Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee 

Sub-committee on Online Harms and Disinformation

Oral evidence: Misinformation and trusted voices, HC 597

Tuesday 7 March 2023

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 7 March 2023.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Damian Green (Chair); Kevin Brennan; Clive Efford; Dr Rupa Huq; Simon Jupp; John Nicolson; Giles Watling.

Questions 354 - 443

Witnesses

I: David Dinsmore, Chief Operating Officer, News UK; Nick Hopkins, Executive Editor of News, The Guardian; Alison Phillips, Editor, Daily Mirror; and Peter Wright, Editor Emeritus, DMG Media.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: David Dinsmore, Nick Hopkins, Alison Phillips and Peter Wright.

Q354       Chair: This is a meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. It is part of our investigation into misinformation and trusted voices.

We have four witnesses this morning. Thank you all very much for coming. We have David Dinsmore, the Chief Operating Officer at News UK, Alison Phillips, Editor, Daily Mirror, Nick Hopkins, Executive Editor of News at The Guardian, and Peter Wright, Editor Emeritus of DMG Media.

I should declare that I used to work for The Times, a long time ago. Does anyone else want to declare any interests?

John Nicolson: Yes, I have written as a freelancer for The Guardian and I have presented as a radio host for TalkRadio.

Q355       Chair: Anyone else? Well, thank you. Let’s start off and first explain to our guests that a lot of the discussions we have been having in this inquiry have been about coverage in newspapers, broadcasting and online during the pandemic when, clearly, the quality of news and information being given was genuinely a matter of life and death for the whole country so that was an area of great sensitivity.

Going along the line of witnesses, who did your organisation look to for reliable advice during the pandemic?

David Dinsmore: Good morning. We would have gone to a number of sources during the pandemic. There were daily briefings from the Government, daily briefings from scientists and science-based organisations from within the UK and further afield. We would have had that daily drumbeat of information, but our journalists were also given the scope to go and find different angles and themes and were also encouraged to write longer-form pieces so they could, as one put it, get away from the fog of the story and into the nuance.

There were all kinds of sources for a big global story like that, in fact probably the biggest global story that we have seen in our lifetimes. Bringing it down to where to go for information is very difficult, because the information was all around and there were so many different angles to it.

Q356       Chair: That is a fair point. Let me ask a slightly different question: did you discover, quickly, who was reliable and who was not?

Nick Hopkins: No, I don’t think we did. We encourage all our correspondents to canvass as many experts in the field as possible. What we discovered—and this was by the nature of the fact that this was a new virus—was that no one had full understanding or knowledge at any particular time.

I think some organisations came out better than others in terms of the information they gave us. I am thinking about the ONS and the UK Health Security Agency. The Science Media Centre was an invaluable resource in terms of giving different voices at specific times during the pandemic. In talking to our science editor, Ian Sample, and one of his colleagues, Nicola Davis, just before this session, it was very clear to me that they did not feel they could trust any particular source without at least trying to triangulate with other experts.

Alison Phillips: I had a conversation before this session with our health editor, Martin Bagot, who was the person in the field. To Nick’s point, there was some concern at the beginning of the pandemic because it was so unknown. Fairly quickly, however, the daily briefings were extremely useful and I think the other major advantage we had was the Science Media Centre, which Nick mentioned. It was always there as a backstop when people wanted to sense-check anything they were hearing from lots of different sources. They were hugely important.

As with all journalism, at the beginning, if you have a source and you are not entirely certain whether it is going to be right or wrong, you check it and you check it again, and it becomes clear which ones you can keep going back to, that are reliable and are the closest. However, as we have seen subsequently, there were lots of different perspectives and it was very much the case of feeling our way but we feel that with the daily briefings with the MRHA, Public Health England, they were there and there was certainly a lot of information available to us.

Peter Wright: I would give a very similar answer. We had a lot of journalists—not just medical and science correspondents—working on this. I worked out that at one point, 80% of our online content was covid-related in one way or another. Information was coming in from all over the world.

Some aspects of the daily briefings and Government policy seemed fairly incontrovertible, such as the vaccine programme, although there were people out there who were decrying it. On other aspects, such as lockdown—and I am sure we will get on to The Telegraph revelations this week—clearly, the science was completely unsettled and that was the sense we had at the time.

We looked a lot at what other countries were doing—the experience of Sweden, New Zealand, and China; at different ends of the spectrum—and tried to work out what was working. However, it was evolving. Nobody knew the answers to begin with and probably don’t now.

Q357       Chair: You correctly identified two of my obvious follow-ups, which are the same questions but with different contexts.

First, did you ever—and in retrospect, should you have—allowed anti-vax voices any publicity? Apart from reporting demos and things like that, did you allow the opinion that the vaccines were Bill Gates putting chips into us or anything like that, any publicity?

Peter Wright: Someone will now produce some story that we wrote but it certainly always seemed to me—and I am not the editor—that the case for vaccines was extremely strong and that lockdown was only a stopgap measure.

I remember doubts were expressed about the safety of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, which of course we had to report, but I don’t think we ever gave any credence to the uninformed, emotional anti-vaccine message. There was a lot of noise about anti-vaxxers, and I did slightly wonder at the time whether the amount of coverage the subject was given was counterproductive because it was encouraging people to think perhaps there was something in it, but no.

Alison Phillips: No, is the short answer. However, we were very conscious indeed of the volume of anti-vax content that was out there and circulating on social media, particularly in WhatsApp groups, which I think is a serious issue because it goes unseen. It particularly, perhaps, goes unseen by people in the mainstream media, people like yourselves perhaps [laughter]—

Chair: Not all WhatsApp—

Alison Phillips: —not all WhatsApp groups—but the idea about how information circulates that can be unseen by a lot of people in power, quite often, we became very aware of that because particularly some of the people who may have fallen under the influence of that information are people who traditionally would have come to a mainstream tabloid organisation. We always take the opinion with something like that. You cannot just tell everybody that they are stupid, so we did a lot of myth-busting, Q&As, trying to explain why certain information was wrong and trying to put the facts out there in a way that was not telling everyone that they were stupid, because that is the only way you can counteract misinformation.

Chair: The Guardian has a different market.

Alison Phillips: Yes.

Chair: How did you deal with it?

Nick Hopkins: We took the same approach—from my recollection in news—that we wanted to interrogate where this was coming from, who was speaking the anti-vax message, what were their credentials, what was the background to them, to unwrap the issue in that kind of context. We couldn’t just completely ignore it but neither did we want to give a platform to conspiracy theorists.

Chair: David Dinsmore? You are coming at it from both ends of the market.

David Dinsmore: I think it is also important to point out that, unlike Nick Hopkins and Alison Phillips, I am not currently at the sharp end of editing newspapers, which I have done in the past. I agree with everything that has been said. Also, during the pandemic, the Government chose to do a lot of advertising and messaging through news brands, because it was found that the message had a lot more trust and credence as a result of being in that trusted environment. There is no doubt that news brands played a very important role during the pandemic in getting out reliable information as people were crying out for it because there was so much misinformation or the anti-vax message and there was a lot of debate also around lockdown.

We would certainly have surfaced the lockdown debate because I think that was probably more debatable, if I can put it like that. On the whole, however, it was, "Here is what we think is the consensus approach; here is the myth-busting if you are wondering about it; this is probably, with the best information we have available to us, the way that we should be moving forward at this point in time”.

Q358       Chair: You make a point about lockdown and clearly this week’s revelations make it more relevant. In retrospect, I am struck that no paper started campaigning against lockdown as a tool, despite all the arguments about Sweden and other countries that did it. In retrospect, do you think that the anti-lockdown argument was underplayed by mainstream papers?

David Dinsmore: It is so easy to have an opinion with hindsight. We were in the midst of something that we had never encountered before. No one knew what it was going to do to us. The country was genuinely in a state of fear. There was a real danger that the NHS was going to fall over. Those were all the arguments as to why we should be locking down and I think it was important that the country got behind that policy.

There was consensus in Parliament and I think consensus in the general population. As things then went further, you could possibly have made the argument that we did not need the third or fourth lockdowns—possibly—but it had got us that far and we have come out the other end of it reasonably intact. We should always be asking questions but at the same time, where there is a national need, I think you get behind that need.

Nick Hopkins: My recollection is that there were some voices, fringe voices, that were anti-lockdown, but, as David says, it is easy to forget, now, that it felt that we were in a state of panic, a state of emergency. You can look back with hindsight and think all manner of different things but, at the time, our mortality rates were very high, our hospitals were full and that was what we, and I think most people, were focused on. It is only now that the pandemic is subsiding that those fringe voices have more of a platform.

Alison Phillips: As Nick says, there were some people who were questioning lockdown, particularly when we went to the third and fourth. I think The Telegraph, perhaps, was more questioning of it. However, we have to remember that we serve our audiences. We serve a print audience and a digital audience and probably all of our print audiences are slightly older and more conscious about their health. Take a Daily Mirror print audience and ask them to choose between health and wealth; they will always go with health. Therefore, all the economic arguments about lockdown were of less value than staying alive at that point and we are there to serve our audiences.

When you get to a digital audience, perhaps slightly younger, more young people who were adversely affected economically and also in terms of things like mental health—and they were the physical effects of covid—that is slightly different as well.

In hindsight, yes, possibly more questions could have been asked about lockdown and the impacts, particularly on younger people, but they did start to come out, I think, towards the end of it all.

Q359       Chair: The Daily Mail, you would have thought, might be on the anti-lockdown edge of the argument.

Peter Wright: I think we became increasingly sceptical and we were certainly worried, very worried, about the effect on education, on children, and the effect on the economy and whether it was working. That is one of the reasons that we devoted quite a lot of effort to looking at countries like Sweden that were handling it differently.

This is opinion rather than reporting, but certainly my friend Peter Hitchens on The Mail on Sunday was very sceptical all along. There were always sceptical voices. However, I do agree with my colleagues that, whatever we have now learned, it is hard to see what the Government could have done at the beginning, given how little we knew about all this and the fact that there was no vaccine available.

Q360       Chair: Is that what it felt like at the time? This is an inquiry into trusted voices, and David made the point that you each have a different market and you want your readers to trust you and, particularly, in the context of an online world where all kinds of craziness is going on and a lot of people are believing it. Did you see the role as very much saying, “Hang on; don’t believe these mad voices. We have actually done some proper journalism on this” so even in a climate of deep uncertainty about what would happen next—because the whole world didn’t know anything about this pandemic—that you had that role to play?

Peter Wright: I think we did on the vaccine and we were very sceptical about some of the miracle cures that were being touted.

Chair: Bleach.

Peter Wright: Yes. Even there, there were occasionally contradictory stories from possibly reputable sources that had to be looked into. I repeat: I cannot really see what else the Government could have done. I don’t think the Government could have stood there and said, “The answer to this is herd immunity”, which in the end it is, “and therefore a lot of British citizens are going to lose their lives because we won’t achieve it straight away”. You could not have done that.

We were certainly sceptical and critical of the way lockdown applied to care homes. There was a lot of concern about that.

Q361       Dr Rupa Huq: We will continue on some of these themes. You are from different titles, different traditions, and different politics. In this day and age, you are competing with different stuff and I imagine that circulations are declining from the heyday of Fleet Street. What do people who still reliably buy a newspaper look for? Peter Wright—Metro—is that the one with the biggest circulation because people can just pick it up on the tube every morning without paying? What are the circulation figures? Who reads it, compared with the Daily Mail and the online versions, for all of you?

Peter Wright: Metro was hit very badly by lockdown, as you can imagine; very badly indeed. Before lockdown, it was the biggest by circulation. Metro appeals to young people because it is a commuter newspaper and its policy is to be very straightforward in its reporting of news. It will give you short stories without spin and try to keep as close to common ground as it possibly can. The Daily Mail, by contrast—the newspaper rather than online—has an older readership, it is a campaigning paper, it has a political view and is not afraid of expressing it. The MailOnline has a much younger audience—

Q362       Dr Rupa Huq: Is it still the most-read website in the world? For a while it was, wasn’t it?

Peter Wright: It was the most-read newspaper website. The BBC is bigger but, yes, I was just checking the latest figures. There are 180 million unique visitors every month.

Q363       Dr Rupa Huq: How does that compare with the print newspaper?

Peter Wright: The newspaper, I think, currently sells somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 copies, and for readership, you can multiply that by two and a half.

Q364       Dr Rupa Huq: And the Mail on Sunday? Is that a bit more because of the colour magazine?

Peter Wright: No, slightly less.

Q365       Dr Rupa Huq: Oh, really? Okay, and Metro? What’s that? Is that the biggest of all?

Peter Wright: I am afraid I do not have the figure but it is in a similar region.

Q366       Dr Rupa Huq: And that 600,000 to 700,000 is down on what it was a couple of decades ago?

Peter Wright: When I left the Mail on Sunday in 2012, we were selling 2 million and the Daily Mail was selling something similar. In its heyday, some Sundays we sold over 2.5 million. I am sure everybody along here will tell you exactly the same story. I am afraid newspapers will not be with us forever. The problem is that the advertising has gone online, all the marginal costs have increased, newsprint is more expensive because we are buying it in smaller quantities. The paper industry has serious problems and, if you are not taking advertising revenue, you have to put your cover price up and cover price has become a larger percentage of our revenue. Then of course when you put the cover price up, you lose sales. It is inevitable. I doubt if anyone has a different story to tell, I am afraid.

Dr Rupa Huq: Alison?

Alison Phillips: Yes, sadly, we do not have a different story to tell. Print circulation has gone down, but digital—the Daily Mirror is reaching more people, in many ways, than it ever has done. We will get 10 million hits a day on our website, so there is the opportunity that we are reaching a younger audience. We are almost playing those audiences—I like to think our digital audience and our print audience are like a father and son; they share the same values and the same beliefs but they might wear different clothes. That is the way we operate.

In print, as Peter says, due to cover-price increases, which we have seen many of, unfortunately, we are losing readers but there is a huge loyalty among those people who do stay. In many ways, we almost regard the Daily Mirror as a kind of club that just so happens to bring out a daily news product because there is a sense of belonging. That was hugely powerful in the early days of covid. When people were not even leaving their homes, our sales really held up during covid.

If people were going out for one thing, it was to go out and buy a paper because that was their connection to the world. Also, it was something that allowed people to fill their days. It was something to do. We felt our role in people’s lives grew enormously during that period and our relationship with our print readers grew enormously as well, even though it has always been strong.

There is that, but obviously so much of the work that we are trying to do—as I am sure my colleagues are doing—is to replicate that kind of depth of relationship with our digital readers but of course the way people access digital news is quite different. Largely, people reach digital news through their Facebook feed or their social media platforms, whatever they use. It is much more of a pick-and-mix. Somebody picks up their phone in the morning and goes onto Facebook and they might see one story from the Daily Mail, the next story from the Daily Mirror and the next story from the Guardian.

It is a very different relationship and it is much harder to build that loyalty. The dream is that people wake up in the morning and go to a destination website. The Guardian has gone a long way in that regard, and obviously the BBC has cleaned up because it is free, but that is how we are all trying to get those relationships digitally.

Q367       Dr Rupa Huq: Are younger people not in the habit of picking up a newspaper anymore?

Alison Phillips: Oh, no. No, but that is fine as long as people are accessing their news somewhere. The harder bit is not as much that they are not picking up a newspaper; it is more that they have grown up not recognising the need to pay for news. That is where it gets very difficult.

Dr Rupa Huq: It is Metro’s fault.

Alison Phillips: Well, it is digital, really. Yes.

Q368       Dr Rupa Huq: Out of interest, what is the circulation?

Alison Phillips: We are around about 330 now.

Dr Rupa Huq: The Guardian?

Nick Hopkins: I cannot give the circulation figures because, as head of news, it is not something that I necessarily keep details of. I can certainly get them to you.

Q369       Dr Rupa Huq: I imagine that it is pretty big because you are not behind a paywall, are you?

Nick Hopkins: Our readership online is huge; regularly we are between 40 and 50 million readers, or page views, a day. During covid, it was much higher still than that. We saw a massive spike in traffic throughout the pandemic.

Like everyone else, I know there has been a gradual decline in our paper readership through that time but we do have loyal readers of The Guardian, and we don’t think they are necessarily the same readers as the ones we have online.

Q370       Dr Rupa Huq: How do you keep them? The crosswords?

Nick Hopkins: I would say that The Guardian is a terrific mix of very-trusted news—and I think our news throughout the pandemic was very highly regarded and very well trusted, from the research that has been done on that—and it has always been a good mix of news, investigations, and highly-opinionated pieces in our opinions section and people still like it.

Q371       Dr Rupa Huq: David, how do you straddle the divide between the quality, the tabloids, and what do people who stuck with it look for in a newspaper?

David Dinsmore: I want to tell a positive story about this. I think you should not think in terms of print and digital; I think you should think in terms of total audience.

Q372       Dr Rupa Huq: You are behind a paywall?

David Dinsmore: On The Times, yes.

We have an organisation called PAMCo, which I think stands for the Publishers Audience Measurement Company, which does an independent survey a couple of times a year, which gives total audiences of newspapers and de-dupes print and digital so you get to the right figure. In terms of total audience, The Sun is the biggest in the country, at around 30 million; the Daily Mirror is just behind that and the Daily Mail is just behind that.

Q373       Dr Rupa Huq: This is hits on the internet, yes?

David Dinsmore: Both; print and digital, so looking at the total audience, the number of people who consume the brand at a point in the month. That is where you get to that total audience number. It is a huge reach.

I was looking at some figures earlier. In the 15 to 34 age group, which would be predominantly digital, as news brands we are reaching 14 million across print and online every month, which is 6 million more than Snapchat and 5 million more than TikTok. Now you would be forgiven for thinking everybody was on TikTok and Snapchat but they are consuming our content in greater numbers, which is a really good story.

Another thing is the evolution of news and how it has changed in recent years. Take The Times, for example. It still has a strong print sale that will go from about 300,000 during the week up to 500,000 at the weekend.

Q374       Dr Rupa Huq: The Sunday Times?

David Dinsmore: The Sunday Times is about that. Saturday is the biggest selling day of the week, except for The Times, where The Sunday Times outstrips it, but the Daily Mail’s biggest sale is on a Saturday. It does over 1 million; The Sun does over 1 million on a Saturday as well. Saturday is the new Sunday in that respect.

The Times has evolved from being a print product alone to having a website, apps and now a radio station as well, to increase its reach. We launched Times Radio—at the height of the pandemic as it happens—which has opened us up to a new audience but has also given our journalists another way to reach their existing audience.

What were traditionally newspapers, we now refer to as news brands with different ways of communicating and that is what the audiences require.

Q375       Dr Rupa Huq: How do you keep your readers of the print version? Page 3 has gone, I think, hasn’t it?

David Dinsmore: Page 3 has gone, since 2015. Again, there is no doubt that print sales are declining but there is still a loyal base there, predominantly in the over-50, over-60 category. When you get into the over-70 category, the use of the internet, among our readership and I think the Mirror—in fact, I know the Mirror is similar—is very low, so in that C to D and E demographic, internet use is not a daily habit. They will not have smartphones and will rely on print to get their information, so it is important that we keep print alive for that demographic for the next couple of decades.

Q376       Dr Rupa Huq: To you all: how did the elements of what people look for in a newspaper inform your covid coverage compared with the Brexit coverage? Were you trying to reflect what your readers were thinking or did you see it as more about informing what the Government line was, compared with the big stories?

David Dinsmore: I think the predominant feeling among the readership and across the country was one of fear as we went into covid. What did it mean? What does it mean for me? What does it mean for my family? How do I protect myself? How do I protect my family? Those were the pretty basic questions that we were trying to answer. I think news brands played a blinder during the pandemic period.

As Peter said, basically every journalist was working on this story and trying to produce as much trusted and trustworthy information as possible, asking questions when there were questions there to be asked but also getting across the key messages when they did have to be got across. The Sun launched its “Jabs Army” campaign on 1 January 2021, which was about how to get volunteers to help out at vaccination centres and I think within 18 days had signed up 60,000 people. That showed the convening power of The Sun but also the trust that people had in The Sun, that they wanted to get involved, wanted to help out. All those things helped to build the narrative of how we approached it.

Q377       Dr Rupa Huq: With Brexit, is it the case that The Scottish Sun was a remainer title compared to The Sun in the rest of the country? Do you mould according to your readership?

David Dinsmore: Our editors have the freedom to talk to the audiences that they serve. I have edited both The Scottish Sun and The Sun in London. We did approach things in different ways because they are different countries with different Parliaments, different organisations, and different cultures.

Nick Hopkins: I do have some figures for you. I didn’t want to give you misleading ones. The circulation of The Guardian is around 100,000 and, according to the PAMCo print and online metric, which David just mentioned, we are at 24.6 million unique users.

Q378       Dr Rupa Huq: It is going towards a pay model, is it, or not, so they know who you are?

Nick Hopkins: No, I don’t think we are.

Dr Rupa Huq: I think it says, "Register here".

Nick Hopkins: We look for subscribers but we are very much not behind a paywall. That is not the way we have gone.

In terms of our coverage during the pandemic, the key thing was just: explain, explain, explain. The best-performing pieces, or some of them, were always the ones where we were posing questions to ourselves and getting someone, one of our specialists—science editor or health editor—to answer them. There was a thirst for “What is happening right now?” so the devices of our live blogging, which we have established over a number of years, were very useful in that regard. There was also a thirst for the slightly more reflective pieces—“How do we make sense of what we have just been told?” and the step-back, the explainers, FAQs and so on.

Q379       Dr Rupa Huq: Also podcasts. You do quite a lot of them.

Nick Hopkins: Yes, we do those, too, and that is another good device. Sometimes a news story can seem quite brutal; by necessity, it will have a sharp top and there is a formula to a news story whereas something like an explainer or a conversation, something like “Today in Focus”, allows you to be a bit more conversational.

Q380       Dr Rupa Huq: On Brexit—not so much explaining but opinions?

Nick Hopkins: No, there was a lot of explaining in Brexit and lots of context, as well. In both stories, people were saying things that needed to be interrogated and we did not want to leave the news story on its own; you wanted to bring it out, to step back, reflect on what was being said—“Are we being told the truth? Are we being misled?”

Q381       Dr Rupa Huq: Anything else from the others?

Peter Wright: They are a very different type of story. Covid was all about a thirst for information, which is great in a way for journalists because it is basic journalism; it is reporting fact or trying to discern fact from fiction. We ran a massive campaign to acquire equipment for the NHS, which readers engaged with on a massive scale. It was a very good sort of exercise in both informing readers and empowering them.

Q382       Clive Efford: Thanks for coming to give evidence to us today. The Science Media Centre described science and health reporters as allies in the fight against misinformation. Did you feel the duty to combat misinformation in the way that you reported during the pandemic? How did you balance the need to get the Government’s public messages out with scrutinising and questioning the public messages? Three questions in one there, to move us on a bit. Can I start with David and go across the panel?

David Dinsmore: I think we have touched on quite a lot of this already in terms of the messages that were coming out from science organisations. If messages are coming from a credible science organisation, that gives them a good start but it is not a free pass to “this information is 100% correct”. I think it is the job of journalists and news organisations to challenge the fringes. Let’s face it, if we based our financial future on the consensus of economists, it would probably not be the best way forward.

I was listening to Times Radio this morning, to Tom Whipple, our science editor, who played a big role in the pandemic coverage. He was talking about editing genomes of gut bacteria and I thought it was a classic case of science reporting. He was using phrases such as, “there is a growing body of evidence”, “it is linked to”, and “there are claims”. The thing about science is, we don’t know exactly what is happening and how it is going to turn out. When we are reporting these things, we are giving them credence but there is always a big question mark at the end of the sentence, if that makes sense to you, and I think that is an important thing to understand about the role of the journalist.

Q383       Clive Efford: Did the need to provide a balanced range of information, if I can put it that way, during the pandemic—when people needed to understand what was going on and there was clearly a need for public messaging to advise about lockdowns and accepting the vaccine and so on—stay your hand at all in your usual scrutiny of a Government?

David Dinsmore: No. I think so much work was being done on so many different aspects of the story—literally, no stone was unturned—so, no, I don’t think it did. I certainly wasn’t aware of stories being pulled or that sort of thing. That was just not the case. As recent months have come to pass, not much has emerged to show that we took the wrong decisions at the time.

Nick Hopkins: The thing is, you can do both, can’t you? You can report the news and then interrogate the news and that is what we tried to do. I don’t think that at any point during the pandemic, did we ever decide we were not going to run a story. We stuck the boot into Matt Hancock repeatedly; we highlighted what we regarded as concerns over VIP lanes and chumocracy and the scandals within the procurement of PPE.

I felt we could do both and certainly our science correspondents are among the most inquisitive and, in some ways, least-trusting of all our correspondents. They will listen to one expert and then immediately get on the phone and want to talk to another one to challenge their opinions. I felt we were in good hands, and I did not feel that the need to report the news at any point prevented us from interrogating it or from highlighting scandals where we thought they existed.

Alison Phillips: It will probably not come as any surprise that the Daily Mirror was deeply sceptical of Boris Johnson’s Government at that point, in many ways. As Nick says, we looked at the way care homes were treated—we did a huge number of stories on that and on PPE; there were a lot of issues that we were very, very strong on at that stage.

However, on the science, the health messaging and the briefings, we trusted Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van-Tam and it was not just the daily briefings that people were seeing on the television; our reporters were also getting off-the-record briefings from those people. There was background and an understanding of what was going on, but then we absolutely interrogated the evidence.

I think my role as an editor is to ask all the questions that people sitting at home are asking when they have seen something on television: “Why are they saying that? How come last week the chief nurse was saying that we were going for herd immunity and now we have all dropped the idea of herd immunity?” We put those questions in day after day. We tried to put them in using a range of experts, and all the information we were getting from sources such as the Science Media Centre to try to fully explain and assure our readers because people wanted to understand. If they do not fully understand, they will never feel any sense of security and at that point, much of our role was to try to create that sense of security.

You can absolutely do as Nick said; you can provide information, which gives people a sense of security, but you can also question a lot of the political decisions that were being made.

Q384       Clive Efford: To the point you made about private briefings from the scientists we were seeing on the news every day, looking back now do you feel that they were full and frank, or that they were trying to manage the information at times?

Alison Phillips: Some interesting things have come out in the last fortnight about the WhatsApp messaging, which last week perhaps did make me question if there were occasions where some of those scientists should have publicly said that they were unhappy. However, I guess they, too, were in a situation whereby they felt that unity and putting on that front to the public was the best idea. Certainly I think they were giving the scientific and health advice we were getting from them at the time to the best of their ability. I guess it was for them whether they had to compromise in some areas that were more around policy, on things such as lockdown.

Peter Wright: We were sceptical about various aspects of the story. That is the easiest way of encapsulating it. This happened as it went along because, when it started we did not know any more than anybody else about all this. We were not in a position where we could possibly have said lockdown was the wrong policy when it was introduced because we simply did not have a body of knowledge about it. Things were being done that one then started to be sceptical about.

I remember in the early days the medical establishment invested an awful lot of hope in ventilators. We did stories about entrepreneurs who were going to produce massive numbers of ventilators and, if we could find a way of building enough ventilators quickly and cheaply enough, this would be the solution. We then began to hear that, actually, ventilators possibly were not saving people’s lives. We sent a reporter to New York, where we interviewed a young doctor working in an intensive care ward in a hospital and he explained to us why he thought they were not the solution. As far as I am aware, ventilators are rarely used in covid cases now.

To begin with, because this is all new, you begin accepting what the medical establishment is accepting and then, as time goes along, you start finding dissenting voices and you go and talk to them.

The other question that we put effort into was the origins of covid. We still do not know for certain, but the possibility that it was a leak from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan was denounced as a conspiracy theory for a long time, to the point where Facebook and Twitter banned posts on the subject. When Joe Biden became President, he instructed the US Government to look at it again and last week the FBI said they think that is now the likely origin. We still do not know, but sometimes you have to ask questions that people do not want you to ask. There were certainly people in the medical establishment who did not want to consider questions like that about how the virus began.

Q385       Clive Efford: We are here discussing trusted voices and people would question us if there was no mention of WhatsApp-gate at all at this Committee this morning. With all your experience, have you ever experienced a time when a politician has become such as trusted source of information as Nick Hancock has over the last week?

David Dinsmore: Matt Hancock, yes. Nick is the comedian. Maybe it is one and the same thing. Yes, it is a fascinating treasure trove of information on that period in history. One danger that we face now, weirdly, with all the electronic communications is that you speak to historians now and they are worried about how we will be able to tell history in the future because nothing is written down and things can get destroyed. It is important that we think about how these things are captured for the future.

Q386       Clive Efford: Does it shed any light on the trusted voices that we were listening to during the covid period? Do you think that makes us rethink how we should approach that in the future?

David Dinsmore: Yes, but, also, getting back to the point around the chaos of the situation, if you try to run something—be it a business, a country or whatever—you should ask yourselves questions internally as well. I am not saying that this excuses everything that is in the WhatsApp treasure trove, but sometimes when those questions do come out in the cold light of day, with hindsight, they do not look particularly clever, but they are probably the right questions to be asking at the time to get to the right decision.

Q387       Clive Efford: Does anyone else have any observations on WhatsApp-gate this week in light of what we have been discussing?

Alison Phillips: I have not seen anything in that that makes me question what the Chief Medical Officer or those people were instructing. They may have compromised on some issues that they thought were perhaps for the national good but, in terms of the actual information they were giving, I have not seen anything that makes me doubt that. Quite a lot makes you doubt some of the political judgments that have been made, but certainly from our perspective the politicians were not the trusted voices in the whole thing. The medical people and the health people were the trusted voices.

Peter Wright: I have found the last week pretty depressing, honestly. People generally thought with each lockdown that they were doing it for absolutely 100% medical reasons. We now know that the medical science was, at best, uncertain, particularly as time went on, and that it was being done for political reasons because the Government wanted to show it was doing something. If we are talking about trust, it is worrying. I do not know about others but, in another situation, a similar situation in the future, maybe avian bird flu, when the Government start wanting to impose patterns of behaviour on people that will disrupt their lives, people will be more questioning, inevitably. There cannot be another consequence of what we have learned over the last week.

Nick Hopkins: One of the surprises with this Government-by-WhatsApp is that it has taken us by surprise that so many conversations were being had and, frankly, that they were as petty. That the language was so petty in the conversations is a real surprise.

It is a great scoop from The Telegraph, but it does not provide any context. This is something we have tried to do at The Guardian. At each of the points where there were these discussions going on, there was not, as far as I can see, that much reflection on what the country was going through at that particular time, the number of people who were in hospital, the stretch there was on the NHS, the number of people who were dying. That is where I feel that we have a job to do to try to explain it a little bit more and remind people about what was going on at the time.

Alison Phillips: Also, I suppose it is difficult. Within this conversation as well, among the politicians and the supposed trusted voices, we also now know that there was a huge amount of rule-breaking going on. That lies at the heart of it. That will cause a breakdown of trust between the public and the supposed trusted voices.

With The Guardian, we ran an exclusive on the Dominic Cummings and Barnard Castle story, which was back in May 2020. I remember thinking long and hard when we ran that story because I felt a huge level of responsibility. What if running this story destroys trust to such an extent that the public health message completely breaks down and then people stop abiding by the lockdown rules? I felt a personal weight of responsibility at that point, but we also felt the overwhelming need that that was in the public interest and that needed to be out there. Sometimes journalists were more concerned about the importance of trust than perhaps some of the people who were making the policy.

Q388       Simon Jupp: Thank you, Chair. Good morning. One thing that I have noticed about journalism is that it is one of the five least trusted professions in the country now. I dare add that politicians are trusted less, and so it is important to caveat that as you are sitting in front of a bunch of politicians. What accounts for low levels of trust in journalists?

David Dinsmore: I like the way that I start this off.

Simon Jupp: It is because I always go in that direction, left to right.

David Dinsmore: We are big public organisations in the way that MPs are part of a big public organisation as well. Therefore, it is easy for people to have an opinion of it. The statistics around trust in news brands are slightly different. When people are surveyed, whether it is print or online, they put a lot of trust in what they read. There is a difference between whether you trust journalists and whether you trust their actual output. That is an important point.

Q389       Simon Jupp: That does bear fruit. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism did a report and brand trust scores were heavily variable depending on the brand and depending on the publisher and all that kind of stuff.

Nick, the same question to you: why do some people have a low level of trust with journalists?

Nick Hopkins: There have been scandals over the years that have painted journalists in a not terrifically positive light. The phone hacking scandal is the main one. But as David says, there is a difference between journalists and journalistic brands. I am not saying The Guardian does not have a problem. We have to be mindful of misinformation and we do our best to ensure that we do not publish wrong stories and incorrect stories. But from what I can see of the studies that have been done, for instance, on our coverage of covid and our coverage of the environment, we are a highly trusted news brand and we value and cherish that.

Alison Phillips: It might be slightly more nuanced than just different brands having different levels of trust. It is the relationship between a reader and that brand. Somebody says, “I do not trust journalists”, but then, if they are a The Mirror reader, “I trust The Mirror. I have been reading The Mirror for 20 years. I know all the writers. I know all the columnists”, because they have a relationship. I am sure it is exactly the same for The Sun. The people who buy The Sun will trust The Sun but may not necessarily trust other brands or journalists generally.

For example, I imagine lots of people say, “I do not trust politicians”. Do they trust their own constituency MP? “Yes, he is a nice bloke.” If you have a relationship with somebody, it is different to journalists in a broad brushstroke.

Data shows that our trust scores as an industry did go up following covid as well because we were so out there—not just telling the news but explaining the news. Maybe we need to do more of that.

Peter Wright: I am familiar with the Reuters research. Also, some recently published Ofcom research shows that print newspapers are close in trust to TV at a high level—71% for TV, 67% for print—while social media is at 35%.

I was at an Ofcom conference last week where the Reuters Institute produced some fascinating survey research on young people’s—18 to 25 year-olds’—consumption of news. They told us that only 25% of the people they surveyed had actually accessed news from a traditional provider, whether TV or newspaper, in the last month and 75% had not at all. When they were asked where they got their news from, they said, “Social media”. When they were asked what that means, they said, “TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook”. What they were actually consuming and calling “news” were posts by influencers and celebrities.

Q390       Simon Jupp: Does this scare you?

Peter Wright: Yes.

Q391       Simon Jupp: I was a former journalist. I did not say so at the top of this because it was as a broadcast journalist as opposed to a print journalist. I worked for the BBC and ITV.

Does it scare you that that is a growing trend? We all saw it during the pandemic. We saw the avalanche of new community groups on social media sites as well, moving away from TikTok. I do not go on TikTok. It is utterly baffling. I am only 37. Is this a worrying trend? Trust in proper, rigorous journalism is important because people get their news and it is fair and can be balanced and everything else like that. There are arguments of bias either way on all different kinds of publications. But if young people access news in that way and do not go to the news that is developed specifically for them—Radio 1 Newsbeat or whatever it might be—do you face extinction?

Alison Phillips: No. It is our responsibility to go where the audiences are. Audiences have always evolved and changed. News organisations that will survive have to evolve. That is why probably all the people around this table invest in Snapchat and TikTok. We have to go to where the audiences are and we have to ensure that we create trusted news that they want to access.

Q392       Simon Jupp: It is so difficult. Having been a Snapchat user many years ago when it was not even particularly trendy—and other websites as well—there are snippets of clips and news. You cannot contextualise a proper story with that. Are we cheapening news by using these platforms?

Alison Phillips: No, because it is different. People change. They grow up. Through their lives, they want different things from their news. It is not that one solution fits all. You could have been sitting here 30 years ago and bemoaned young people not being interested in the world around them. That has always been but people—

Simon Jupp: I am not saying that, by the way. I am still relatively young myself.

Alison Phillips: But things adapt. As people become more invested in society, their children go to school and they use public services, they become more aware of society around them and, therefore, have more investment in understanding the world around them and trying to make sense of it. The onus is on us to tailor our news to the different audiences.

Simon Jupp: I hope you are right, Alison.

Alison Phillips: I have to say it is not without challenge, but we have to keep fighting.

Q393       Simon Jupp: Absolutely. If I can, I would like to draw a comparison between national newspapers and local newspapers. We know that local journalism has struggled in recent years. Local newspapers have closed. The staffing levels within local newspapers have diminished somewhat. Work is being done through the Local Democracy Reporting Service to try to strengthen local reporting of council stuff that goes on. I have sat in council meetings, most of which were not particularly enjoyable, but there were news snippets out of it.

But they are trusted. Local journalists and local papers are trusted more than national brands. Is that because there is a perception that that journalist could live in their street?

David Dinsmore: Yes. Again, it is back to that point of who you know, who you have the connection with and who is in your community. It probably is from that.

The difficulty now is, with the challenges that local newspapers are facing, they may well not have somebody in that community. They are the canaries in the coalmine for news in general. More and more local community news is provided by untrained sources and you do not know whether anything has been checked out.

Q394       Simon Jupp: If I may, can I use an example? There was an online news site in my county of Devon a couple of years ago, which allowed councils and the police to upload press releases that would then be turned into news stories. That is pretty bad. That is not journalism.

David Dinsmore: No, it is absolutely not. It is a wall on which you stick your poster, basically. It is absolutely not journalism. As I say, it is the canary in the coalmine. We need to sort that out. We need to find new models for this.

If I could go back to the other point on what happens to national newspapers and news in general, it is important to remember that only one group is creating the trusted raw material that is professional news providers. Everything else is feeding off that. When you get into these platforms, Snapchat is not a good example because it has brand-specific channels that you go into, but TikTok is just a flick-through. With the brand blindness that you get there, you have no idea where it comes from. People will say they get their news from Facebook, but actually they see it from The Sun or The Mirror or whatever.

Then you take the next evolution of this, which is artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. If we start off with a Google search term that provides you with a load of answers, you can see what the source is. Then you move to the other extreme, ChatGPT, where you put in your question and are provided with an answer, you have no idea where it has come from and no idea whether it is true but you can guarantee that it has scraped our content somewhere along the way to come up with that answer.

Q395       Simon Jupp: Could it also be—and I will come to Nick for this particular point, if I may—that with local journalism there can be less of a groupthink mentality? We know that in Westminster we have the lobby and they have briefings and all that kind of stuff. It is quite a closed shop. Can that be detrimental as well as beneficial to those publishers who are part of it?

Nick Hopkins: It comes back to the different relationship. I started on a weekly newspaper and then an evening newspaper. I well remember that the relationship between the readers and us as reporters was different from the national scenario. It was quite intimate. They turned up in our offices. They had access to us at council meetings. There was a much more personal and intimate relationship than there is, probably, with national readers.

Of course, the local press has been withering for all the reasons we know. It is a real problem for us and it is a real problem for the ecology of news, not least because it is difficult for journalists now to get into national newspapers. There is not the route that I went—two weekly newspapers and an evening newspaper. That is a much more perilous route now than it ever used to be.

Q396       Simon Jupp: Salaries are low. People cannot continue to do it. They go and work in, funnily enough, PR after a short period.

Going back to my point particularly about regional versus national, can groupthink be a problem?

Nick Hopkins: Groupthink is not a problem at The Guardian.

Peter Wright: Or The Mail.

Alison Phillips: No, that is not one of the big issues that we face at all. Certainly within the lobby there are all sorts of different perspectives, and within every newsroom.

Q397       Simon Jupp: I guess my point is that it would be great if that was opened up to a more regional strategy so that you had more people from the regions who could come and be part of those briefings and everything else. We saw that during the pandemic. That was progressive.

Alison Phillips: Yes, we did. Some of the regional titles have people here but, as we have discussed, it is a real challenge in the regional press at the moment.

David Dinsmore: The plurality of our national news brands is to be cherished for exactly that reason. We do not have groupthink. The wonderful thing about newspapers in the UK is that there are biases and that you do know where they come from. That avoids that groupthink. I cannot say it is quite the same with sports reporters. It is slightly different.

Peter Wright: Yes. I have a couple of observations. I worked in local papers as well. With a local paper, you have a direct connection with the news. If there was a big plume of smoke over on the other side of town last night, the next day you read the paper and there is the explanation. Then you go to work and you can see the burned-out buildings. You know it has happened. If you choose to be untrusting, you see the same report in a national paper and you have no way of checking it yourself.

I am deeply worried about the lack of on-the-ground reporting by local papers these days. For my sins, for some years I sat on the complaints committee at IPSO. A growing category of complaints is people complaining about court cases that have been reported in the local paper. You discover they have been reported from a police press release. The police are not a neutral party in a criminal court case, whereas the local paper reporter is. That is deeply worrying.

The other thing that has happened to a lot of local papers is that they have vastly increased the amount of centrally produced content because it is cheaper. It is deeply concerning that local paper reporting is at such a low ebb.

Chair: Thank you. Before I move to Kevin, can I thank Alison for using exactly the same point—about how readers trust their own newspapers more than they trust newspapers generally—as all politicians use? We say that MPs are more trusted by their own constituents than by others. This is a rare moment of harmony between politicians and journalists that I feel we should note. Kevin?

Q398       Kevin Brennan: Thank you, Chair. It is funny. I was going to talk about the brands like The Daily Mirror as a club because I remember being a member of The Daily Mirror Pop Club when I was a teenager, which helped me to acquire tickets to see Bob Marley and the Wailers in Cardiff. I have fond memories of being a member of The Daily Mirror Pop Club.

We were talking about trust and so on. What is the process by which you seek to verify a story when something comes your way?

Alison Phillips: Yes. I do not know how much detail you want on this.

Kevin Brennan: Just the top line.

Alison Phillips: A reporter will come in and they will talk to their news editor. Probably the news editor or the deputy news editor will be involved in a conversation if it is a big story. They will discuss what the story is, “Have you managed to get a second source on that? Have you managed to get a third source on that?” Depending on the scale of the story and the possible ramifications, we will want two or three sources.

Then that will go to the lawyer. There will be a conversation with the lawyer or the copy, if it is written, will go to the lawyer, who will go through any possible legal issues. It will get listed in conference, at which point I will ask about a million annoying questions, which drives the news editor up the wall. We check that we are all bottomed out on the facts. It would then be discussed later in the day. If it is appearing in the print edition, it would go through the back bench, which is the night editor. It goes through the middle bench, which is the chief subs. It goes to the sub. It goes back to the middle bench. It goes through the lawyer again and then it will appear in print. It is a pretty robust system.

Q399       Kevin Brennan: Would it be fair to say that that is the same system that pretty much everybody would follow in your organisations? If there is not a dissenting voice from that or a different process, I don’t think you need to—

Alison Phillips: Dissenting voices is an interesting point as well. When it is discussed in conference—which is a great opportunity similar to this with lots of people sitting around a table, where somebody can say, “I do not know. That does not sound right to me”—there are lots of opportunities for problems to be flushed out.

Q400       Kevin Brennan: Do you ever go ahead with a story if you have only a single source? Would there be circumstances where that might happen?

Alison Phillips: Sorry, I missed a bit out. Also, when you have the story, you would go to the person who is impacted by the story and say, “These are the allegations. What is your response?” If they come back with a flat denial, “That is not true”, we go back to the drawing board. If they make some quote or statement that is not actually denying it—if you have given them the opportunity to deny it but they try to flimflam around it—we would run it in that scenario.

Q401       Kevin Brennan: What if they ignore you?

Alison Phillips: If they ignore us, it is much more difficult. We would probably go back several times. If we think they are deliberately ignoring us, that is—

Q402       Kevin Brennan: I want to go back to this business of WhatsApp and the stories this week and so on. I take it, David, from what you said that it was a great scoop for The Telegraph. Had Isabel Oakeshott brought you this story, your titles would have been likely to publish it. Is that a fair assumption?

David Dinsmore: You would need to ask the editors.

Q403       Kevin Brennan: Let us ask you in a different way, then. As someone who has been an editor yourself and as a journalist and so on, if you had been approached and you were in charge of a national title, would you take on that kind of story?

David Dinsmore: It is difficult not to give great consideration to a story of such merit.

Q404       Kevin Brennan: Nick, if Isabel Oakeshott had come to The Guardian with these messages, which might sound a farfetched idea—

Nick Hopkins: That would be a story in itself.

Kevin Brennan: —what would your reaction have been?

Nick Hopkins: We would have considered it. We would have looked at the material on its merits. If we were going to publish it, we would have done it in a slightly different way.

Q405       Kevin Brennan: What would be different about the way The Guardian would have done it?

Nick Hopkins: I think that putting Isabel Oakeshott so front and centre of it was problematic—it would have been for us, anyway—because Isabel has a view about lockdown, as does The Telegraph, and we would be careful to intermingle with a news story commentary in the way that The Telegraph has. We know why The Telegraph has done it in this way. I am not criticising The Telegraph for the way it has done it. I am saying we would have done it differently.

Q406       Kevin Brennan: Alison, would The Mirror have published it?

Alison Phillips: Yes. The Telegraph and Isabel Oakeshott have an anti-lockdown agenda. We did not. We erred on the side of caution in terms of the lockdowns. However, those WhatsApp messages were in the public interest and we would have used them.

Peter Wright: Yes, I agree with Alison. They were very much in the public interest. We do not know the exact nature of this non-disclosure agreement, which we would have wanted to see. I am afraid it gives a unique insight into the way the Government works and how the Government handled the pandemic. I would not like to be in the position of having turned it away.

Q407       Kevin Brennan: I understand the argument about the public interest and you would have run it past lawyers given the NDA and so on. But do you have any qualms at all ethically as journalists about a journalist signing a non-disclosure agreement with somebody who is writing a book in exchange for having access to personal details? I am not sure I know anyone who would like all their WhatsApp messages to be put all over the front page of The Daily Telegraph, even if they are a highly reputable individual. Do you have any qualms about it at all? In terms of our inquiry, does it in any way undermine trust in journalists that it does not matter what they say to you—at the end of the day, if it is a good story, you’re screwed?

Peter Wright: First of all, there were aspects of it that I would have had qualms about. One is that publishing Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages may be one thing because he had given them to Isabel Oakeshott to write a book, with the intention of him being painted in a heroic light, so there seems to be a pretty strong public interest in knowing the truth about what he was saying. I did feel for Helen Whately, the junior Minister, because they published everybody else’s WhatsApp messages as well. I would be fascinated to hear what people like Helen Whately or Simon Case or other people involved think about this.

I can illustrate this with a story from my own time as editor that also involves Isabel Oakeshott. We were approached through an intermediary by Vicky Pryce, the wife of Chris Huhne, about her allegations about her taking speeding points. She, quite understandably, did not want to go to prison. We spent weeks on The Mail on Sunday with lawyers, trying to find a way of doing this that would not end up with her being prosecuted. She got impatient and went to Isabel Oakeshott. Isabel Oakeshott, then working for The Sunday Times, published the next week and Vicky Pryce went to prison.

Kevin Brennan: She did, indeed. I knew her when she was an economist when I was a Minister in the Business Department. She was our chief economist at the time.

Peter Wright: But I lost the story. There we go. I cannot answer that one.

Q408       Kevin Brennan: Any qualms, any of the rest of you, particularly about this?

Alison Phillips: There are qualms about other people’s text messages or WhatsApp messages, but you could probably have done the story in such a way that you did not necessarily have to use all of those. There is a public interest justification for journalism. In this situation, that is okay.

Q409       Kevin Brennan: Does this whole episode undermine trust in journalists?

Alison Phillips: This is quite a specific episode in that you have a high-profile politician in the biggest story of our generation giving his WhatsApp messages to a high-profile journalist. There are other things that you could say cause distrust in journalists. This is not one of them.

Q410       Kevin Brennan: This is what happens when a conceited fool gives their WhatsApp messages to a devious scribbler, basically. Is that what you are saying?

Alison Phillips: That is what you just said.

Peter Wright: You could say that. I cannot comment.

David Dinsmore: Yes, I take a similar view. Somebody texted me last week and asked if this is a breach of confidentiality. I said it is probably a breach of confidence—more than that. There is a difference here. As Peter said, he used this WhatsApp trove to write the book and now we have seen the rest of the context. There is not much of a complaint on his part, apart from with the person he made the agreement with. There is a strong public interest.

The other aspect is, if you are in public life, be careful what you commit to communication, which is challenging. We all have to navigate our way through that.

Chair: Clive wants to come in

Q411       Clive Efford: Following on from what my colleague has been asking questions about, which is Isabel Oakeshott ghost-writing that book, given what you have seen of the WhatsApp messages, should that book be rewritten? Is it a trusted source of information? As a journalist, would you have written it?

Alison Phillips: It is probably not the full story. But I guess most people’s autobiographies are not necessarily the full story of their life, but their life as they perceive it.

Q412       Clive Efford: A journalist ghost-wrote it in full possession of all those WhatsApp messages and we can now see what was written and compare what was written with what we now know.

Alison Phillips: You would have to get into the arrangement around ghost-writing a book. Ordinarily, a ghost-writer uses all the information and then the actual person who should have been writing the book in the first place edits it. I do not know that you can necessarily blame the journalist in that scenario. It is the person whose name is on the front cover.

David Dinsmore: You could probably call it “Matt Hancock: My Version of Events”.

Alison Phillips: Yes.

Q413       Kevin Brennan: A reconstructed diary after the fact, was it not? On one other issue, briefly, Chair, on the legacy of Leveson and hacking and so on, how much damage did that do to your organisations or to trust in journalism, newspapers and media organisations? Is there still a legacy of it? Are you still facing challenges about it? Has the response from the industry post Leveson worked? I would like your thoughts on that.

David Dinsmore: Our organisation has been through a huge amount of turmoil as a result of it. The News of the World, as you know, closed as a result of it. The industry as a whole is almost unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago in the way that it operates and the way it goes about its business. I have every confidence, certainly with our titles and from the evidence I see from other papers, that we conduct our business in a fit and proper fashion.

It is important to understand. Alison was talking about how we go about verifying a story. As news brands, we train journalists. We pay journalists. We bring in lawyers. We pay lawyers. We have an editors’ code of conduct, which, if you have not read it, I would implore you to do, because it is an excellent document and an excellent guide that, when I was editing newspapers, I certainly lived by and I am sure my colleagues do the same. That is just pre-publication.

Post publication, you have the right of redress. You can go to the title itself. You can go to IPSO. You can go to the courts. There are many ways in which you can deal with complaints to newspapers that you have no chance with on social media.

Q414       Kevin Brennan: I do not want to go into it because John Nicolson might ask a question about that later. In essence, you are saying that you have completely changed your practices as a result of that scandal. Some legacy cases are still going through the courts that we cannot talk about because they are sub judice, presumably, but that is the position we are in currently. Is that a fair assessment of the situation?

David Dinsmore: Yes.

Q415       Kevin Brennan: Does anybody want to add anything to that from the perspective of your own organisations on how Leveson has impacted and whether it is still impacting upon you?

Alison Phillips: As David said, everything has changed and the way we operate is entirely different. That is a good thing. We are in the process of trying to rebuild trust.

Nick Hopkins: The Guardian broke the story, as you know, but that does not mean that we felt that we were excused from or exempt from examining our own processes. We have this readers’ editor that we have had now for 25 years. That has been a fantastic recourse for people who have a complaint against our journalism. Katharine Viner, our editor-in-chief, has emphasised time and again since she was editor that we cannot assume trust. We have to earn it.

Q416       Kevin Brennan: Okay. I have a final question to you, Peter. What do you think of the development of things like TalkTV and GB News and so on? What implications do they have for your organisations?

Peter Wright: For my organisations?

Kevin Brennan: For traditionally printed newspapers, which have operated under different rules than broadcast media. Is what is happening in that space now a good development? Is it a concerning development?

Peter Wright: I am afraid I am not a consumer of GB News or TalkTV. The informal state of play that developed over the years once television came on the scene was that television operated under state licence and the trade-off was that it had state regulation. Part of that regulation was a requirement for impartiality. Certainly, going back decades, that was reasonably true of the BBC and ITV. When I came into newspapers, I was told I was an idiot because newspapers were dead—this was 1974—because we could not compete with TV. We did. That arrangement left the field for newspapers to provide comment and opinion, to campaign and to take up causes in a way that TV found much more difficult.

I cannot pretend to know—David will know better than me—how Ofcom is applying impartiality rules to GB News and TalkTV. Again, David will know the size of their audiences. They do not seem to me to be vast. But if television had a free hand with opinion and did not have to obey impartiality rules, I presume life for newspapers would get more difficult.

Kevin Brennan: I will not hog any more time. I will hand back to you, Chair.

Chair: Giles Watling.

Q417       Giles Watling: Thank you, Chair. First, Alison—to give David a break from being first on the list—you said earlier that medical people were the trusted voices during the pandemic, but there was a big campaign on social media that said they were not to be trusted. Even poor Chris Whitty was physically attacked as a result of some of that campaigning. Should you as the mainstream media—this is for all of you but Alison first of all—feel a responsibility to push back against such campaigns or do you just report on them?

Alison Phillips: We did push back. We all pushed back. But you have to explain the news to people. You cannot just batter them over the head with it. Our responsibility is to explain it. That is why we try to focus on the importance of good information and to give people the information they need.

If you imagine someone is at work and having an argument with somebody who has got all their information off a WhatsApp group or off a posting they have seen, you have to give them the ability to fight back and say, “No, I read in The Mirror this, that and the other thing”. That is how we do it. There is no point in anybody going out there and yelling at people that they are stupid and they are thick, because that does not change their minds.

Giles Watling: Also, that might make them become even more entrenched, I suppose.

Alison Phillips: Yes, and I guess you are looking at it, but I don’t know how much of that misinformation you were seeing. Interestingly, because I was in prior WhatsApp groups for my children’s sports and things like that, I was seeing all these WhatsApp messages coming in saying things like, “Another footballer has just collapsed because of having had the jab”.

When we talk about trusted news, people trust people they know. If one of the dads in your kid’s football team said this, that is how you have that relationship of trust because it is somebody you know. The media is obviously that bit apart. That is why we have to have those relationships with our readers—so that they feel like we are like friends who are telling them some good information.

Q418       Giles Watling: In a previous incarnation, this Committee has taken evidence on how social media gives a big voice to small, and perhaps extreme and often uninformed, opinions. That can be a very dangerous thing. Do we look to you—the mainstream media—to make sure you are given that voice of truth?

I know you have covered it to a certain extent, but how do you ensure that you can get that message through to those people who are getting their news from their trusted source, which is the person they know who has been misinformed by social media, if you see what I mean?

Peter Wright: I remember when people were attacking 5G phone masts, we certainly did a number of exposés on the people behind these crazy theories and debunking them. It is worth doing when something is causing clear damage. You are always aware of the risk that by giving someone publicity, even if it is negative publicity, there will be people who believe it. It is not easy.

Giles Watling: No. There is that thing, of course, that you must not give them oxygen, so don’t comment, I suppose.

Peter Wright: Also, you only have limited resources and they should be devoted to covering events that have actually happened and science that is science, not bogus science. However, there comes a point where you do need to debunk it.

Q419       Giles Watling: Absolutely. This one is for Nick. Do you think there is a responsibility on newspapers, such as The Guardian, to spread calm among the panic? Looking at it through the lens of the time, we did not know what was coming. We have iterated that today. The Government and scientists were literally feeling their way because we did not know what was happening. It would be easy on social media to spread panic. Was there a temptation in the media—I am not accusing any publication represented here—to trade on the penny dreadful side of things because horror and shock is much more interesting?

Nick Hopkins: I don’t think so. As I said in answer to previous questions, I think that we took a view all the way through the pandemic that we would try to wrap around our news stories context, analysis, FAQs and devices such as that. This would allow our journalists—hopefully, in an honest and transparent way—to explain the state of knowledge at that particular moment in time—what we knew and what we did not know. As I said earlier, these kinds of pieces were the ones that did fantastically well during the pandemic. People wanted to be told what was going on at any given moment, in as much detail as we could, in as accessible a way as we possibly could.

Q420       Giles Watling: That is encouraging. You did not feel like you were shouting at a blank wall or that there is nobody listening—that they were listening to social media instead?

Nick Hopkins: No. As the other panellists have said, there is a wider problem, which is that our hopefully trusted online news can be mingled with misinformation. Our job is just to make sure that the material we produce is as honest and trustworthy as possible and go to those places, like TikTok. We do stuff on TikTok now. Even if the people who use TikTok are not necessarily Guardian readers now, by going into that community, the gravitational pull of our journalism will hopefully bring them towards us.

Q421       Giles Watling: Very helpfully, you have touched on something I want to ask next. Your editorial code at The Guardian says, “Trust in the authenticity and reliability of our sources is essential”, and it is those very sources I want to ask about. I will move initially to Nick again. Do your newspapers put more weight on anonymous sources or those who are willing to be identified?

Nick Hopkins: The code states that we must not use anonymous sources “lazily or indiscriminately”. I think those are the words that we use. Do we do use anonymous sources? Yes we do, but we would take using anonymous sources on a case-by-case basis.

Also, to a degree it depends on the journalist who is offering the story. If someone like Pippa Crerar—who Alison knows very well—tells us she has an anonymous source in Whitehall telling her something, we would listen to her. Pippa has fantastic reach into the corridors of power. It would not mean that we would not interrogate her on it. If a more junior reporter is offering a story based on an anonymous source, we would probably question them under caution to find out more.

Q422       Giles Watling: That is one way of putting it. I am sure every politician in the room has been asked by a journalist to give a quote off the record, and that is probably where some of these sources come from. Do you think that the use of anonymous sources might lower the trust in journalism?

Nick Hopkins: Obviously, you don’t want to use anonymous sources unless you really have to. You want to be able to put a name, a title and a responsibility to the source that you are quoting. That is not always possible.

Ideally, we would not have to use them but there are circumstances in which we do. Fundamentally, if a story is right, it is right, and if we use an anonymous source, as Alison said, and we go to somebody for a right of reply and in that right of reply it becomes very clear that whatever the source has told us is correct, that should not diminish the credibility of that kind of story.

Q423       Giles Watling: Any other comments on this? No. Fair enough. I will ask one more question. We all recall, I am sure, David Sullivan’s publications Sunday Sport and Daily Sport. The general public knew that, fundamentally, what was published there was rubbish—Elvis had been found on the dark side of the Moon, Hitler was somewhere or whatever it was. We all knew it was rubbish and quite rightly pooh-poohed it as the precursor to social media stories. How much damage do you think that did because that was a paper publication?

Alison Phillips: So is The Beano. I don’t know if that did have much—

Giles Watling: Exactly, but people did believe it.

Nick Hopkins: Did they?

Alison Phillips: I don’t think anybody did. I think it was pure entertainment.

Giles Watling: Okay, fair enough.

Peter Wright: He never sold very many copies.

David Dinsmore: I think the important thing to remember is that, as the stats bear out, when they read something on social media, most people will then go and check it in a reputable news source. I think we still play an important role in that verification process. Back in the Sunday Sport days, you would describe that as an urban myth and, as editors of papers, we could just ignore it. Now, there is such a low barrier to entry to the distribution of information that these things take on a life of their own. When we move into the world of deepfakes—which is on us now—and state-sponsored disinformation, it may be that we need to start showing why we are not running stories and the reasons why they are not true.

Q424       Giles Watling: Again, you bring me neatly to my next question: on what basis do you decide whether to publish stories about misinformation and disinformation?

David Dinsmore: I have a good example of this. At Christmas, I was with a friend—who I will not embarrass by identifying, but she has a senior public affairs role at a multinational company—and we were talking about the Zelenskys, and Mrs Zelenska in particular. She said, “It was such a shame that she went and spent $40,000 on a handbag and shoe spree in Paris”. I literally felt the bottom fall out of my stomach, and I went, “This is horrific”. I thought, “But it cannot be true”. I went home and investigated it, and the first hit on Google was the Newsweek debunking of this story, which had emanated from the Sunderland Global Media—one employee, Anna Pavlova. That is a good example of—

Q425       Giles Watling: Did it get traction?

David Dinsmore: It did get traction, yes. It got traction all over France and all over the States, to the point where it had to be debunked. I think that is the point. We cannot be the policemen of the internet, but we can be a source of trust.

Q426       Giles Watling: Do you have any concerns that covering these sorts of stories gives them some credence?

David Dinsmore: No, I think that in cases like that where we are able to go, “There is no evidence to support this whatsoever”, that is important. In the deepfake thing as well, where you have a video of something going around Twitter, if you are able to say, “This is categorically not true”, and that is coming from one of our organisations, that will really help.

Q427       Giles Watling: Is there any liaison between the news organisations on this? If something comes along that is damaging, do you speak to each other?

Alison Phillips: Not really. Not on a story-by-story basis.

Peter Wright: Reporters may do.

Giles Watling: It is informal.

Peter Wright: It would be informal, yes. It would not be appropriate to discuss what stories we are doing.

Giles Watling: No, quite. I understand. Thank you.

Chair: All I would say is that if you look at any MP’s email inbox, the idea that everyone goes away and checks with a reputable news source before they get convinced by something they have read online, I am afraid that is not true. I agree, we then get a skewed section of the population. John Nicolson.

Q428       John Nicolson: Thank you. Yes, on that, I am looking at a story that has just popped up from The Herald on Sunday and it has Kate Forbes—who is one of the candidates for the SNP leadership—with a Bible photoshopped into her hand. That cannot be right, can it? Front page. She wasn’t holding a Bible. She was just standing like that and they have photoshopped a Bible into her hand because she has some controversial religious views.

Can I start off with you, Peter? I was interested that you talked about the straightforward coverage that Metro got. By some metrics, local papers have higher trust levels than some of the nationals. What do you think the nationals need to learn from local coverage or straightforward coverage, as you described it?

Peter Wright: As I said earlier, I think one of the reasons why locals have higher trust levels is simply that you can observe for yourself what they have reported, which you cannot do with national papers. The way the newspaper market has evolved in Britain has meant that, unlike in the US, France or Germany—where most titles are defined geographically under local monopolies—the national newspaper market in Britain has divided demographically and politically.

Q429       John Nicolson: Is that maybe the key? People feel with local papers that they are not being spun a line. That stories are not being filtered by the newspaper’s politics, and that in fact they are being told the truth rather than political spin?

Peter Wright: It is not so much a matter of the truth, and local papers do run leaders, or they certainly did in my day. They do run campaigns and they do take political positions. I think that all of our titles took a position one way or another over Brexit. Metro did not, but the Daily Mail was in favour of Brexit, Mail on Sunday was against, and everybody took a position. Readers expect the position—

Q430       John Nicolson: To reinforce their own prejudices?

Peter Wright: Opinions are valuable. People want to know facts but you also want to know opinions. You don’t just want to be told that the economy is in a nosedive and that the cost of living has gone up 12% in the last month. You want to know why that has happened, which will be 50% opinion because there will be different theories. Also, you want to know what could be done about it, and inevitably that will be opinion. Economists will give you different answers.

Q431       John Nicolson: I think we mostly pretty much agree that Brexit has been pretty disastrous. That is what the OBR says.

Peter Wright: That is your opinion.

Q432       John Nicolson: That is what the OBR says, and I am not responsible for what the OBR says.

I have asked people online to tell me what questions they would like asked. I am very keen on whistleblowers. I often encourage them to write to me here. You get some fantastic stuff. You have to filter it very carefully, of course, to make sure that people really are who they imply that they are. One of the questions I have been asked quite a lot is: what responsibility do you as newspapers have to promote trusted voices? In other words, how engaged are you in making sure that what you say is true, Alison?

Alison Phillips: We aim to ensure that everything we print is true.

Q433       John Nicolson: I was fascinated by your description of three layers of editorial oversight.

Alison Phillips: It is probably more than three by the time you have gone through all of those different sets of eyes. Mistakes happen. We try to avoid mistakes happening.

Q434       John Nicolson: What was the last big mistake you made?

Alison Phillips: Gosh, I think we have been all right for a few months, but mistakes will happen in any organisation, but on actual premeditated attempts to mislead people, there is absolutely none of that.

In terms of trusted voices, we have many voices—both people doing straight news and opinion writers—who our readers trust. Other people may not agree with what they say, so they are perhaps less likely to trust those people, but our readers trust them and that is why they are there.

Going back to your point about why people feel that local news is more trustworthy, I think that might often be because you are less likely to read something in a local paper or on a local website that you disagree with. I think that if you go into the whole situation about polarisation within our society, there is a tendency now that if people don’t agree with a particular viewpoint, they find it untrustworthy. If you are unpicking this whole issue, you need to have a look at that.

Q435       John Nicolson: Has social media done that?

Alison Phillips: As a society, Brexit has had a huge impact on us. Social media and the way algorithms work are such that it is easier to sow dissent than it is to sow issues that bring people back together. I think that the social media algorithms are a huge issue in this.

Q436       John Nicolson: I love newspapers and I pick up a pile from The Sun to The Guardian. I like to hold newspapers. That is a generational thing, which is probably a little bit sad, but I like to read them online as well. Can I talk to you, Nick, about corrections, which is something else a lot of people have asked me about? I know you have not signed up for IPSO. Maybe you can explain to people that there are two regulators. There is the one that the industry wanted—IPSO—and then there is another one, which is independent. What politicians promised at the time was not really delivered after Leveson, was it? IPSO only upholds a tiny number of complaints. Am I right?

Nick Hopkins: You might well be, but we are not a member of IPSO.

John Nicolson: I know.

Nick Hopkins: We have our own checks and balances system.

Q437       John Nicolson: Why did you decide not to join IPSO?

Nick Hopkins: This is all quite a historic argument, but—

John Nicolson: If you could just remember that this is all for laypeople to watch or listen to, so if you could explain it simply.

Nick Hopkins: I suppose after Leveson, my recollection is that we thought that IPSO was slightly better but still quite similar to the Press Complaints Commission, so it really was not our cup of tea. I don’t think our view has changed since then. As I recall, Leveson praised the checks and balances system that The Guardian had at the time, which have been reinforced since then with the readers’ editor role that we have had for a long time now. We have ended up in the position we are in and we are comfortable with it, and certainly from the surveys that have been done, we are regarded as a trusted news source.

Q438       John Nicolson: What would you need IPSO to do to persuade you to join?

Nick Hopkins: As head of news, it is not a subject that I grapple with day to day. I am sure I could get you a proper line on it.

Q439       John Nicolson: No, but journalists talk about it. I noticed one wag said, “You are more likely to win EuroMillions than you are to get IPSO to force you to publish an apology at the same size and in the same prominence as the original article if the article is untrue”.

Nick Hopkins: I guess one of the things that we were worried about at the time was the perception of total independence. I think that at the time that IPSO was being set up, we were not comfortable with it.

Q440       John Nicolson: In a previous Committee we had IPSO’s supreme boss in front of us. He was astonished to discover that newspapers might print retractions in smaller lettering than the original story. He shared with the Committee his surprise and that he felt he had been likely misled on this. I think I am right in saying that since IPSO was founded, not once has it required a front-page apology of equal prominence to the story itself which it ruled was inaccurate.

Nick Hopkins: Again, that is really not for me to—

Q441       John Nicolson: It is counter-intuitive because you are not with IPSO so I thought I would ask you about some of these. Another thing, David, that people have asked—and every politician would talk about—is on stories that they themselves have been involved with that they think are unfair. I was interested in what you said earlier and I wrote it down. You said that you have every confidence that your newspapers—your titles—conduct business in a fit and proper fashion. I think that Alison said that flat denials were always taken into account.

I am a journalist by training so I know how to research a story, but of all the stories I have been involved in since I was first elected to Parliament in 2015, one of them stands out to me. It was a story that was in The Sun and it bears a little reprise. My office had a package sent to it. It was white crystals. We followed parliamentary procedure. We phoned parliamentary security, who called the police. The police closed down the street and evacuated the office. I understand that the person concerned was subsequently arrested.

The police asked me not to talk to journalists about what they discovered. The Sun journalist called me up and said, “What was in the package?” I said, “I cannot tell you. The police have asked me not to say”. The Sun journalist said, “Was it a biscuit?” and I went, “Of course it wasn’t a biscuit. The police are not going to close down a street for a biscuit, obviously. I don’t have the power to close down the streets, so obviously it is the police who have done that”. The Sun journalist said, “So that was a categorical denial”, and I said, “Categorical denial”.

This was the story that The Sun then published. “Oh crumbs. Suspicious package which caused major lock down around SNP MP’s office turns out to be a biscuit”. I had given a categorical denial. The journalist knew it was untrue. The journalist knew that an MP cannot close down a street and the journalist must have known that was untrue.

Let me tell you what the consequence of that is. First, the story is still on The Sun’s website years later. I got trolled for days and days, and weeks and weeks, with people telling me that I was an idiot and had wasted police time, because I had closed down a street for a biscuit and had destroyed the livelihood of shops operating there. On some levels, you could say that was funny, but a lot of people believed it and, at the end of the day, my office had actually been sent something that was potentially dangerous. There were crystals that the police told me could be used to make an explosive device.

What process does a newspaper go through that would result in that story being published and remaining online years afterwards despite clearly everyone involved knowing it is false?

David Dinsmore: What steps did you take after publication to get it removed from online?

John Nicolson: I spoke to a senior executive at The Sun about it. I explained that it was untrue. I had already spoken to the journalist concerned and told them that it was untrue. Everybody involved knew that it was untrue. I was left feeling that it was probably a deliberate attempt from a newspaper that is not sympathetic to the SNP to spread a bit of disinformation, and it disappointed me because I had great respect for The Sun’s journalism. One of my close friends is Jane Moore, who is a star columnist for The Sun. I love reading her columns. I was disappointed in it, but—

David Dinsmore: You did not go to IPSO? You did not pursue it further?

John Nicolson: I did not go to the independent regulator because I don’t have much faith in the independent regulator. This is a huge splash. What IPSO would have done is put a tiny little box on page 12 saying that it was untrue, and the copy—

David Dinsmore: If it was untrue, and—

John Nicolson: Of course it was untrue. The police did not close down the street because of a biscuit.

David Dinsmore: We have not been able to investigate it. I am hearing about this now. If it was untrue and you went to IPSO, they would have gone straight to The Sun and said, “This is the version of events from you. What is your defence on this?” They would have got to a resolution. I suspect if your version is correct, there would have been a correction and it would have been taken down online. That would have happened within a matter of hours or days, and we would not be sitting here today with it still online. That is there for every member of the public.

John Nicolson: Two thoughts, David. The obvious one is that it might be taken down online, although I complained to a senior executive who told me that it would be and it has not been, and I did not realise that until yesterday.

David Dinsmore: I cannot discuss this specific case because I don’t know the specific case, but—

John Nicolson: Secondly, because the newspaper has been published, it is in every newsstand in the country and you cannot take that back. You cannot do more as a politician than give a categorical denial to a journalist. I also rely on the journalist’s common sense because the journalist knows that the police will not examine a package, see a couple of KitKats and close down the street. As a journalist, we know that that would not happen. You are left with—

David Dinsmore: As I say, is it possible to see what the evidence in fact is?

John Nicolson: You are left feeling that there is a bit of malevolence at play, which, as I say, I find disappointing as a journalist and as somebody who admires The Sun’s professionalism. I thought that I would flag that up because it is one particular example that I have come across when I went from poacher to gamekeeper and moved from journalism into politics.

David Dinsmore: Thank you for doing so but, as I say, the courses of redress are there to use.

John Nicolson: Except that once the newspaper is out, the damage to me has already been done. The best that you could have offered me, if I had gone through IPSO, would have been a retraction sometime afterwards in much smaller lettering inside the newspaper. The fact that it appeared in the paper, there is no way of undoing that afterwards—

David Dinsmore: It would likely appear in the same place where the story appeared in the first place.

John Nicolson: It would have?

David Dinsmore: I don’t know where it appeared in the paper.

John Nicolson: Very prominently, and my point remains that there has not been a single example of any story ever getting the same prominence as a front page story ever.

David Dinsmore: There have been front page apologies, which is since—

John Nicolson: Not to the same degree of prominence.

David Dinsmore: I would agree with that, but there have been front page apologies and that is a significant move forward.

Q442       Chair: Thank you. One last quick question for each of you, and I will start at the other end, to be fair to David. You have all had long, distinguished careers that have led you to the top of journalism. Do you think that trust in newspapers and their websites is higher or lower than when you started out in your careers?

Peter Wright: I am not sure. It is so long ago I started out. I am not sure anybody was measuring it then. It is always going to be difficult being a journalist for a number of reasons. One is that you are reporting events as they happen, and there will always be different versions and different interpretations of what you report. That will always affect people’s view of you as a professional.

I think that if trust has declined, particularly in recent years, it may be because some of the big stories of recent years have been very divisive ones. I am thinking particularly of Brexit, but covid-19 as well in a way, where people have been divided within families in their opinions, and where people don’t want to believe what they perceive to be contradictory to their point of view, and therefore there is a ‘shoot the messenger’ attitude.

There is actually an illustration of that in the Reuters recent research into trust, which found that over the last three years, trust in the BBC, which normally scores very highly, had fallen from 75% to 55%. They ascribe that to working-class viewers disagreeing with the BBC’s line on Brexit and, therefore, not trusting the reporting. That is their observation, not mine. That is interesting.

I am also afraid to think that there is a phenomenon where people are asked if they trust in news but, as I mentioned earlier, they may actually be talking about what they read on TikTok rather than what comes from an outfit like us or The Mirror, The Guardian or The Times.

Q443       Chair: Basically, it is lower. That is quite a pessimistic analysis. You can say there are reasons for it, but trust has gone down.

Peter Wright: I am not sure that it has. I think that the Ofcom research shows that it has in recent years but it doesn’t go back very far. If we could raise trust, it would be great.

Alison Phillips: I think that the trustworthiness of the established news organisations has actually increased hugely compared to when I think back to the mid-1980s. I think that the quality of the content that people are getting now is far more informative, responsible and well thought through. I am not just saying that because I am in this role now, but I think that if you looked back to particularly The Sun or The Mirror in that period and compare it with the reporting that goes on today, it is hugely improved.

However, I think that we cannot just look at lack of trust in the media in isolation. I think it is something that every major institution in the country is facing—the police, politicians and doctors. As a society, we have changed enormously. My grandparents’ generation used to talk about “their betters”. If a doctor told them this is what you had, that is what you had. Now people will go in and they will question that, just as they will question the police and they will question journalists.

You can argue that a lot of that is good because people are becoming much more questioning and sceptical about the world around them, but that obviously comes with a breakdown in trust. How much of that is caused by social media and all the changes? Probably a lot of it is, but I think there are all sorts of other socioeconomic reasons that probably feed into that as well.

To put some good news in there as well, if you look at all the people here on this table, during covid-19 we saw record numbers of people coming to us for the content that we were creating. We saw print sales holding up when you were barely allowed out of the front door. That is because people wanted news they could trust at that point and they knew that the established news organisations in this country were places they could get it. Yes, there was bad stuff happening in some places as well, but there was still a real hunger for trusted news and we were able to fulfil that. I think that you cannot look at that in isolation. I think if there is less trust in us, that is because there is less trust in most things now in this country.

Nick Hopkins: I think it ebbs and flows. As Alison has said, I think that during covid-19, the whole pandemic, most news organisations behaved responsibly and our readers reacted to that. Our readership soared. I think that we showed that we could be trusted, during a time of panic and emergency, to provide trusted information.

I feel quite hopeful. When I think about the scandals in public life that have been brought to light by journalists, whether it is Barnard Castle or partygate or any one of the investigations The Guardian has done in recent years, people really react to them. They will come to us and subscribe to us. They write to us and tell us that they want more of it and our readership goes up. I feel hopeful that in the future we can sustain the trusted voice that people relied on from us during the pandemic.

David Dinsmore: I am similarly bullish because I think that the world in which we live has changed out of all recognition in the last 20 to 25 years. The speed of information we are now dealing with is on a second-by-second basis and we have had to evolve to meet that need. I think the need for professional media and journalism has never been greater because there has never been more information out there. Somebody has to make sense of it. Somebody has to provide the raw material in the first place, and there is no one apart from us doing that job. I think that the future is bright, and it is important that we have a vibrant national media and local media in this country that will enhance democracy and trust at the same time.

Chair: Thank you all very much indeed for your time and insight this morning. David Dinsmore, Nick Hopkins, Alison Phillips, Peter Wright, thank you very much. That concludes our session.