Mike Berners-Lee (Cambridge University Press UK: On sale now US: On sale from 10 April)
Mike Berners-Lee admits he is worried about getting bad reviews for his new book, which criticises sections of the UK media for having editorial agendas effectively set by their owners. In the readable but dispiriting A Climate of Truth: Why we need it and how to get it, he points the finger at the BBC, Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the Daily Mail and other titles for not caring what is true and for not having people’s and the planet’s best interests at heart. New Scientist is also in the crosshairs: it is owned by DMGT, the Daily Mail‘s parent firm.
There is good reason for such censure, says Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University, UK. It is, he writes, unrealistic to hope for an unbreachable firewall between owners and their staff – “in the end, journalists’ and editors’ careers depend on following the agenda of the owner”.
Advertisement
I know something about this, and let me reassure you that, in my experience, the firewall is intact and robust at New Scientist. Our owners do not interfere. We are free to do our journalism as we see fit.
I bring this up not out of peevishness, nor to set the scene for a bad review, but to illustrate the central failing of this book: it demands impossible standards of flawed human beings, by which I mean all of us. But I’ll get to that.
The first part of A Climate of Truth is a penetrating and enlightening analysis of the polycrisis – the interlinked and accelerating problems of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, pollution and disease. This is a crisis of our own making and it is clearly existential. But, try as we might, and despite having the knowledge and technology to solve each part, we have been unable to slow down, let alone stop, the juggernaut.
Berners-Lee makes a cogent case that our failure is caused by fixating on solving individual elements of the polycrisis rather than the underlying causes. Things like climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are “superficial problems”, he writes, underlain by deeper ones. These are dishonesty in politics, business and the media; an obsolete economic model based on GDP growth; rampant inequality; inadequate legal systems; out-of-control technology; and an education system that teaches and prizes the wrong things.
Dig deeper still and we find the core of the polycrisis: our values and the way we think. You might call it human nature, though Berners-Lee doesn’t. That boils down to three things: collective disrespect for the environment, for other people and, above all, for the truth.
I can’t fault his argument that the polycrisis is ultimately a product of how we think and what we value, especially our disdain for the truth. What I can fault is his recipe for solving it. In a nutshell, if only we were all more truthful, the polycrisis would evaporate.
This is arguably true. But we live in a world where President Donald Trump won the popular vote in the US last year, riding on a tsunami of lies, where Europe’s worst war in almost a century is founded on blatant falsehoods, and where social media has dragged us into a cesspit of untruth. Lying is easy, largely penalty-free – and profitable.
To be fair, Berners-Lee lays out a manifesto for getting truth into the media, politics and business. It can be uplifting, and I hope I am wrong, but I think it is a hopeless task.
Which brings me back to his belief that it is unrealistic to expect an unbreachable firewall between media owners and journalists – something with which I fundamentally disagree. In Berners-Lee’s utopia, getting something like this wrong means we cannot trust him on anything. Hoist by his own petard? Maybe not, but indicative of how hard his standards will be to achieve in the real world.
New Scientist book club
Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.
