Bad NewsSeptember/October 2019 207
was to assume that since there wasn’t any
clear way to make a newspaper at once
journalistically robust and ¿nancially
pro¿table, the paper would just have to
live with large losses. But in retrospect,
his view has arguably been vindicated.
Today, The Guardian is one o the most
important news organizations in the
world, in a way it never could have been
had Rusbridger not embraced the Inter-
net as he did. It has a larger global
audience than any British news source
besides MailOnline, the website o the
Daily Mail, a celebrity-focused tabloid
that helped drive the campaign for Brexit.
And under Rusbridger’s successor,
Katharine Viner, the newspaper has pared
costs and encouraged digital readers to
make donations; in 2018, The Guardian
had a marginally pro¿table year. It is one
o the few high-quality news organiza-
tions that now appears to be sustainable.CHANGING TIMES
Compared with Rusbridger, Abramson
gave hersel a more dicult assignment
in going beyond her own former organi-
zation to write more broadly about the
changing news business. Her journalis-
tic model is The Powers That Be, David
Halberstam’s long-winded 1979 book
about the rise o modern media, which
revolved around the stories o ,
Time Inc., The Washington Post, and the
Los Angeles Times. Abramson picks four
other organizations to tell the tale o
the business’ decline: the Post again,
plus The New York Times and two digital
insurgents, BuzzFeed and Vice. She
acknowledges her partiality when it comes
to her own experience at the Times, an
institution she revered so much that
she had a T tattooed on her back in the
paper’s iconic gothic-style font. SheStreet club. In the years that followed,
as Rusbridger published WikiLeaks’
revelations about U.S. foreign policy
and, later, information provided to The
Guardian by the former National Secu-
rity Agency contractor Edward Snowden,
Murdoch’s newspapers led the mob
crying for censorship and punishment.
In deciding to publish material from
WikiLeaks, Rusbridger dealt with a set
o issues no editor had ever confronted in
quite the same way. WikiLeaks’
founder, Julian Assange, was no Daniel
Ellsberg: Assange was a radical seeking
to fundamentally transform society
through transparency, whereas Ellsberg,
who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The
New York Times in 1971, was a member
o the national security establishment—
a hawk turned dove who had the more
limited goal o hastening the end o the
disastrous war in Vietnam. The poten-
tial harm contained in the raw ¿les
Assange had obtained went far beyond
any imagined threat posed by the Penta-
gon Papers. “Once, to do journalism, all
you needed was a knowledge o short-
hand and to read a couple o books on
law and local government,” Rusbridger
writes. “Now the best journalists had to
be moral philosophers and students o
ethics.” He cannily shared his big Wiki-
Leaks scoop with The New York Times,
ordinarily a competitor, in order to gain
First Amendment protections. The
great virtue o his book is the way he
describes trying to make dicult choices
in stressful situations. His thoughtful
handling o these episodes makes him,
in retrospect, the most important editor
o the era.
As a business thinker, Rusbridger’s
reputation is more questionable. His
approach, much derided during his tenure,