Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Every week our colleagues Read
Speaker 1: This invite some of the best writers from Australia and
Speaker 1: around the world to discuss their lives and work. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear a conversation with journalist, editor, and
Speaker 1: media proprietor Eric Beecher. Eric is a media veteran, having
Speaker 1: been in the business for almost half a century, and
Speaker 1: he's just released his first book titled The Men Who
Speaker 1: Killed the News. In it, Eric reveals the distorted role
Speaker 1: of the media moguls of the last two centuries, from
Speaker 1: William Randolph Hurst to Rupert Murdoch. Michael Williams is the
Speaker 1: host of Read This and he's with me now. Hi Michael.
Speaker 2: Hi, Ruby, Michael.
Speaker 1: I believe that you've known Eric for quite some time,
Speaker 1: So tell me how did your paths first cross and
Speaker 1: what did you learn from working with him?
Speaker 2: Eric was kind of biproxy in my boss twice. Early
Speaker 2: in my career, I came out of Union. I worked
Speaker 2: at Text Publishing, the Melbourne independent publishing house, but it
Speaker 2: was while an independent house, it was part of a
Speaker 2: bigger media company called Text Media that was founded by
Speaker 2: Eric Beecher and his then business partner Diagribbel. So Eric
Speaker 2: was this kind of shadowy figure who only when we
Speaker 2: had big meetings about kind of corporate stability, Eric would
Speaker 2: appear and it has a bit intimidating, But the thing
Speaker 2: I remember about meeting him in those early days was
Speaker 2: that he was passionate about the books part of the
Speaker 2: media company that he was founding. It wasn't an optional extra,
Speaker 2: it was important. There. Many years later, when I became
Speaker 2: director of Melbourne'sheeler Senda, Eric was the chair of the
Speaker 2: board and so he was far more directly my boss
Speaker 2: and I got to work closely with him, and the
Speaker 2: thing that he impressed upon me very early on was
Speaker 2: that he was that very old fashioned idea, a newspaperman
Speaker 2: through and through. He cared about the ways in which
Speaker 2: we tell stories, the ways in which the news builds,
Speaker 2: the kind of society we want to be, and the
Speaker 2: ways in which quality journalism needed to be protected.
Speaker 1: And in the manner who killed the news, he takes
Speaker 1: aim at some of the world's most influential and consequential
Speaker 1: media owners. Can you talk to me a bit about
Speaker 1: why it is that this book feels so relevant right now?
Speaker 2: Seven AM listeners may have come across Eric before and
Speaker 2: most recently, when the media company he now runs, Private Media,
Speaker 2: were threatened with a lawsuit by Lachlan Murdoch over a
Speaker 2: peace published in Kriche and they may have followed that
Speaker 2: story and that response. It was kind of vintage Eric.
Speaker 2: It was a little bit of a shit stir, but
Speaker 2: it was also about defending the principles of the thing,
Speaker 2: you know. And let's face it, there are so many
Speaker 2: threats to quality journalism. Not everyone gets to have Ruby
Speaker 2: Jones in their life five days a week, or a
Speaker 2: combination of Ruby Jones and Daniel James, you know, seven am.
Speaker 2: These people are the lucky few. But the media options
Speaker 2: are diminishing, and they're diminishing all the time. And Eric
Speaker 2: does this incredible forensic job of putting that in a context,
Speaker 2: a context where influence and money have distorted the ways
Speaker 2: in which we get the news.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. Eric Beecher is a
Speaker 1: media mongrel.
Speaker 2: I love a newspaper in addition to my deep obsessiveness
Speaker 2: about books. I am a compulsive consumer of news in
Speaker 2: all its forms. But there are a few more purely
Speaker 2: pleasurable ways to enjoy the news that on the holidays,
Speaker 2: coffee brewing papers strewn across the table, with people passing
Speaker 2: supplements and sections across to one another. There are online equivalents,
Speaker 2: but there's something about that old fashioned way of catching
Speaker 2: up with the world that remains very special. But the
Speaker 2: business of news, we are told, is in crisis. I
Speaker 2: think it's declared dead even more often than the book is.
Speaker 2: There are challenges of advertising, challenges of revenue, and a
Speaker 2: decline in consumption and a decline in trust. It's a problem.
Speaker 2: If news dies, then our society suffers. Eric Beecher is
Speaker 2: a newsman. It's what is devoted the better part of
Speaker 2: his life and career two as a journalist. His work
Speaker 2: for some of the most well respected newspapers in the world,
Speaker 2: and as his career has progressed, Eric has climbed the
Speaker 2: media ladder. He's currently a media proprietor, head of Private Media,
Speaker 2: which runs the website criche. Amongst the many achievements of
Speaker 2: Eric Beach's career in the media, there are few key
Speaker 2: moments that stand out. In nineteen eighty four, he became
Speaker 2: the youngest ever editor of the City Morning Herald. He
Speaker 2: was just thirty three at the time, with Digribbel. He
Speaker 2: built text media into a major player, and in two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven he received a Walkley Award for Journalistic Leadership.
Speaker 2: Later he also became chair of the Wheeler Center in
Speaker 2: Melbourne when I was its director. And the thing that
Speaker 2: I've always so admired about Eric getting to work alongside
Speaker 2: him is the ways in which he's such a fierce
Speaker 2: advocate for independent, fearless mets. It's a passion that played
Speaker 2: out more recently in twenty twenty two when Lachlan Murdock
Speaker 2: leveled a high profiled defamation lawsuit in his direction. While
Speaker 2: the case ended up being withdrawn, it was just the
Speaker 2: motivation Eric needed to finish the book he's been quietly
Speaker 2: working on for years. That book was called The Men
Speaker 2: Who Killed the News, and in it Eric reveals the
Speaker 2: distorted role of media moguls over the past two centuries,
Speaker 2: from Conrad Black and William Randolph Hurst to Rupert Murdoch
Speaker 2: and Elon Musk. The book explores how these men have
Speaker 2: abused their power to increase their wealth while undermining journalism
Speaker 2: and truth at a huge cost to our politics and
Speaker 2: our society. It might sound like a book that has
Speaker 2: the potential to be dry, but Eric Beecher knows how
Speaker 2: to spin a story. At its opening, it has the
Speaker 2: feel of one of those Russian classics, a cast of
Speaker 2: characters in the front, introducing us to the colorful moguls
Speaker 2: good and bad who are going to populate its pages.
Speaker 2: And then it pivots. It becomes a crime story as
Speaker 2: we bear witness to the ways in which the world
Speaker 2: of news is slowly deliberately being killed. It's a political
Speaker 2: thriller that asks the kind of society we want to
Speaker 2: belong to. And it's a love story because one thing
Speaker 2: is crystal clear. Eric Beecher loves news and loves the
Speaker 2: disappearing world of serious journalism. I'm Michael Williams, and this
Speaker 2: is Read. This the show about the books we love
Speaker 2: and the stories behind them. There are many things in
Speaker 2: The Men Who Kill the News that I love. It's
Speaker 2: a fabulous bit of reading. It's a kind of sobering
Speaker 2: history and also an assessment of the kind of current
Speaker 2: state of newsmating and how we got here. But I
Speaker 2: wanted maybe to dig into your personal history and relationship
Speaker 2: with journalism. When did you first get the bug? When
Speaker 2: did you first identify that journalism was a thing that
Speaker 2: you might devote your life to.
Speaker 3: Well, I got the bug at a very early age.
Speaker 3: And I have no idea where the bug came from
Speaker 3: because no one in my family was a journalist. And
Speaker 3: I grew up in Sydney and we got the Sydney
Speaker 3: Morning Herald every morning and I saw it on the
Speaker 3: breakfast table. Whether that gave me the bug, I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: But you know, I edited my boy Scouts magazine, I
Speaker 3: edited all the school magazines. I started a national cricket
Speaker 3: magazine at the age of seventeen. I just loved it.
Speaker 3: I just fell in love with it.
Speaker 2: I love this story about it, not just because it
Speaker 2: reveals you're a colossal merd at every level, but there
Speaker 2: is something about the attitude of identifying a gap in
Speaker 2: the market, and you know you're an avid cricket fan,
Speaker 2: you knew what you wanted to read, identifying it wasn't there,
Speaker 2: and deciding that you may as well take the responsibility
Speaker 2: to fill that gap.
Speaker 3: It sounds like it's some kind of special instinct or intuition.
Speaker 3: Actually what it was was naivety. That's what it was.
Speaker 2: You don't think it's the exact same naivity that has
Speaker 2: carried you through the rest of your career, since.
Speaker 3: The naivety probably developed a little bit into something a
Speaker 3: little more advanced. But I look back and think, you know,
Speaker 3: why would I have done that. I mean, I've had
Speaker 3: so many failures in my publishing career, magazines that didn't work,
Speaker 3: and ideas that didn't work, and websites that didn't work.
Speaker 3: And I've had a couple of successes as well. And
Speaker 3: I was a newspaper editor in my early thirties at
Speaker 3: a very young age, and I don't quite know how
Speaker 3: that happened, but it was great. And I mean one
Speaker 3: of the most important things, or the most important thing
Speaker 3: that happened to me in my life as a journalist
Speaker 3: was I was a reporter on the Melbourne Age in
Speaker 3: my twenties, and that's where I started in daily journalism.
Speaker 3: The Age then was owned by the Fairfax Company, but
Speaker 3: it had been owned by the Sime family, and there
Speaker 3: was still a Sime family member was the managing director,
Speaker 3: Ranald MacDonald. And I got to know Ranald, and he
Speaker 3: knew because I told him many times that my interest
Speaker 3: actually was in editing, not so I could be the boss,
Speaker 3: but because I loved the craft of editing. And in
Speaker 3: those days, most newspaper editors were people who had been
Speaker 3: promoted because they were very good reporters. And to me,
Speaker 3: they are different skills. They obviously overlap, but they are
Speaker 3: different skills. And the Age sent me away for eighteen
Speaker 3: months and put me through three very good newspapers, the
Speaker 3: Sunday Times and the Observer in London, and the Washington Post.
Speaker 3: And so I learned about editing and newspapers at that level,
Speaker 3: and newspaper editing at that level, and journalism at that
Speaker 3: level in those places. And I came back and then
Speaker 3: I started a practice it here all right, Eric, I.
Speaker 2: Want to level a quote in your direction. Here we go.
Speaker 2: The industry is littered with self styled purists who believe
Speaker 2: the business of media, the requirement to make a profit
Speaker 2: somehow corrupts the craft. The self anointed media elite among
Speaker 2: us believe, somewhat self servingly, that not only the act
Speaker 2: or process of maintenance profit is positively sinister, but also
Speaker 2: that the very desire to do so is Does that
Speaker 2: describe you, Eric Beecher? Are you a self satisfied, self
Speaker 2: anointed media elite.
Speaker 3: I guess some people might think I am one person
Speaker 3: in particular the person you're quoting. I remember that quote.
Speaker 3: I have been a working journalist, an editor, a publisher,
Speaker 3: and a media owner. So I'm not someone who regards
Speaker 3: profitability and commercial imperatives as being unimportant. In fact, it's
Speaker 3: so critical because if you're not viable, you don't exist.
Speaker 3: So that goes without saying so criticism like that, I
Speaker 3: think is facile at the same time, and what I've
Speaker 3: tried to do with his book is to try and
Speaker 3: look at the balance between the profit motive, the commercial motive,
Speaker 3: and the role of proper public interest journalism in a
Speaker 3: democracy and whether they can coexist. And sometimes they can,
Speaker 3: and often throughout history they haven't, and that's been I
Speaker 3: think a real tragedy for democracy.
Speaker 2: That quote is Lachlan Murdock, in that moment, giving a
Speaker 2: narration at the State Library of Victoria, was actively taking
Speaker 2: issue with previous comments you've made, picking a fight with
Speaker 2: you personally, and I want to get to Lachlan and
Speaker 2: his family in a but before we get there, it
Speaker 2: seems to me that when we talk about media again
Speaker 2: and again, the thing that we talk about is whether
Speaker 2: the business model is possible or whether it's irreparably broken.
Speaker 2: Was there ever a time when the business model made
Speaker 2: sense and didn't compromise what it did?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? I mean I was lucky enough to start my
Speaker 3: career and live a lot of my particularly newspaper career,
Speaker 3: in what I would regard as the golden age of media,
Speaker 3: both business models and therefore journalism. And they were the
Speaker 3: days when newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald or the
Speaker 3: Melbourne Age would produce two hundred pages of classified ads
Speaker 3: every Saturday and would make millions and millions of dollars
Speaker 3: of profit every Saturday from those ads. And they had owners,
Speaker 3: the Fairfax family for over a century, who saw their
Speaker 3: role as yes, owners and business people, but also as
Speaker 3: participants in the civic life and the democratic life of
Speaker 3: their country. And so they were able to get that
Speaker 3: balance right. Other media moguls, through history and even up
Speaker 3: to now, and especially now, in some ways don't get
Speaker 3: that balance right in my view at all. All they
Speaker 3: focus on is the profit motive.
Speaker 2: So did that Golden Age, those kind of rivers of
Speaker 2: classified advertising gold mean that it distorted our idea of
Speaker 2: what people valued when it came to the news. Did
Speaker 2: it mean that we never fully understood the relationship between
Speaker 2: a civil society and its press.
Speaker 1: Look.
Speaker 3: I think for journalists it was a foundation stone to
Speaker 3: enable them to do their work properly and do it independently.
Speaker 3: For the consumers of news, it was a different era,
Speaker 3: not just because of that business model. In fact, the
Speaker 3: change in business model was when advertising, classified advertising and
Speaker 3: other forms of display advertising migrated from those print newspapers
Speaker 3: to digital and then to social media. And so what
Speaker 3: that has meant is not only has the revenue that
Speaker 3: supported quality journalism almost disappeared now, but it means that
Speaker 3: the landscape for consuming news and being interested in news,
Speaker 3: and the competition for people's time that essentially didn't exist
Speaker 3: before the Internet now makes it an entirely different landscape
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons that in that lecture Lochlin Murdock
Speaker 2: was having a gou is that two years prior you'd
Speaker 2: given the andro Olli lecture, and in that you'd drawn
Speaker 2: a kind of distinction between serious journalism and other journalism,
Speaker 2: and the ways in which those lofty ideals for the
Speaker 2: kind of newspaper that CII is like Melbourne or Sydney
Speaker 2: should be able to sustain were compromised and we're being
Speaker 2: consistently compromised. If it's not the business model that compromises them.
Speaker 3: What It's a whole lot of things that have changed
Speaker 3: in the world, I think, not least social media. I
Speaker 3: mean social media has transformed not just the media landscape
Speaker 3: and not just the media consumption landscape, but it's transformed
Speaker 3: the way that people think about issues. And it's turned
Speaker 3: people who would otherwise have depended on a small amount
Speaker 3: of reliable media, it's turned them into partisans. I mean
Speaker 3: everyone now has an op ed column, as it were,
Speaker 3: and so that changes entirely the way that journalism is
Speaker 3: consumed and thought about.
Speaker 2: It never ceases to amaze me the ways in which
Speaker 2: if you survey consumers of media and journalism, which I'm
Speaker 2: sure you've done many times in your career, they'll say, oh,
Speaker 2: these things are important to now, these are what I'll read.
Speaker 2: But now, in the age of the Internet, when we
Speaker 2: can track what stories they read and which ones they
Speaker 2: read to the end, the disconnect between the things that
Speaker 2: general populace says they want from their journalism and the
Speaker 2: stuff that they engage with or consume. There's a pretty
Speaker 2: big chasm between those two things, isn't it?
Speaker 3: Absolutely and I think that what you've really done is
Speaker 3: make another point here, which is so important for people
Speaker 3: not just in the media, but consumers of the media
Speaker 3: and people who care about the state of civic society
Speaker 3: should be aware of. Is that media now has rapidly
Speaker 3: changed in the last few years and is heading in
Speaker 3: this direction so fast. Media now has become niche. It's
Speaker 3: only niche. Even the New York Times, with ten million subscribers,
Speaker 3: is actually in its marketplace, which is the world is
Speaker 3: a niche. The old newspapers that used to sell hundreds
Speaker 3: and hundreds of thousands of copies a day now sell
Speaker 3: tens of thousands of copies to day to very old
Speaker 3: people largely, and I'm old, so I can say that.
Speaker 3: But they are niches. Everything is a niche. And so
Speaker 3: if you look at what the mass market is interested in,
Speaker 3: it exists, but it largely exists on social media and
Speaker 3: it's certainly not news journalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of the things that I so fondly remember
Speaker 2: about working closely with you and you know, our time
Speaker 2: together and getting the wheelis Center established was that attitude
Speaker 2: of willingness to kind of take a risk and do
Speaker 2: something because there was a gap that needed to be filled,
Speaker 2: you know, that desire to actually make a social and
Speaker 2: cultural difference in the thing that was made. That the
Speaker 2: profitability the viability of it mattered at all times, but
Speaker 2: that the driving impulse was how do we make this
Speaker 2: space better thanks to the work that we're doing. And
Speaker 2: I think it's interesting for someone who spent their career
Speaker 2: in journalism and in newspapers overwhelmingly that you still carry
Speaker 2: that energy that's that's what you do, because it seems
Speaker 2: at odds with so much of what we see from
Speaker 2: our media.
Speaker 3: Yes, I guess it's I don't know how or why
Speaker 3: it was inculcated in me, but I did have that.
Speaker 3: I mean, it wasn't quite recklessness because I've always approached
Speaker 3: whatever the risky projects that I was involved with, including
Speaker 3: the Wheeler Center, with the view that you push the
Speaker 3: boundaries really hard creatively and commercially, but you do it
Speaker 3: understanding what would happen in the worst case scenario, so
Speaker 3: you try and put some kind of safety limit underneath
Speaker 3: it to make sure that it can't actually fall over
Speaker 3: the cliff. And if you can get those two things right,
Speaker 3: it seems to me that that's the best mix, rather
Speaker 3: than being all bravado and just doing it and suddenly
Speaker 3: you see the cliff, or being so cautious that you
Speaker 3: never get anywhere near the cliff.
Speaker 2: I think that relationship between the two is really important.
Speaker 2: But when you were describing your career before, you're a
Speaker 2: great pains to refer to yourself as a media owner
Speaker 2: rather than as a mogul. And I want to know,
Speaker 2: is that just a question of scale or is that
Speaker 2: a question of attitude both?
Speaker 3: I think. I mean it's certainly a question of scale.
Speaker 3: I think media moguls, to the extent that they are
Speaker 3: defined formally, need to have significant scale. I mean, in
Speaker 3: today's dollar terms, they need to be running organizations and
Speaker 3: empires that are billions and billions of dollars. So in
Speaker 3: the book, I actually delineate between media moguls and media magnates.
Speaker 3: And then, as some of my friends describe me, I'm
Speaker 3: a media mongrel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems like a good slating scale. After the break,
Speaker 2: Eric reveals his favorite media moguls and why this book
Speaker 2: won't be his last. We'll be right back. Part of
Speaker 2: the central thesis of the Men Who Killed News is
Speaker 2: about the centrality, as the name would suggest, of these
Speaker 2: moguls of the individuals who, through their application of their power,
Speaker 2: completely shaped and defined the way we understood news were
Speaker 2: the men who killed the news. Also the men who
Speaker 2: made the news.
Speaker 3: They were, I mean, the basic thesis of this book
Speaker 3: that has struck me for I spent two years working
Speaker 3: as an editor for Rupert Murdoch in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: and then I left because my social and ethical conscience
Speaker 3: didn't allow me to stay, and I left. And ever
Speaker 3: since then I've both observed and to some extent, participated
Speaker 3: in what I describe as a loophole in democracy. And
Speaker 3: that loophole is that democratic countries provide significant support for
Speaker 3: a free press, in the sense that in America it's
Speaker 3: the First Amendment constitution. Most European countries have free press
Speaker 3: support in their constitutions. In Australia and England it's a
Speaker 3: bit different, but it still exists. And so what that
Speaker 3: means is the press has a privileged position in society,
Speaker 3: as it should have to hold power to account and
Speaker 3: to really make democracy the sort of vibrant force that
Speaker 3: it should be. But on the other side of the
Speaker 3: ledger there are absolutely no regulations, laws, ethical guidelines. There's
Speaker 3: nothing to control or to regulate the way that the
Speaker 3: owners of the free press operate, and so it's entirely
Speaker 3: up to the conscience of individuals to decide how they
Speaker 3: get that balance right. And the media moguls who decided
Speaker 3: that they were in it for money and power, not
Speaker 3: for the role of the free press, were able to
Speaker 3: achieve money and power. But the price that was paid
Speaker 3: in those democracies, I think has been enormous and continues
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 2: Some of the characters in this book, it's a strange
Speaker 2: way to kind of talk about it, but are very
Speaker 2: richly drawn, and it seems to me there's a certain
Speaker 2: amount of pleasure in on earthing they're peccadillos and their monstrousness.
Speaker 2: Do you have favorites? Do you like if you were
Speaker 2: collecting football cards or their moguls, so you'd want to
Speaker 2: kind of keep in your album.
Speaker 3: Well, before I answer that, I should just mention that
Speaker 3: they're not all bad. There are some good moguls, and
Speaker 3: the Ox Sulzburger family who owns the New York Times,
Speaker 3: are good moguls. I think the Fairfax family in this country,
Speaker 3: who no longer have media holdings, although they have a
Speaker 3: small interest in my company, and I should declare that
Speaker 3: I think we're really good moguls. Lord Thompson, the Canadian
Speaker 3: who then went on to own the London Times, was
Speaker 3: a really good mogul. So there were good moguls as well.
Speaker 3: The others, however, in my view, always put their own
Speaker 3: interests ahead of the public interest. Are their favorites well,
Speaker 3: I mean it depends what the criteria are. I mean,
Speaker 3: you couldn't invent a character like Robert Maxwell, both the
Speaker 3: way he lived and the way he died. Lord Beaverbrook
Speaker 3: was a media mogul from Central Casting, and the stories
Speaker 3: about him are just so entertaining. The TV series Succession
Speaker 3: tries to tap this and does to a large extent
Speaker 3: tap it. And when people ask me what do I
Speaker 3: think of Succession? Wasn't it a fantastic story? I say
Speaker 3: to them, well, to me, it was a documentary.
Speaker 2: At the very top, you have a kind of list,
Speaker 2: almost like a Russian novel, of here are the key
Speaker 2: players who you need to know and how they connect,
Speaker 2: and you're very ineffably, Eric Beecher, I am the way
Speaker 2: that you sum them up. I particularly took issue with
Speaker 2: the where you described Conrad Black, which made me laugh,
Speaker 2: which was Canadian publisher controlled the global quality newspapers, pompous
Speaker 2: and verbose author, stole from his company, jailed, And it
Speaker 2: seems to me that construction suggests that verbosity is a
Speaker 2: product of being an author, just as being jailed as
Speaker 2: a product of stealing from your company.
Speaker 3: Well, Conrad Black was never the biggest media mogul in
Speaker 3: history in terms of the size of his empire, although
Speaker 3: at its peak it was quite extensive. But he was
Speaker 3: certainly in the top two or three most colorful media moguls.
Speaker 3: And he's still alive. He's still writing columns in Canada.
Speaker 3: He's still a member of the House of Lords. He's
Speaker 3: discredited in his home country Canada. He's not allowed to
Speaker 3: travel to the US because he had a jail term there.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can't make these things up.
Speaker 2: That is a great way to end your life as
Speaker 2: a media proprietors in exile but still writing column You
Speaker 2: get to do both things exactly. One of the things
Speaker 2: that you clearly in this book have a lot of
Speaker 2: belief in an affection for, and I know this about
Speaker 2: you and the way you've conducted yourself in your career
Speaker 2: is the writer, the journalist the person who's actually crafted
Speaker 2: the story and put it out there. And it seems
Speaker 2: to me that many of the threats across decades that
Speaker 2: you run through here are threats of delivery mechanism, their
Speaker 2: threats a business model, but they're not threats to the
Speaker 2: purity of the telling the story in the first place.
Speaker 2: But what we're facing now with the rise of AI
Speaker 2: is an existential threat to writers.
Speaker 3: Look it looks like it is. I think it's far
Speaker 3: too early to be in any way definitive about how
Speaker 3: this is going to play out, just as it was
Speaker 3: when the Internet arrived on our doorsteps, you know, twenty
Speaker 3: five years ago or whenever it was. AI in theory
Speaker 3: and in some place in practice has the capacity and
Speaker 3: the ability to replace certain kinds of journalism. But will
Speaker 3: people trust that If it's not proved to be either
Speaker 3: accurate or incisive, or intelligent or serious, serious readers won't
Speaker 3: trust it. The people it will be vulnerable are people
Speaker 3: who aren't serious about their consumption of news and journalism.
Speaker 3: So we just don't know yet. But I think we
Speaker 3: need to prepare for the worst, and that requires governments
Speaker 3: regulating and legislating. We need to impose copyright principles across AI.
Speaker 3: We need to do all of those things because at
Speaker 3: the end of the day, it's only humans who can
Speaker 3: create the kind of content that is going to both
Speaker 3: satisfy and enlighten other humans.
Speaker 2: The book was more than ten years in the making,
Speaker 2: and I'm curious about whether in the writing of it
Speaker 2: there were surprises for you, or whether it confirmed things
Speaker 2: that you'd long known and suspected about the industry that
Speaker 2: you've given your life to.
Speaker 3: There were no real surprises in the direction that I found,
Speaker 3: and most of us who follow these things know about
Speaker 3: that direction. What surprised and to some extent, alarmed me
Speaker 3: was the scale of it, the layers of it, and
Speaker 3: the way that it's become normalized and accepted. And I
Speaker 3: understand why that might be, because most normal citizens, including
Speaker 3: politicians and political leaders and business leaders, feel they can't
Speaker 3: do anything about it, so they have to live with
Speaker 3: the beast rather than tame the beast. But when you
Speaker 3: look at the cumulative effect, which is what I've done
Speaker 3: in this book, from really the late eighteen hundreds, when
Speaker 3: the first big kind of newspapers started to evolve, until
Speaker 3: you know, the third decade of this century, where we
Speaker 3: have social media, and we have Fox News and whatever.
Speaker 3: The cumulative effect has just been horrific, and that surprised
Speaker 3: me the scale of it.
Speaker 2: At the end of writing this book, are you more
Speaker 2: or less optimistic about the prospect of the kind of
Speaker 2: journalism you believe in having a future.
Speaker 3: I'm far less optimistic about it happening at scale, and
Speaker 3: indeed that's not what's happening. But I remain in some
Speaker 3: ways even more optimistic of it happening in important pockets
Speaker 3: because the business model now requires the consumers and readers
Speaker 3: and viewers of quality journalism to pay for it in
Speaker 3: a way that they didn't before. They used to pay
Speaker 3: for their newspaper, but it was subsidized heavily by the advertising.
Speaker 3: It means that the people who end up paying for
Speaker 3: it and consuming it take it very soon seriously, and
Speaker 3: they can fund to a limited but a big enough
Speaker 3: degree the resources needed to do it well. So it's
Speaker 3: a bit of both.
Speaker 2: Now you know you've got a book on the front
Speaker 2: of the shelves of the bookshops, in the library, whatever.
Speaker 2: Now do you have a yen to write a follow
Speaker 2: up book? Books? Where you're going to spend the next
Speaker 2: few years.
Speaker 3: Well, I really really enjoyed it. I mean, I've been
Speaker 3: writing journalism and editing journalism all my life, but writing
Speaker 3: a one hundred thousand word book is a different proposition.
Speaker 2: And it's flying business class. You can stretch your legs out.
Speaker 3: It's flying first class, actually, Michael, and you can really
Speaker 3: stretch your legs out. But it was really satisfying. So
Speaker 3: I've enjoyed that. I am thinking about another project. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure what it will be.
Speaker 2: Eric Beacher, thank you for your time.
Speaker 3: Thanks Michael.
Speaker 2: Eric Beach's book The Men Who Killed the News is
Speaker 2: available now.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Eric Beacher on read this. For
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