16% of its remaining workforce.
Lionel:
We talked to BuzzFeed’s former UK editor Janine Gibson, now at the Financial Times, about the troubles of Vice and BuzzFeed.
Alan:
Lionel chats to the writer and disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev about a forgotten master of World War II propaganda and the contemporary resonances of Sefton Delmer’s story touching on Putin, Navalny, Ukraine, and Trump.
Lionel:
Listen and follow us wherever you get your podcast to make sure you never miss an episode, and follow us on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Alan:
Lionel, I don’t know where you are today. You’re extremely smartly dressed, and you look as though you’re in a posh hotel room.
Lionel:
Well, I’m actually in Paris, Alan, wearing an Italian tie, trying to impress the various officials here in this town, and talking a little bit about Ukraine. I think it’s always important to dress slightly fancily when you’re in France, don’t you think?
Alan:
You look [unintelligible 00:02:03]
Lionel:
Merci ma foi.
Alan:
What have you been observing on either side of the channel?
Lionel:
Well, all the big talk is that President Macron has suddenly upped substantially his game on Ukraine. He’s really saying we have to support Ukraine. Ukraine cannot afford to lose, and Putin cannot afford to win. This is a big shift in rhetoric. He’s even talked about putting boots on the ground in Ukraine, NATO boots, which has drawn quite a lot of deep breaths in Berlin and in London. I see that he’s being knocked by certain British officials or politicians. I think there’s a bit of a mood swing. You never know with Macron though because he talks a lot and some of the French deliveries of missile systems and weapons system, and this has been well-reported in the British press, is perhaps less impressive than is rhetoric.
Alan:
All very fascinating, more mundanely. On a more parochial note, my eye was caught by a tweet this morning from the former editor of The Sun, probably the most successful editor of The Sun when it had sales around four million. It begins as follows, “I’m told Rupert Murdoch has decided from his care home in Montana that Rishi is done for, and asked London matron Rebekah Brooks to organize “interviews” with potential Tory successors.”
He thinks that Kemi Badenoch is the key contender to win Rupert’s favours. It says that come to the general election, Murdoch won’t allow The Sun to endorse Starmer as he was DPP when 25 Sojourners were arrested for paying public officials for stories. All were cleared, but Starmer has since said, “Sometimes juries get it wrong as the country will clearly discover in November, so do voters.” It’s quite hard to unpack. They’re assuming Kelvin Mackenzie is still in the loop. The idea that he’s sent out Rebekah Brooks to decide who will get the Murdoch blessing shows the old boy is still in the game.
Lionel:
Even though he’s supposedly in Montana, I suspect somewhere near Yellowstone. There’s some quite good care homes there. [unintelligible 00:04:33]. I have no evidence whatsoever that Kelvin McKenzie is accurate in his reporting of the precise location of Mr. Murdoch. It is interesting because everybody is putting out their stall for the conservative party leadership from Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and others.
Alan:
Apart from that, I listened into a Westminster Hall debate yesterday on the BBC, which was just lamentable. It was a series of the Northern Irish DUP people and second-rate Tory MPs blurring on about how the BBC was failing particularly in their partiality over Gaza. This does this. The contribution from a Tory MP called Andrew Percy who is as far as I can see, a former teacher at an infant school in Scunthorpe. That’s his expertise in the media. He said, “Once again, the picture being painted by the BBC is suffering Gazans versus a well-armed Israeli military and trying to deal with Hamas. There are no images of Hamas fighters or hostages being held. It is this picture of civilians and the Israeli military that gives a wholly false impression of the battle going on.”
Well, how does he think the BBC is going to get images of Hamas fighters or of hostages being held? It’s, I don’t know, an ignorant critique of how the media works from Tory MPs in a debate in Westminster Hall that nobody in their right mind would take any interest in.
Lionel:
Interestingly, I saw a tweet this morning, made a bit of time in Paris to see Alex Crawford, the excellent foreign correspondence guy who’s calling along with more than 50 other journalists to get the Israeli government to let the international press correspondence into Gaza so they can actually do some reporting. I thought that was interesting collective pressure there.
Alan:
Absolutely. Of course. The BBC would love to get pictures of Hamas fighters or hostages being held, but no international media has got access to that. To lambast the BBC for that feels to me woefully misplaced.
Lionel:
Well, yet again, people climbing on that bandwagon and thinking it’s going to save their skin in the future election, I suspect.
Alan:
The other thing, Lionel, I don’t know when you set off across the channel. It is quite funny in the media studios, Tory MP after Tory MP refusing to refer to Lee Anderson’s remarks as Islamophobia. They just got a script which is to say it’s wrong. Then, of course, the interviewer comes back and says, “But is it racist or is it Islamophobic?” They said it’s wrong. It almost becomes funny after a while.
Lionel:
Well, I’d tip my hat because just before crossing the channel to Brussels, which is my first stop, I did hear Nick Ferrari’s wonderful exchange with that hapless illegal immigration minister, what a title to have, where he asked specifically the minister, “Is Lee Anderson’s comments is Islamophobic, and then why?” He refused five times to answer the question, so Nick cut him off. I suggest that was a rather good piece of branding for LBC.
Alan:
Very good. Very good. Take out a digital subscription to Prospect and enjoy a one-month free trial to our digital content. You’ll immediately get full access to rigorously fact-checked truly independent analysis and perspectives. There’s no commitment, you can cancel at any time. Now, to take advantage of this offer, visit our website or go to your favourite search engine and search for Prospect Magazine subscription.
Lionel:
Well, not so long ago, Vice and BuzzFeed were the cutting-edge digital media outlets, the scenes at the right, at the most edgiest, sharpest, the most in tune with digital journalism. If you think about it, Alan, Vice was valued at $5.7 billion.
Alan:
Good God.
Lionel:
Quite extraordinary. Rupert Murdoch invested in it. Shane Smith, who was the very charismatic CEO, later chairman, championed the brand. We’ll talk more about how I think they got overextended and promised a great deal more than they actually delivered. You’re more familiar with BuzzFeed.
Alan:
Yes. BuzzFeed again was seen as the future of journalism. To be fair to it, it really was quite a journalistic force for a while and won a lot of prizes, did some great investigations. It never, I think, reached the dizzying heights of $5 billion in valuation, but it was certainly nudging $2 billion in valuation. I think when it IPOd, it IPOd for about $1.7 billion, and then that was the high watermark. I know when Vice began to collapse, people questioned the behaviour of its founder, Shane Smith, who was collecting a salary of $1.6 million, and cashed out about $100 million in shares when it was at the peak of its fame.
The founder of BuzzFeed, Ben Smith, who then went off to be the media correspondent columnist for the New York Times and has now started his own media operation called Semafor, I don’t think anyone would accuse him of cashing out at BuzzFeed’s expense, but he did make some catastrophically wrong decisions, I think.
Lionel:
Yes, this is a story about new media and old media, and maybe we shouldn’t be writing off old media so much. I suppose the other point which we’ll investigate is, was it all just too good to be true in an age of cheap money? When you had cheap money, you could borrow, you had valuations go to extraordinary levels, but then interest rates come back, it’s harder to borrow, more difficult invest environments. There’s a financial story here as well as a journalistic one.
Alan:
The thing is that nobody knew. I remember being at Davos in around 2008, so 2008/2009.
Lionel:
You went to Davos, Alan? How could you go? I thought this was for the international elite, people like me with ties. What were you doing in Davos?
Alan:
I wasn’t in the big rooms, Lionel. I was off-Broadway. There was a meeting I remember vividly. It was either 2008/2009. Facebook was about a year old, and the young Mark Zuckerberg was there, and so was Arthur Sulzberger and Rupert Murdoch. These old, big beasts of the jungle were prowling around with Zuckerberg, who I think was about 28, and the power dynamic between these old beasts and this young beast with neither quite sure who was going to be the ultimate king of the jungle was fascinating to watch. There was a period in the 2010s where no one really knew whether BuzzFeed or Vice might overtake the New York Times or not.
Lionel:
I can remember that, actually. Zuckerberg actually appeared, I think, before a bunch of hardened journalists. I didn’t notice you there. You must have obviously felt a bit out of kilter with all the elite there, Alan, but he was seen as the king. He had the platform, and everybody else was saying, “Well, it’s all about distribution rather than content. It turned out to be a little different for reasons which we’re going to explore.”
Alan:
It will be interesting to talk to Janine Gibson, who worked with both of us, with you at the FT, Lionel, before that at the Guardian. She was, of course, years ago, the Guardian’s media correspondent looking at the media industry, but then in between working with the Guardian and the FT, was head of the London office, started up BuzzFeed, because I think she will have a very interesting take as to whether this was a bubble that was always going to burst or whether things could have been managed differently.
Lionel:
Janine, the demise of new media, Vice once employed 3,000 people, big online business, online video, had a deal with HBO, had branded content, almost got to $100 million revenues plus, valued at $5.7 billion at the top of the market, and now it’s next to nothing. Then we’ve also got BuzzFeed, where you worked for several years as editor in the UK. What went wrong?
Janine:
It’s interesting because it’s obvious and convenient to link them together and assume it’s the same problem. I don’t think they were the same business. However, what broadly can we learn from a bunch of digital media businesses that were aimed at getting large millennial audiences and selling advertising against large numbers? The economics were wrong. They were too dependent on the platforms. To a certain extent, each one of those businesses relied on platforms to get them out of trouble.
Alan:
Like Facebook?
Janine:
Like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Exactly. I would say what’s changed is advertising has moved irrevocably to the platforms, to TikTok, to the others that we’ve just mentioned to the point that the platforms are starting to eat each other’s lunch. It’s a real battle for survival there. It used to be, which of these 20 media brands will survive? Probably only five of them. It’s now which of these five platforms will survive because advertising loves to coalesce around the most powerful place. Advertising hates small, diverse, indie, many different platforms with very, very niche because advertising is quite lazy. It just wants a great big banquet, and platforms is the best way to do that now.
Alan:
I’ll put the question a different way, Janine. What did they do right? You may want a different answer for Vice and BuzzFeed. For a while, they were doing really new stuff in an innovative way.
Janine:
I’m glad you asked that because everybody focuses on doomed economic models. These sites have a lot to blame themselves for this reckoning because they all proclaimed themselves the future of news. I think I definitely, definitely gave a really embarrassing interview in which I said we were building a newsroom of the future. I really regret it when I was at BuzzFeed. The journalism that both produced in very different ways was notable. It was innovative, broke huge stories by anybody’s standards. Both sites did.
HuffPost really invented the Hot Take. Imagine, they invented a whole genre of journalism which has come to define a decade, an era. They perhaps were less successful with news, but BuzzFeed was very successful with news, with investigations. They won Pulitzer. We won lots of awards in the UK for our coverage, and we engaged a generation of readers in serious and hard news in ways in which they could relate to it.
I was just reading a piece on CNN about the general doom and gloom around digital news and how terrible it is. In the middle of it, I was scrolling through, I found a great big ad unit with a curiosity gap headline to it. “What is the most luxurious airline in the world? Join us on our journey.” The content is produced by Singapore Airlines in the middle of CNN Business. Then you scroll down to read the rest of the doomed new media business. They learned all of that from Vice, BuzzFeed, and a couple of other sites.
Lionel:
Yes, I read that, Janine. I read that CNN piece.
Janine:
Did you click on the Singapore Airlines content?
Lionel:
No, I didn’t actually. I thought, “Mark Thompson, you need to actually get some editing in these pieces that are being written.” It wasn’t actually that illuminating. Much better was the 2018 piece by Reeves Wiedeman, who wrote a good piece, a book on WeWork. He looked at Vice Media and essentially, to use a technical term, highlighted the bullshit factor, which I think was quite strong in Vice Media.
They did talk a good game, and they did do, as you say, some really innovative forms of kinetic journalism, journalism from the front going into North Korea, and behind the cameras there. Shane Smith, the co-founder, took $100 million out of the business at the top of the market, and he always overpromised. A different character also from Jonah Peretti, the BuzzFeed founder.
Janine:
Yes. Obviously, I would say this because I work for BuzzFeed and for Jonah. I always thought Jonah is a sort of academic monkey who has very profound thoughts about why humans consume news and entertainment and how the need that they fulfil in sharing them and what it is about us and how we socialise. Shane, well, allegedly, there were an enormous amount of coke in the Vice offices and people would blow things up and jump out of helicopters.
Alan:
And fun.
Janine:
It was great. Not really my thing. I hasten to add. The editorial philosophy, it’s unarguable that Vice was always a partnership model that came out of something much closer to advertising, the funding of both journalism and projects. This is not to decry the very good video journalists that worked for Vice. Some really great work went on there. Absolutely, there was.
The fundamental aims of Vice, I think, were very different to the fundamental aims of BuzzFeed. You might argue that BuzzFeed was less financially rigorous and competent, but their aim was definitely to transform the future of media. Jonah did not leave. Jonah is still there trying to hold that company together in some form, although he has obviously closed the news business.
Alan:
Picking up on another point that you made, Janine, and it really is key, these were both media organisations that were dependent on platforms, particularly Facebook. Once Facebook stopped or pivoted away from news, that really left them beached.
Janine:
It’s very true. I think anybody at a media organisation, including where I am at, Financial Times, your media organisation or yours, Alan, at the Guardian, would be rash to ignore the fact that a change in digital publishing model can really mess with your plan very, very, very quickly. There isn’t any quick way to pivot. We’re all looking now at TikTok and that generation of news consumers who are consuming news on TikTok. They are. It doesn’t matter that news creators on TikTok are all reading legacy media and then popping onto TikTok to talk about it. That is the form through which everybody is getting their news.
It will have an impact. Judging by the era of digital media that I worked through, it’ll take 5 to 10 years, but it will change profoundly what we do and what we see.
Alan:
There’s a good deal of schadenfreude amongst so-called mainstream news journalists about the troubles that these new upstarts have got into. Just to go back to my previous question, what do you think we can learn from Vice and BuzzFeed at their best? Because they did attract the enthusiasm and belief of millennials who completely switched off from legacy media brands.
Janine:
What we really learned was how to focus on topics that matter profoundly to your core audience and shed the sense that you have to cover the waterfront. Now, I think every big media organisation has tried that form of innovation over the last 10 years or so and failed to a greater or lesser degree.
The beauty of a start-up, the beauty of a digital start-up, and the beauty of having an incredibly focused audience is that you don’t hire, for example, specialist correspondents that face every government department because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You say, “This is a generation that cares relentlessly about social justice issues and fairness and takes that approach to everything. Where is the intersection of things they care about and things that we can break stories in?”
It became really quite straightforward because you just realise if you take a different filter of news, nobody’s playing where you’re playing, and you’ve got a completely clear run at it. Some of the biggest things we did were things where we were able to devote more time, money, and resources to one story than even, say, the New York Times or really big news organisations because we didn’t have to fill a certain number of pages and you could take a year reporting out the mysterious Russian deaths on UK soil or similar.
Alan:
Very prescient.
Janine:
Unfortunately, we don’t seem to stop that. Yes, there was a lot. Vice really learned, I think, and showed everybody that you could be cool and sexy and still do the news. News didn’t have to be worthy and boring. Most television news has really been impacted by the language and the pacing and the, let’s say, sexing up because why not, of visual news that Vice pioneered. You can argue whether that’s to your taste or not, but it’s definitely everywhere. It’s influenced everyone.
Alan:
There was something about that gonzo journalism. I think Lionel called it kinetic journalism, or whatever word you want to use.
Janine:
It’s a good word, yes.
Alan:
I just borrowed it from Shane.
Janine:
I thought there’s no way Lionel came up with that.
Lionel:
I’m not proud.
Alan:
Gonzo, kinetic. Whatever you want to call it. That seemed, and again this is a ghastly word, but authentic, didn’t it? You’ve got the young guy on the battlefield, and it was very first person straight to the camera. There was something about that that appealed to young people. Maybe that’s something, again, other kinds of media organisations could learn from.
Janine:
Oh, and if you want to go really to the matter, the investment in authenticity and individuals, and building the star reporter brands, and this is true of all of the digital upstarts, proved that you can build an individual brand of trust with your audience just as quickly as, if not more quickly than you can impart a legacy brand of trust to an individual, if you see what I mean.
Lionel:
I thought that’s what I did at the FT, Janine. We have all these mini brands and maxi brands.
Janine:
Yes, and we’re still happily producing them now. Thank you very much, Lionel.
Lionel:
It’s very important because that is part of the identity and character. In a way you then-- and I’m going to riff off on the financial angle here, you create a class of very well-paid to a degree, but big investment banker type. They’re the ones that do the deals. There is a bit of inequality, therefore, in the newsroom. On the other hand, in this new age, you need that, I think.
Janine:
It was a big shift in the power of newsrooms and the power of individual journalists. I think it’s been slightly hidden from view because it’s not universal, and plenty of journalists, as we’ve certainly seen in the last fortnight, have absolutely no job security, very little clout, and can be fired tomorrow. It’s increasingly not the sort of business that you’d want your children engaged in.
For some people who did very well and built very, very big brands, very trusted brands very quickly, that has endured. You see it in a generation of book publishing. Most of people or a great number of people that used to work for BuzzFeed now work for the New York Times or work for the Guardian in the UK or the Sunday Times. I think everybody in my newsroom in BuzzFeed UK has got a very illustrious job on a national title now.
Lionel:
Janine, let me put you on the spot. Where do you think that these audiences will now go?
Janine:
Oh, they’ve already gone. For a start, we’ve got to stop thinking of the audiences of BuzzFeed, Vice, HuffPost, et cetera, as young. They’re not young. They’ve all got several kids. Some of them have mortgages and they’re well into their 40s. They are comfortably middle-aged now. I imagine they’re all buying Weekend FT. If they’re not buying the weekend FT, I’m not doing my job very well. They’re not being chased by anybody anymore. God loves them. They’re just welcome to middle age. The ones below, Gen Z and the alphas are all on TikTok. They’re all on TikTok.
Alan:
Janine, thanks for coming on.
Janine:
Absolute pleasure.
Alan:
Good luck with Weekend FT.
Lionel:
Yes, good luck, Janine. Really nice to see you.
Alan:
I’m glad we got both the ups and the downs because, of course, there’s a lot of pleasure. The old media types who say, “Oh, these young ups, it’ll never work.” There are dreadful lessons about overreach, et cetera, et cetera. I think it was good that we heard from Janine about the things they did right.
Lionel:
Exactly right. They created new forms of journalism, new genres, new ways of doing things more exciting. It’s just in an age of cheap money. We had that for 20 years. All sorts of companies, including media, put too much emphasis on growth. If you do try to grow too fast, then you can be left really stranded, either when there’s a change in interest rates or, as Janine was pointing out, when the powerful platforms upon which their business models largely rest in, when they decide to move in a different direction, away from news, that was the real problem.
Alan:
I just want to end this little segment by-- there was a film called Page One in 2011, the great New York Times media columnist, David Carr. They went into the New York Times to film a meeting between Shane and the New York Times veterans. This was a time when people didn’t know who was going to win this battle, Vice or the New York Times. Smith was boasting about their foreign coverage. They’d been in Liberia, and they were boasting about this.
Carr’s retort became very famous. He said, “Before you ever went there, we had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do.” At the time, it felt like a grizzled old hack feeling a bit threatened and a bit punchy at being faced by this young new kid on the block. As it turned out, David Carr was right, as he was about so many things.
Lionel:
The late David Carr, much missed, much lamented great writer who was right in the end. I’m glad you emphasised the positive, accentuate the positive to quote Frank Sinatra. This is Media Confidential and coming up, we talk propaganda, an old master, and the contemporary resonances of information warfare.
Alan:
Will Donald Trump succeed in his bid for the Republican nomination? Subsequently, what are his chances of winning the US presidential election in November? Is the world ready for a Trump presidency? That’s the subject of this week’s Prospect podcast, as the former British ambassador to the United States and former National Security Advisor Kim Darroch discusses the implications of Trump returning to the White House.
Kim Darroch:
Trump was very negative and disparaging on NATO. If he, as he says he will, stopped US military support for Ukraine, that affects us. Almost why we feel we should have a vote in US elections because those kind of policies have a profound effect on our own security.
Alan:
For more of that interview, listen to and follow the Prospect podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Lionel:
This is Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber. Our next conversation is all about propaganda with the Ukraine-born British writer Peter Pomerantsev, an expert on disinformation. Alan, I recorded the conversation with Peter Pomerantsev earlier this week, and you were sadly indisposed. I think you had a bit of a tummy bug. I found it a very interesting conversation, mainly because Peter does describe extremely well the art of countering propaganda through propaganda, and tells the story of this extraordinary man, Sefton Delmer.
He’s an Anglo-German, worked for the Daily Express as a foreign correspondent, knew all the key top Nazis. He met Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, later took up this very important position at Special Operations Command in the English countryside, broadcasting propaganda against the Nazi regime. He’s the conversation coming up. The book is How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, published March the 7th.
Peter Pomerantsev:
As you mentioned, my-- what’s that thing you call a mastermind? My specialist subject is propaganda and disinformation. Delmer was someone who was really the very bleeding edge of the propaganda wars of World War II. He was fascinated by the power of propaganda throughout his career. His memoirs, which first drew me to him, talk about what it was like for him growing up as a British kid in Germany during World War I, seeing propaganda take over these nice Berliners that he knew and turning them into these propaganda machines spitting out these patriotic catchphrases, and the personality transformation that would happen to people.
He actually was very honest about his experiences coming back to Britain at the end of the First World War, ‘17/18. He came back. After having been bullied as a British kid in Germany, he must have been 13 or 14, bullied as a German kid in Britain, and also could see how Londoners were in the grip of a propaganda fever. Then after the Second World War, he talks about the influence of what he fears is the return of fascist propaganda in post-World War II Germany.
Lionel:
It’s very important, though, that he did go back to Germany, met Hitler, knew Goebbels, the master of Nazi propaganda, and therefore was in a unique position to understand, if you like, the Nazi mind, when he came back to play this propaganda role for the British government during the war.
Peter:
Exactly. After having grown up in England, he goes to Oxford, he becomes the Daily Express correspondent in Berlin, during the cabaret days of Berlin, and he catches Hitler’s rise.
Lionel:
There is a great story, though, I have to say about, isn’t there, about Sefton Delmer, that he’s in Germany in 1933, and rings in with a big story to the Daily Express copy desk and says, “The Reichstag is burning.” The copy editor says, “Well, sorry, Sefton, but we’ve got a big fire in London tonight, so we’ll leave that aside.” Probably a pop, maybe not a pop before, but carry on.
Peter:
Before we get into his role as the almost demonic information warrior in World War II, he was an incredible journalist who actually pioneered a form of journalism, which is a little bit similar to what Sacha Baron Cohen does with his Borat characters. Delmer’s childhood of moving between different countries, different languages, playing different roles to almost survive socially, made him a master impersonator.
One of the things he did as a journalist was basically disguise himself as a really clumsy, Borat-like German, and go around English seaside hotels, with this really loud German accent, nonstop talking about the war, about the First World War. He was checking to see whether the Brits had got over the First World War in the ‘20s and ‘30s, whether they’d forgiven the Germans.
Then he basically impersonates Ernst Röhm’s assistant and goes to a Nazi rally pretending to be the head of the stormtroopers, adjutant, his right-hand man, and gets away with it. He disguises himself as a Nazi. He’s always playing different roles. He was not just a journalist reporter, he was the inventive, immersive impersonator reporter.
Lionel:
That’s the method that he used with creating this alter ego, the der chef.
Peter:
Yes.
Lionel:
You make a very important point in the book about the key to effective propaganda in the war was to try to detach the ordinary German from the Nazi Party. How did he do that?
Peter:
That was one of his key aims, to weaken people’s loyalty to Nazi officials, and Nazi high command on the front. His aims were quite specific at times. He wanted soldiers to surrender and defect. He wanted people to not follow Nazi orders about following the domestic war economy. There was a genuine crack there, genuine resentment of Nazi officials. Army was always super popular. Hitler was always worshipped by many, frankly, but mid-ranked Nazi officials were seen as parasites. They weren’t serving on the front. “Our boys are dying and these parasites are here, making us do all sorts of unpleasant things and just sitting here.”
He tried to exploit that as much as possible by essentially-- well, I think I’m going to misquote him, spreading a layer of filth and slime over Nazi officials as thick as they had done over the Jews. He was really using a lot of Nazi-type vitriol against the Nazi officials themselves, and showing how corrupt they were, how self-serving they were, abused Russians, and threw these lavish parties. He would gather this incredible information about the specific corruption of specific mid-level officials and do these rants on the radio about them.
Lionel:
Quite a counter to the Leni Riefenstahl aesthetic of Nazi Germany. Let’s just bring this to today. The way you were describing Sefton Delmer’s approach on corruption just reminds me of Alexei Navalny, the murdered Russian. He was very effective, was he not, in using YouTube to expose Putin-era corruption.
Peter:
However, there’s a huge difference. Navalny, as you say, quite rightly, tried to pass Putin and also his party, United Russia, away from the Russian people. He called them the party of crooks and thieves, which stuck. Navalny had a political agenda. He was trying to build motivation and outrage at corruption to start a rebellious movement. Delmer was not into that at all. The big thing that Delmer says right at the start of his propaganda work is like, he is not interested, he does not believe in the potential for any democratic movements in Germany.
His characters then created these cabaret of radio hosts, would be people who were either real or pretending to be angry German soldiers who are ranting about corruption. The aim was not to start a movement. The aim was to make people as corrupt as the Nazis, “Why don’t we all trade on the black market?” He wanted to encourage corruption in the German system because that undermined the Nazi economy. What’s really saved Ukraine several times during this war is the amount of corruption in Russia because that has made a lot of Russian attacks very inefficient.
Lionel:
How do you think the West is doing right now in the battle for public opinion?
Peter:
We’re not doing very much into Russia at all. We’re not at war with Russia, so therefore, we haven’t adopted any of the proactive information warfare that Delmer was doing.
Lionel:
You don’t think we’re at war?
Peter:
Officially, we’re not. We haven’t started launching anything. I think we are. That’s certainly a war with us, but at the moment, all we do is help Ukraine. All the things that would start once you’re at war with somebody; sabotage, subversion, political warfare, information warfare hasn’t started. Certainly not in the scale that it would have started after September the 11th. All we’re doing is helping Ukrainians. The Ukrainians do lots of really, really clever stuff, which I talk about in my book.
Lionel:
Give us a couple of examples.
Peter:
They will do things like they’ll go to the places where Russian soldiers might go like porn sites or bootleg video sites. They’ll put like a chain of ads there, at the end of which will explain to you how to surrender or defect. In their information capacities, as in their military capacities, Ukraine has just got limited capacity and limited scope. What they haven’t had the time to do is launch these vast programs.
Just to be clear on the scale of what Delmer was doing, he basically ran an alternative BBC from Woburn house in Bedfordshire, definitely over 100 people in the English countryside, dozens of radio stations, many in German, Romanian, Bulgarian, and all the languages of occupied Europe, all of them essentially masking themselves as if they’re local stations, creating this incredibly subversive content.
Lionel:
Just make that connection with today because if Delmer was looking at what tools he has in the information war, one of the problems is you’ve got social media that can spread disinformation, misinformation at a speed and scale which is unthinkable compared to the 1930s. I know you’re going to come back at me and say, “Ah, yes, but modern radio in the 1930s, that was the new technology then. What’s so different?” Well, it is different, isn’t it, Peter?
Peter:
Oh, no, it’s different. Now we have this pluralism of different types of psyops that everybody’s trying now. In Delmer’s day, you needed to get into the government and have access to wavelengths and radio stations to conduct these, let’s call them communications exercises. Now anyone can do it. Anybody with a Twitter handle can make up an outraged soldier the way Delmer did, and target information that would separate a leadership from its people. It’s technologically much easier to do.
The difference between Delmer and what we have now or then was just the level of sophistication and psychological sophistication that he was using. He always said that what he was doing in propaganda, and he called it propaganda, only worked because it came along with military and economic warfare.
If we’re talking about the larger plan vis-à-vis Russia, there is a way of stopping Russia. There is a way of constraining Russia. It involves rearming in Europe, showing that we can outproduce Russia. It involves proper-- I think the polite word now is economic statecrafts because you can’t use the word economic warfare, but economic statecraft that actually would undermine Russian military supply chains, and it involves, of course, arming Ukraine. Then there’s the information bit that goes with it.
Lionel:
I want to come to the subject we were talking about just before we went on air, Peter, which was fascinating. You live in the States, you’re teaching at Johns Hopkins, although you regularly, as you say, going to the war front in Ukraine. I spent a lot of time in my career in America, nearly 12 years. Just tell us a little bit about why you think the American public has become so mistrustful of information. What went wrong?
Peter:
It’s such a massive question. I’ve only been in the US two years, and my research is not purely focused on the US. I see patterns that I’ve seen in other countries where people decided to reject reality. I see very strong echoes with the story that Delmer tells about the 1920s in Europe. There was a long journey to what ended up as Nazi propaganda. That journey has echoes in many other historical periods. The Nazis are uniquely nasty. I’m not comparing them to anyone else. The reason societies or bits of society take leave of reality, those patterns repeat.
I think, in America, it’s very interesting. Where do we start if the endpoint is 30% of Americans, over half Republican voters think the last election was rigged? Despite the fact that Fox News was taken to court on this and lost the case, despite the fact that Republican state officials have checked and rechecked whether the vote was fair and said it was fair, despite the fact that Republican judges, judges nominated by Donald Trump say the vote was fair, you have 30% of Americans that embrace an alternative reality.
Why do people do that? One is often there’s a very strong social shock that comes or people feel that who they are is under such threat that they start to push away reality, they start to reject it because it’s something that deeply unsettles their sense of self. I think, in America, this is much documented. There is a fear among large parts of the population that society is changing too quickly, that it’s transforming too quickly, they’re losing hold of power, and they’re rejecting the information that reinforces reality.
Even deeper than that, I don’t know, a lot of people that I talk to who have ended up in the Trumpverse talk about the shock of 9-11, and then the shock of the 2008 crisis made them mistrust not just information sources, but everything. Life was so unstable that your sense of reality starts to become undermined. In Germany, there was the First World War, the financial crisis of the 1920s that undermined people’s sense that anything was solid.
A lot of research that I’ve done in Eastern Europe, in the pre-Putin eras, the end of the Soviet Union, the change in the 1990s, for a lot of people, made them feel that everything is so unstable, that you can’t deal with the chaos of reality, and you start looking for an alternative and closed set of explanations where you can inhabit.
Lionel:
Delmer was an optimist. Are you an optimist?
Peter:
It’s funny. Delmer was actually accused of not being idealistic enough because, as I said, at the start, he didn’t believe in pursuing a democratic revolution in Nazi Germany, he just thought you had to break the Nazi system. He saw vulnerabilities, though. He thought that within each of us, even the people who are aggressively rejecting reality, even those who’ve embraced a propaganda of racial superiority, that there was still somebody else, another person within that person that you can reach. That wasn’t necessarily a romantic person. It wasn’t your better angels. It was something else. It was something that he called your inner pig dog.
Lionel:
Schweinehund.
Peter:
Schweinehund, which means your self-interest, very simply, at times, but also means a sort of individualistic you that you can still reach.
Lionel:
Let’s come to the UK just to round this off, Peter. We’re hearing a lot of noise, a lot of talk from senior politicians in the Conservative Party about immigration, which is shaded into Islamophobia, in some people’s view. On the other side, there’s a lot of polarisation around the Middle East, accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party, evidence of that, despite Keir Starmer’s efforts. In this environment, how does the centre hold? How do you stop or contain what appears to be growing polarisation in this country around these topics?
Peter:
We’ve been talking about polarisation here for a while, ever since Brexit. In many ways, I think Britain is weathering the storm certainly much better than America, but also weirdly, I’d say much better than somewhere like Germany, which German media experts call the alternatives Universum, which is a whole block. Again, it was 15%, now maybe 20% of people who live in a conspiratorial reality.
In Britain, despite our fears post-Brexit, what you call the centre, the idea of a common public square where we can all at least engage with each other has held better. We all criticise the BBC, but the way it flung some of its efforts to engage with bits outside of London after Brexit was clumsy, maybe naïve, but nothing like that has happened in America. There is no one to do that in America. Quite the opposite, every TV channel is heightening polarisation. We at least have an engine that tries to overcome this, however badly, however clumsily, is good.
However, the big channel is the social media era. You can’t just do it with a few TV channels. I do think we need a form of media whose job in the morning is to get up and engage diverse audiences. I think it’s a new job for media. I think it’ll need a lot of audience analysis. The sort of things that evil spin doctors do, we’ve got to start also understanding audiences and then engaging them in ways that are honest and positive. We are in a race to reach diverse audiences. I think it has to be somebody’s job. I think it’s almost a new mission for a new type of media to do that.
Lionel:
Come back, Sefton, all is forgiven, and we’ll even pay your expenses. Daily Express star.
Peter:
Right. He was sacked towards the end of his career, 40 years at the Daily Express. The reason was his expenses. After 40 years, he replied, “If I’d have known it was a temporary job, I’d have never taken it.”
Alan:
Lionel, as you say, I actually had norovirus. I don’t know if that’s the same as a tummy bug. I listened on my sickbed to that interview, which I found fascinating. I love the way you skilfully segued from this fascinating story about Sefton Delmer, which I didn’t know, to the modern-day landscape of information chaos. It was interesting to see the parallels between the 1930s and people not knowing what to believe, which of course, is so much part of the landscape today.
Lionel:
Yes. I also thought Peter was extremely good talking about contemporary America, and the way the American public, large swathes of which just do not trust news, and explaining why rooted in the instability after the global financial crisis, the shock of 9-11, and then this acute polarisation which you’re seeing throughout the American presidential campaign election.
Alan:
I had two other thoughts. One was I was so pleased he mentioned the BBC as a sort of inoculation against fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. I reflected on the fact that the Daily Express was much more than the Daily Mail, the premier newspaper of its age. I was trying to think, who would be the last great Daily Express reporter you could name or editor. I thought it’s probably Chapman Pincher, who you probably have to be over 60 for that name to have any resonance, but he was a master of the spy story. Although we know now that a lot of it was spoon-fed to him from British intelligence.
Lionel:
Yes. I think the difference, Alan, these days is that you’ve got boring names like Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber, rather than Chapman Pincher.
Alan:
Chapman Pincher, great name, great byline, or Sefton Delmer.
Lionel:
Or Selfton Delmer. There we go. That’s the difference. Under Lord Beaverbrook, who was the long-time owner of the Daily Express, it really was the number one popular newspaper, wasn’t it? For many decades.
Alan:
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Danny Garlick.
Lionel:
You can send any questions or comments to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Alan:
Remember to listen to and follow Media Confidential wherever you get your podcasts and join us next week, wherever Lionel is, for more invaluable analysis.
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