this is bbc news. the headlines — senior us democrats have suggested that the house of representatives could vote as soon as tuesday on whether to impeach mrtrump. however, they may decide to delay the start of a senate trial until afterjoe biden‘s first 100 days in office, to allow him time to launch his agenda in congress. indonesian investigators believe the boeing 7a7 carrying 62 people broke apart when it hit the water, which they say could rule out a mid—air break—up. navy divers say they're confident they will be able to retrieve the flight recorders. the uk health secretary has warned people against bending coronavirus lockdown rules in england and backed tough police enforcement. he urged everyone to adhere to restrictions aimed at bringing coronavirus infections under control. the warning comes as hospitals‘ admissions continue to soar. now on bbc news, hardtalk.

welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the covid—19 pandemic is a test of global public health systems. it also presents a profound challenge to our media and information networks. look online and you will find fact and fa kery locked in mortal combat on the dangers of the disease, the efficacy of lockdowns and the safety of the vaccines. my guest today is alan rusbridger, former editor of the guardian and now a member of facebook‘s supervisory oversight board. how do we ensure fact prevails overfiction?

alan rusbridger, welcome to hardtalk. i'm very pleased to be here. your latest book, news and how to use it, is subtitled what to believe in a fake news world. do you really believe we are living in a fake news world? i'm afraid we are. we are living in an age of complete information chaos and all of the surveys of trust show that the media is doing very badly. people don't know what to believe any longer, who to believe and who to trust. but to call it a fake news world is surely to undermine the importance of so many different media organisations and journalists of integrity right around the world, who are continuing to do what they have always done — that is, to bear witness,

to report accurately and truthfully and to give their viewers, listeners and readers a picture of what is happening in the world today? i think actually it's the opposite. it is really trying to emphasise the importance ofjournalism at its best as a method of understanding the world and getting at the truth, but the problem is that survey after survey shows that people don't really trust journalism any more than other forms of communication. we are living in a world now in which the monopoly on news that people used to have when they had a printing press or a broadcasting studio is now shared between the 4 billion people on the planet who can now broadcast and publish. journalism is in some trouble just at the point where you think, or you would have thought, people would be flooding to the safe harbour of a craft or a profession that they know they can trust. well, that of course brings me to the covid—19 pandemic and the way information

is flowing around the world as to the realities, the dangers of the virus itself, the nature of governmental responses, including lockdowns, as we currently live in the united kingdom, and of course the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. are you suggesting that on all of these measures news and information flows are now toxified in some way? well, i think we have to accept that people — and of course manyjournalists are doing a wonderfuljob in the middle of this. i think it's almost the first time in manyjournalists‘ lives when they realise that what they write or broadcast can be a matter of life and death, and many have risen to that challenge really well. but, again, if you look at the surveys of who people are turning to and who they are trusting, it is not clear to me thatjournalism is trusted as much as it should be, and part of the point of writing the book was trying

to examine why that is, to try to explain to readers whyjournalism at its best deserves to be trusted, but also to try and make journalists themselves think a bit more deeply about the reasons for lack of trust, and there are many of them. yeah. the book is fascinating, and you write it as a sort of glossary with keywords that matter to the future of journalism. to be absolutely honest with you, when you get to the letter c, i can't remember whether you alight upon the word "censorship" or not, but either way in your view is censorship what is required right now to sort of detoxify the well ofjournalism, particularly when it comes to the arguments and discussions about covid—19? is censorship what you want? no. you would be amazed to learn i'm not in favour of censorship. i am a very old—fashioned liberal. i am withjohn stuart mill, the philosopher who argued a long time ago that the best

response to argument was more argument. i think censorship is very dangerous because it just gives rise to suspicion. you know, "why are these views being suppressed?" i am in favour of meeting argument with more argument, of bringing as many facts and arguments out into the open so that those can be had out in the open, and where there is falsity it can be confronted with fact. but i am very mindful that having edited a national newspaper in the uk for two decades, you are currently sitting on the so—called oversight board of facebook. we can discuss that in detail later, butjust right now on this question of what is put out on facebook, you are saying you are not in favour of removing, that is, censoring messages put out on the world's most influential social media site, which, for example, sometimes

suggests that the vaccine is deeply dangerous to people or on other occasions that lockdowns don't work and are being manipulated by governments around the world to damage the people's interest. this sort of message on facebook should not be removed, shouldn't it? well, i think you have to look at each case on its merits. infact, iam part ofa panel that is looking at the covid case at the moment. i probably shouldn't talk about that, but looking at that you are in this world of looking at protecting free speech, looking at who is speaking rather than with what kind of authority and how actionable it is. i think if somebody is out there saying, "inject bleach "into your arms, that's going to cure you" or "swallow domestos", that is clearly dangerous and crazy and that is going to endanger people. if it is people — and we know there are lockdown sceptics

who are making the argument that lockdowns don't work or that you want herd immunity — i think i am in favour of allowing those to remain up, possibly with warnings, possibly with the tools that facebook have and other social media platforms that can suppress the virality of those kind of messages, but i think if you don't then what you are going to do is suppress those arguments into places like whatsapp, where they can't be seen and they can't be confronted. it is difficult because the very notion of an oversight board will sound to some people somewhat paternalistic. you know, the whole idea of the internet in a way was to level out information flows, to make them much less top—down, to make them more egalitarian, in a way. then when we learn that facebook is so worried about information flows and false information that it has to have people like you, members of the media establishment, sit

on an oversight board and declare what facebook should and should not take down, maybe it sounds like the spirit of the internet is being lost. well, the people who created facebook and other media companies, modern media companies, interactive media companies, are mostly engineers — and they are obviously brilliant engineers who have done an astonishing job of building their platforms — but simultaneously they have unleashed human life in digitalform. so human life is wonderful and awful, dangerous and exhilarating. there are wonderful things out there on digital media, but there are things that are hate—filled and dangerous. i think it is probably a good thing that a media company has said to people — notjust from the media but from the law, from human rights backgrounds, from academia — "would you help "us think about these issues?" because they are highly complex. we know that the battle

for freedom of speech in this country, in britain, has taken 300 years and they are highly complex issues, these balancing issues between free speech and possible harms, so the reason ijoined this board is it seems to me a most important task to help the engineers think through the moral, ethical, legal and free speech perspectives that are involved in what facebook is doing. it is difficult for me to condense the ideas in your book about the future of news into just a few simple sentences. and i don't want to do you an injustice, but when you write in the book for example about the brexit phenomenon in the uk and the triumph of donald trump in the 2016 election and the nature of his presidency as well, you make it plain that in your view there is a real problem here, that many people voted, expressed their democratic

will, based on what you describe as false information. at some points you suggest it was almost a form of brainwashing. it could be that on both of those issues, the rise of trump and brexit, you just disagree with the democratic outcome. i was no longer editing when brexit happened, but i knew as a reader what i wanted. if you are going to go to the people and ask them to make a direct vote, you want them to be as well—informed as possible. it seems to me obvious that what a newspaper or a broadcasting organisation's function is to give them both sides of the argument, you equip them with the information they need to know in order to vote. almost the last thing that matters is what your opinion as a newspaper owner or editor or proprietor is. i am not against, of course, people saying, "this

is my opinion on how you should vote," but in fact a lot of the british press did exactly the opposite. they started by saying, "this is how you should vote, "this is what we believe, we won't give two sides "of the argument" and a lot of the front pages, particularly towards the end, became hectoring, menacing, bullying and all of this stuff about threatening mps who disagreed or the judges, who were suddenly the enemies of the people. that seemed to me a real perversion of what news should be. but if i may interrupt for a second, i guess my point is you are saying constantly this is a story, a problem about journalism. i am saying maybe it is just an evolving democracy and that voices that haven't been heard before are now being heard. people who felt voiceless before, some of whom, many of whom, frankly, are rather attracted to donald trump, in the uk maybe rather attracted to brexit, they are getting traction now and they are able to express their views via twitter, facebook and many other social media platforms in a way that they haven't been able to do before. and you, if i may say so, a liberal elite, an established

media elite who didn't really have to pay attention to those voices in the past, now will have to. yes, and of course i am totally in favour of that and there is lots of evidence that people are consulting many more sources than they did in the past. i am merely making a point about the position that journalism is to have in the future. of course, i'm arguing from a position in which i think journalists are essential. i think it is essential to have people in society who can say, "this happened, that didn't happen, this is true, this isn't true," because in a world of information chaos where you have no idea what is true and what isn't true and who you can trust, then societies become unworkable. so i'm not blaming the brexit result. i happen to... that is not the way i would have voted myself, but i am saying that if news organisations want to regain that kind of trust they are probably going to have to think about the environment in which they work in the 21st

century, which is very different from the 20th century. yeah. you have had a long journalistic career. even longer than mine. do you think there ever was in your lifetime a golden age when the public really did invest huge amounts of trust in journalists? well, for a start, they didn't have any option. it was one of the things that if... when i began my career if you owned a printing press or a broadcasting studio, you more or less had a monopoly on what people consumed. that is a different point, that isn't about trust, that is about monopolistic access to the reader, listener or viewer, but there is a different point about trust. in the past, did people really invest huge amounts of trust in what they read? it is partly about trust because if you had no other sources, those were the only sources that you had and the evidence seems to be that people did invest news organisations with more trust. now, of course, as you've said, they have multiple sources.

they can check the version that newspaper a is giving against what they are reading on twitter or elsewhere. and that has led to a quite stark decline of trust, not only in news organisations, but institutions more generally. i want to talk about newspapers because you oversaw the most remarkable period in change in the newspaper business, and you were a pioneer of developing the guardian as an online brand — it has become a major international news brand, thanks to its online presence. but its sales, and all newspaper sales, the literal paper copy, they are flailing and dying, and they will indeed terminally die very soon, iwould imagine. does that matter? i don't think it necessarily matters whether you consume your newspaper on a mobile phone or a tablet or a computer or in print. i think it really does matter that newspapers or news organisations themselves

survive, they have an institutional importance and strength and role in developing the craft ofjournalism, and so i think newspapers have no option but to do what the guardian did, which was to accept the fate of print was extremely time—limited and try to do their best to navigate the new world of digital. many newspapers are clearly not surviving, we have seen many go bust, but in particular we have seen a massive financial crisis in the local newspaper industry, in the united kingdom, many other parts of the world, very markedly in the united states as well. does that really matter, that people seem to not really, if one can judge from their user habits, value local news as they used to? it couldn't matter more, in my opinion, and maybe after four years of donald trump, in which you have had a president who has almost gone out of his way to say, "there is no such thing as truth, objective truth,

"you ought to believe me more than you believe one "of the best newspapers in the world, the new york times." so you've got this world in which, as we began by saying, we don't know who to believe, and it really matters that local communities, all communities have a way of knowing what is true and what isn't true. otherwise it can't work. we can see this with covid at the moment. if you don't believe there is a crisis then the government will have a real job in persuading people that their responses are right. that's a dress rehearsal for climate change, if you like. so of course local news matters, all news matters, and i suppose the book is a sort of plea for trying to regain the methods of trust that would lead people back to news that should be trusted, but we have to accept that journalism itself has got some way to... some things about the way that it's done that they have to mend. but maybe the entire landscape is evolving and you are not evolving with it.

there is just an element of you, it seems to me, and you are quite open about it, that is telling people that metaphorically, they have to eat their greens, they have to consume local news about planning and council meetings, and local political stand—offs because it is good for them and it is good for accountability and democracy, even if, frankly, many people find it utterly boring. well, that's always been a function of good journalism, i think, the eat your greens bit. let's take climate change. if we believe, as i do, that we are facing a crisis in climate, that is going to affect our children, our grandchildren, in quite a short time span, it is the duty ofjournalists to keep reporting that, even if people don't want to read it very much. but how do you engage them and how do you make sure they trust what you are saying? these are two elements that really matter for the future, engagement and trust. how do you rebuild it?

the engagement bit, it's whatjournalists should do, so journalists need to work out how best to dramatically, graphically and repeatedly write about climate change or broadcast about it in a way that will grab the attention of the reader. in terms of trust, it all comes down to in the 21st century, transparency, it is no longer enough to say, "i am a journalist, believe me, i work for this title, believe me." i am terribly interested when you look on twitter these days, the best people on twitter don't expect you to believe them, they say, "here is my proposition. "here is my screenshot, here is my link, if i have got "it wrong, please tell me, i will correct it, i'm prepared to have that argument in public." these are 21st century techniques of trust, and i'm afraid they're very different from how a lot ofjournalists of a certain age or mindset still work. one of the ironies, or possible ironies of your career,

is that having spent so long in newspapers, believing in what newspapers do, you are now being paid by facebook, one of the world's biggest social media operators, to sit on their 0versight board, and in a sense give a figleaf of accountability and transparency to a company which remains highly secretive about its core operations, about its algorithms, the way it uses data and personal information and privacy. do you worry that you are being used? of course. one of the conditions forjoining this board is that facebook have agreed to implement all our decisions. but your decisions, if i may interrupt, they are all about specific cases, as you have just said to me, specific cases about covid information, about the use of nudity online, or anything else, i mean they are important, i'm not belittling them, but they are not what really matters about the relationship between the public

and facebook. what really matters there is the way in which facebook, without our knowledge, in so many different ways, monetises us and our personal behaviours. and we have no way of knowing how they do it, and your oversight committee is not going to be able to delve one inch into that. well, step back a bit. what you have is a giant media organisation, probably the most powerful media organisation in the world at the moment, inviting in, if you like, a supreme court of people and saying, "we will obey your instructions about these highly "inflammatory and important matters to do with freedom "of speech and hate speech and incitement of violence "and nudity and public health." and that is... i mean, i can't think of a news organisation that has done that or had the humility to do that. now, i agree with you that i think our role is limited, but i think... what i hope will happen is that once we have started

publishing ourjudgements, we might be in a good position to have a conversation with facebook and ask, "can we start looking at other aspects of how "you run this company?" i'm not disagreeing that it would be preferable in time to get, for instance, inside the algorithm and understand how that works. interesting, you would like to get inside the algorithm. 0n the wider political point, in the united states we see efforts to change the so—called section 230 of the us communications law, which safeguards facebook from being regarded as a publisher — very good news for facebook, but us politicians are trying to change that, the eu is trying to take them on on the monopolistic aspects of facebook operations, in australia, corporations want facebook to pay for news. facebook is under enormous pressure. as a journalist, are you supporting all of these different efforts to rein in facebook? of course. this is like gutenberg,

like gutenberg on speed. the cataclysms in society after someone worked out a way to print books when monks had previously been hand writing them, and we have got that to the power of a billion now, so of course there will be paroxysms as society rearranges itself, and my only caution is to say "look, stop "demanding that everyone does this by next tuesday, "because otherwise we will not get good results." if you're going to do the incredibly difficult work of balancing the freedom of expression that facebook represents at its best, with minimising the harms, with a kind of organisation that we don't even know how to describe, we have not yet agreed whether it is a platform or a publisher, and that whole section 230 debate, so we are dealing with something vast and immensely complex, and it will not be solved overnight, and it shouldn't be because we would

make bad mistakes if you did. it seems to me that all of your messages about information chaos are going to require the next generation of internet and media users to be much more internet and information literate, if they are to navigate through the chaos. do you see signs that the next generation will be literate in that way? well, notjustjournalists, but society more broadly. i think everyone will have to play that role. i would like to see internet literacy, information literacy taught in schools because i think by the time you are 16 or 17, you are going to have to play a part in deciding how you think, what you think is true, who you think you can trust, and individual citizens and their choices about what they retweet or what they share or what they suppress are going to be really important because this is all at such a scale that it's great having an oversight board, but in the end, each of us will have to bear our responsibility, and that will have to begin with

a programme of media literacy, probably from a very early age. alan rusbridger, fascinating to talk to you, thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. good to be here. hello there. quite a few of us had a pretty cloudy day, really, on sunday, but there were some cloud breaks, a bit of sunshine around. in the right place at the right time was pandapix, spotting this beautiful sunset in the doncaster area of south yorkshire. now, sunday was a day that was a little bit less cold than it has been over recent days. still chilly, though. just one in hereford, four in manchester.

but it's turning milder for the vast majority of us, and through monday, temperatures between 8—10 degrees celsius pretty widely. now that milder air is working in at the moment, so temperatures are lifting. we do have rain around, though. damp across north—western areas, rain turning a bit more persistent in northern ireland and heavy rain in western scotland combining with snowmelt brings the risk of some flooding here. the only place, really, that's really cold overnight is shetland, where we'll still see some frost and there'll still be a few snow showers around as well. monday, milder air then pushes in off the atlantic, and with this milder air, we're going to have strengthening west—southwesterly winds. a mild day, but a cloudy day for most of us. a few breaks every now and then. the cloud at its thickest across north—western areas, where we'll have some rain, and persistent rain in scotland. well, northerly winds feeding into this weather front. we'll start to see the rain turn to snow across the highlands and the grampians, with accumulations above around 200—300 metres' elevation. could be some pretty heavy snow, too, but otherwise, it's mild — 8—10 degrees celsius.

for tuesday, we've got pressure building to the north of the uk, and that's going to send colder north—northwesterly winds across scotland and across northern and some eastern areas of england, too. might be colder, but there'll be loads more sunshine to go around. some wintry showers for northern scotland, an odd shower also just brushing into parts of norfolk. now, it will be cold for many of us. temperatures around 2—6 degrees celsius. but in the south west, where it stays cloudy and damp, it will be relatively mild, around ten in cardiff and plymouth as well. now, we've still got mild air into western areas on wednesday behind this next weather front. this front pushes in, bringing heavy rain, turns to snow for a time across the high ground in scotland and across the pennines as well. big temperature contrast. 10—11 degrees celsius towards western areas, but still cold in the north east with temperatures about three. we could start to see some of that snow get down to potentially some lower levels through wednesday night, but some uncertainty about that.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm james reynolds. a senior democrat lays out the possible timeline for impeaching donald trump — after at least 200 democrats give their support to a draft article of impeachment. indonesian investigators believe the boeing 737 that crashed into the java sea on saturday, with 62 people on board, broke apart on impact which could rule out a mid—air breakup. and virtually anything is possible at this years electronic show — where the high tech expo swaps vegas for the comfort of your own home.