our top story: the american comedian bill cosby is jailed for sexual assault. the judge labelled cosby a sexually—violent predator. he'll serve between three and ten years in prison and must undergo counselling for life and be listed on the sex offender registry. president trump has delivered a robust defence of his policies in an address to the united nations — saying americans reject the ideology of globalism and embrace patriotism. he also strongly criticised iran's leaders, accusing them of sowing chaos. and this video is trending on bbc.com: the duchess of sussex on her first solo royal engagement. meghan joined guests at the opening of an exhibition of works from the oceania region at the royal academy of arts in central london. that's all. stay with bbc news. more to come, here. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. what is journalism for? to inform and bear witness? to uncover inconvenient truth and hold power to account? those are surely values that most of us share. but have we collectively lost faith and trust in the news and those who report it? my guest is alan rusbridger, who edited the uk's guardian newspaper for 20 years, in the midst of a digital revolution which transformed the news business forever. if the established media is no longer trusted, who's to blame? alan rusbridger, welcome to hardtalk.

there is a sense hanging over your recent writings that you sort of feel you got out of the news business just before it went into meltdown. would that be fair? it's a tough period economically for news. the model that almost accidentally attached advertising to news, which you could say lasted for 200 years, is melting fast and there's tremendous competition from the digital giants of the west coast. 0n the other hand, i think journalism has never been more important. there is a great battle going on at the moment for truth versus fakery and falsity and rubbish, and i think it's an exhilarating time to be a journalist and to try and work out how you remake journalism. it is an interesting phrase that,

"journalism has never been more important". but i wonder, in all honesty, do you feel that traditional news organisations such as the one that you lead for 20 years, the guardian in the uk, would you argue that it and others like it have never been more important or is the scenery shifting? the big difference is, obviously, this insipid term — social media. in the last dozen years, the image i had as i was writing this book was of a world that had been arranged vertically. we had the printing presses and we almost literally handed down the news, as it were, on tablets of stone and people handed out their money. and now you've got 4 billion people talking horizontally. yeah, but the relationship of authority. yeah. you, particularly you as editor were the ultimate authority, and the consumers would accept that authority. we were certainly the gatekeepers. we were the gatekeepers of news and we handed it down to you, and then you had to decide

if you trusted it or not. what is happening at the moment is that there is a big battle for trust. do they trust the old gatekeepers or do they trust each other? as we get into a complex discussion about trust, i think it is important to set out some parameters and backgrounds. here is a simple one. what did you personally get intojournalism for? if i'm honest, i got into it ‘cause i thought it was an enjoyable life. i was a curious person and i was never going to be a brain surgeon or a concert pianist. that's why — it was a nice life. by the time i was editor, i became very conscious of the responsibility and the duty ofjournalists as people who, in a society, can say that this is true and that isn't true. this happened, and this didn't happen. that's whatjournalists do. you always had, and you still have, a fundamental belief in an objective truth.

that's a more complicated question. as you know, if you lived in america, you would believe in an objective truth. in a british newspaper, it is much more subjective. working for the bbc, you're obliged to be impartial. and of course, you were never that at the guardian. no. one would argue, and perhaps you would disagree, maybe you wouldn't, but there was a collective mindset at the guardian and there still is. it's progressive, it's small l liberal. one would have to say it's probably metropolitan rather than anything else. that is the voice of the newspaper, and what the audience expects. to some extent. and i do think that separating news from comment. comment is free, facts are sacred — cb scott, editor of the guardian for 57 years — that is an important mantra. but i would accept that the guardian was on the liberal side. that is because for 200 years you had a polemical press and there were many people with the opposite view in britain. you saw it as very much part

of your remit to hold power to account. in your memoir/rumination on the nature ofjournalism, you talk in great detail about the specific showdowns you had with the british government, and perhaps the most significant of all — there are a couple, but arguably the most significant was over edward snowden and his revelations, given to you, about a massive electronic secret surveillance operation being conducted by us intelligence, specifically the national security agency. and to be brutal about it, your mantra was published and be damned. you should never, in my view, stop — except in the most exceptional of circumstances — stop an editor from publishing. it's not the duty of the state to stop the free exchange of news. but it's the duty of an editor

to think carefully before publishing and perhaps to consult with those who could tell the editor whether there was a genuine and real—time risk to national security. and we did all that. but the ‘damned' bit is of course, you take the consequences. in the end, we ended up publishing from america because the pentagon papers case of 1972, when the edward snowden of his day, a man called daniel ellsberg, told the truth about the vietnam war and the american government tried to stop him and the supreme court said "no, that's not the role of government. the press has to be independent from government." who did you consult? because of course, the ‘be damned' element of what i said, the mantra ‘publish and be damned', the damned element was severe for you. you were castigated and accused of treacherous behaviour by government figures, including the head of intelligence, and also by fellowjournalists.

who did you consult before deciding to publish? multiple people. we were in touch with the white house, with the nsa, with the british intelligence agencies, with the fabled d—notice system in britain, which is the system in which people voluntary submit material to the government, so there was almost daily contact. so when, as we now know, after publication there was public comment from, for example, the head of mi6, don sawyer, saying that britain's adversaries at the time of publication were rubbing their hands with glee. al qaeda was lapping up with glee all this covert information that you put into the public domain. you obviously decided to just ignore all that sort of comment? we didn't ignore it. we took account of the representations that were made to us and like i said, we went through the d—notice system. did you feel they were lying to you in their characterisation of the damage that would be done? there was a public battle going on at that time,

a war of words. i've spoken to intelligence people since and when you're sitting down calmly with them, quite often they say look, this was inevitable. we couldn't go on with this sort of mass surveillance without it becoming known and publicly debating, and actually i think the calmer ones accept that this was a good debate to have had and they have actually put it all on a legalfooting now. there is a powerful word used by a former home secretary, jack straw, when he was commenting on what you did and on the decisions you took, he said ‘arrogant‘. he said that your decision making showed an extraordinary naivete and arrogance, implying that you were in a position, whether to judge whether or not secrets were fit to be published when many others deemed they were likely to damage the national interest. do you understand that feeling? i do, and jack straw‘s a politician. but if you believe in a free press, then you believe that in a free society you have a free press, and it follows that editors must be free to make those decisions.

some editors will fundamentally take a different view. in a frank discussion of the fallout from your decision—making, you quote a fellow editor, who was briefly editor of the independent, chris blackhurst, he said that "if the security services insist that something is contrary to the public interest and might harm their operations, who am i as a journalist to disbelieve them?" i think that goes to the heart of the independence of the journalism. so if, when richard nixon told the washington post and the new york times not to publish daniel ellsberg and the pentagon papers, they had taken that attitude and said it's not for us to query the president of the united states, then we would never have known about the pentagon papers, we'd probably never have known about philby and burgess and the british spies because that's what governments always say. they always say listen to us, we are the wise ones and you are jeopardising. so you have to begin by saying the press has to be independent

and has to make its ownjudgements. now, of course you can argue that we were irresponsible and we shouldn't have published, but my problem with blackhurst and that quote was him saying that in any circumstances, if the british state told me not to publish, i would not do it. so over a 20—year span where you, as editor, are dealing with important national security issues frequently, and yourjournalists were bringing to you exposes and revelations and secrets uncovered, can you name to me one example where you ultimately took the decision not to publish information that your journalists had gathered ? oh, yes. of the snowden material, we published about 5% in the end of the material, and i established very strict guidelines because we shared the material with the new york times and in handing it oversaid that we were not going to look at anything to do with spying on countries or on warfare or terrorism.

that's not what we're going to do. and sometimes they pushed back and said we would like to use some of this material. i was firm and said that all we're looking at at the moment is the mass capability of surveying entire populations. that's what we're looking at, that's what snowden is concerned with. so we did not publish, deliberately, the vast majority of the material that we had. do you think, if today, somebody inside an organisation, whether it be a news organisation or someone inside government, was wanting or willing to spill the beans, to blow the whistle on what they saw as malfeasance, do you think they would either need or want to go through a traditional media organisation? why couldn't — why wouldn't they, in the age of the internet and all of us having immediate access to the web and social media platforms, why wouldn't they just publish themselves? i think that's a very good question.

it was remarkable in a way that edward snowden, in deciding to pass on this material, didn't just publish himself. i think the opposite example, if you like, is someone like julian assange who is essentially an information anarchist. julian assange, the founder of wikileaks. he did work with you for a while, we must remember, before falling foul. but there is a question of whether you trust old media, if you like, to be the gatekeepers. the reason that edward snowden didn't go to the new york times, which may have been expected, was because in 2005 they had sat on a story to do with genuinely conspiracy within the american government of warra nt—less wiretapping, illegal behaviour by the george w bush regime. and he thought why go to a paper if they will not publish? i tried to explain this to the british government, that in a way, you are lucky it is the guardian and the new york times and washington post that has this material, and we are talking to you daily. because if newspapers refused to publish this material, the next edward snowden willjust release it on the internet. so something has changed now that we are fully immersed in the digital era.

you even suggest that the news industry as we've known it is fundamentally broken. i'm struggling to understand why you think the internet has changed everything because, after all, one only has to look at the way the media has worked through the 19th and 20th centuries to see that the dissemination of lies and the use of propaganda and manipulative tactics, they're as old as the hills. they haven't come in with the internet. and therefore, the notion that everything has changed in the news industry is broken, is something of an exaggeration, is it not? well, the title of the book

is "breaking", not "broken". so i'm not saying it's broken. i'm saying it is breaking, it is under great strain. the reason... well, i hesitate to contradict you, you wrote the book, not me. but there is a quote "by early 2017, news, the thing that helped people understand the world, that oiled the wheels of society, that pollinated communities, that kept people honest, news was broken." then there was a pause, you go on to say there was too much false news. not enough reliable news. that is the point. from the 18th and 19th century, of course there was always falsity in the world, but it was copable with. what we now we have is the fantastic scales, just to take the president of the united states, who on some metrics has told untruths or lies four a half thousand times since becoming president, simply keeping up with the ability of the most powerful man in the world to broadcast to 50 million people daily, things that are untrue and that is before you get the macedonian fake news factories and notjust them — the extreme right, the extreme left. so you have got a machinery that has never existed in humankind before

pumping out billions of pieces of false news every day. that is the real challenge for a journalistic profession that is creaking at the seams in terms of economics. and perhaps the temptation of many journalists is to point the finger at donald trump, but perhaps they need to look at themselves too. trump phenomenon, as you say, the lies he tells our pointed out very publicly and yet, a very significant constituency in the united states, if not in the wider world, looks at trump, listens to his message about the mainstream media being fake, being enemies of the people, and millions sympathise. now why do you think that is? well, i am not uncritical ofjournalism in this book, and as i was writing it, i thought hard about whether it was reasonable just to come out

with a message that said we need morejournalism. because the story that journalists tell to the world is that we are better than that, better than this ocean of content out there because we are journalists and we are trained. to some people it is not the journalist saying that we are better than that, it is them saying we are better than you. well, that is also true. i think in this, the subtitle of the book is the remaking of journalism. i came to think that that meant journalism simply has to be better and there were two things during the writing of this book that led me to query, rather vividly that. one was the reporting of brexit and one was the reporting of climate change. in which, i think, it is not an easy argument to say that traditional journalism is so much better than what is available on the social web or the internet in general. see, when one talks politically about the trump phenomena, it it seems to me that it is important to understand

what it is that the people who voted for trump saw in him that made him an attractive political proposition. the same message, it seems to me, is important for journalists to think about. what it is in the trump message and other what sort of, anti—elite politicians who preach against the mainstream media, what is it in that message that a lot of people find resonant? it's it that too many people in — quote unquote — mainstream media have a mindset which, lot of folks feel, is completely out of touch with their lives? i am sure that is true. but what trump is doing is going further and try to delegitimise journalism itself, it seems to me. i think the new york times, for all of its failings, is a great ethical, responsible newspaper which operatues to a veyr high standard. so it seems really perverse to almost on a daily basis, single out the new york times and say that is fake. it seems to me what trump

is trying to do is to say that actually if i if i can convince you that there are no facts in the world, then we can perhaps operate on a different level, which is emotion, and trump is very successful in playing to people's emotions. that is a very dangerous road to go down. 51%, looking at an interesting recent poll, 51% of republican voters, millions of people, now believe the media to be the enemy of the people, rather than an important part of the democracy. more than half of republican supporters polled were not concerned that mr trump's criticism might lead to violent against journalists. how dangerous a world do you think we are entering? i think it is incredible. i said on the board of the committee to protectjournalists in new york and it never occurred to me four years ago that we would be talking about protecting american journalists, that is what it has come to because there is an attempt to say that the press

are the enemies of the people. the press should be the friends of the people, they should be on their side. there should be a lot of soul—searching among journalists to say well how we got into this position? yes. a fascinating idea that the press should be the friends of the people. going back to the beginning of our conversation, how you got into journalism, i hope you don't mind me being a little bit personal, you are a classic 0xbridge—educated and a member of the upper middle—class british elite, and according done by lewis goodall, a young journalist who cares about theese sorts of things, a vastly disproportionate number of senior british journalists on national media organisations are both privately educated and have been through the 0xbridge system. coming back to this point aboutjournalists need to reach out to the people and be seen to be trusted by the people, isn't that part of the problem? of course it is, yeah. and one of the things that i think you have to realise that social media is that it is more reflective

of the kind of conversations that ordinary people have. one of the things that we did on the guardian was to open up our comment pages and call it ‘comment is free'. it wasn't just the same six commentators working on a daily basis that the newspaper traditional model has, we are able to have a lot of muslim voices and young voices and black voices and gay voices and indians writing about india, rather than writing about india from king's cross. so this is the extent of the revolution that is moving and that's part of regaining trust. let's end by going back to those years on the guardian, we have talked about some of the huge stories that you broke as editor. what you also broke while you were there, was the bank. you almost drove the paper into bankruptcy, i think the last year you were editing it it lost £16 million,

according to michael wolff, who sometimes wrote for you and sometimes was a critic of yours. he said you are putting the guardian, because of your disastrous economic model, on a suicide mission. now that you are a few years left, gone from the paper, would you acknowledge that your journalistic career was a success, your economic model for the paper is a total disaster? no, i think totally the opposite. that is a very good example of fake news. guardian has £1 billion in the bank and it is breaking even this year. so, i would argue that we had actually a very long—term strategy and the current people running the paper, who could have put up a paywall, but have decided not to three years after i have gone, have realised this is a good strategy, not a disaster at all. the point about being free is a very important one. the new york times, which is a brilliant paper, is not read by 97% of americans, quite a lot of whom watch fox news or get their news off the internet. and it is a brilliant thing and an important thing which should be celebrated, not knocked,

that guardian readers are prepared to pay for the guardian, this was the membership model that we devised about five years ago. not in order so that nobody else could read it and nobody else could read it, but a bit like the bbc, so the world could access a really good source of news. that seems to me, fundamental in terms of thinking aboutjournalism as a public service that is available to everybody in an age when, if you put up a gigantic paywall around your content, then you are of course disenfranchising and creating a poverty of information for people who can't access it. ten years from now, who will be defining the world ofjournalism that we live in? will it be institutions like the guardian, or will it be the tech giants like google and facebook? well i think google and facebook are realising the world is that more difficult than they thought, this world of information. i do think that the traditional

news organisations are, at their best, rather good at sifting truth from lies. i think, what we are going to have, i hope what we are going to have, is an interaction between facebook, the googles and the guardians and the bbc‘s and the new york times and out of that comes something rather creative and important. but it is going to be messy, lots of people are going to lose a lot of money and it is going to be worrying. but i do think it is a great time to be a journalist and to be part of that revolution. i was going to say, if you were setting out as a young man on a career today, would you still want be a journalist? absolutely. i would not have the career security that you and i have at our great age, but what an exciting time to be able to makejournalism even better than it is today. that's a nice thought to end on. alan rusbridger, thank you very much for being on hardtalk. hello.

tuesday was a day of contrasts across the uk. cloudy and windy for northern ireland and scotland, with some outbreaks of rain. across much of england and wales we saw a good deal of sunshine, and it's a similar day on wednesday. we keep this piece of cloud over the atlantic, extending into northern ireland and scotland. the heaviest of the rain through wednesday looks likely to be across the western isles and the scottish highlands. the odd spot of rain, some patchy drizzle at times for northern ireland, under cloudy skies, and we'll see a bit more cloud sinking its way across northern england, maybe with the odd spot of rain. but there'll be some sunshine across eastern scotland, north—east england, and that extends all the way down across much

of england and wales. now, these are the average wind strength through wednesday afternoon. gusts once again will be higher, but not as strong as we saw on tuesday — a0 mph at times across scotland and northern ireland. in the sunshine, temperatures quite widely up to 20 or 21 celsius, including aberdeenshire and murray, which should see some sunshine through wednesday afternoon. through wednesday evening and overnight into thursday morning, our area of rain across the western isles and the scottish highlands moves its way a little bit further northwards, into 0rkney and shetland, so some clearer skies across eastern scotland. a bit more cloud across the far north of england, but clearer skies further south, where it will be another fairly cool night. some rural spots getting in the low single figures for a time. so this is the general setup as we go into thursday. we still have the influence of high pressure across central, southern england and wales, these fronts still fringing northern ireland and scotland, and bringing further cloud and outbreaks of rain through thursday. now, very slowly this will be slipping its way south and eastwards through thursday, but running into an area of high pressure, so the rain slowly

starts to fizzle out. and ahead of it, we've still got a good deal of sunshine across much of england and wales on thursday, and a warm day here. last day of the warmth, though, for a while, i suspect — temperatures on thursday afternoon across east anglia, south—east england getting up to 22 or 23 celsius. but behind that front, we're going to be in the mid—to—high teens. a sign of something fresher to come as we head towards the end of the week. so, from thursday into friday, here's our front sliding its way south and eastwards. high pressure starts to build in as we head towards the weekend. so, across northern ireland and scotland, we should see a return of some sunshine, but for all of us by the end of the week we're back into something much fresher. so, after those temperatures getting up to 22 or 23 celsius on thursday, by the time you to friday, things will be starting to turn cooler. and into the weekend, some cool days, some chilly nights, but for most of us it will be generally dry, with some spells of sunshine. that's all from me. goodbye. i'm rico hizon in singapore,

the headlines: the us comedian bill cosby is jailed for sexual assault — the judge says he'll serve between three to ten years in prison. president trump addresses the un general assembly, putting his america—first policy centre—stage. the project is the ideology of globalism and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism. —— we reject. i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: a breakthrough in the battle against malaria — scientists use gene—editing to make an entire population of mosquitoes infertile. and the duchess of sussex on her first solo royal engagement — at a new show celebrating the art