THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TRUTH

And they do. Our response has been to set up an independent readers' editor with his own space to clarify, correct--and comment on--things we get wrong. It's not perfect. It is a start. My sense is we're going to have to go much further in opening up our processes if we're to retain the trust of present readers and to win the trust of future generations. The dismaying thing is the timing of all this. The crisis in trust has coincided--with a great many newspaper and media companies--with troubled times in revenue, circulation and audience. And it is also happening at a time when good, reliable, serious, challenging journalism is needed as rarely before.

A few months ago I attended a select off-the-record gathering of M.P.s, judges, spies and civil servants to discuss the lessons of the Iraq war. Actually, the meeting was more narrowly focused on the Hutton report into the BBC's infamous coverage of one aspect of the war. The distinguished participants around the table owned up to failure--a failure to hold the executive accountable, to operate as proper checks and balances. The only people who had done their duty (said the spooks and the judges and the mandarins) were the media. They had made mistakes, certainly, but they had got something out into open which deserved to be.

What was true then has been as true since. It wasn't Parliament that flushed out the hurried and mysterious changes in the British Attorney General's advice on the legality of war: it was the media. The prime minister struggled to the bitter end to keep it all secret. Since the formal end of the war there have been numerous journalistic postmortems on both sides of the Atlantic. Editors have been fired, errant reporters have resigned or been publicly criticized. The BBC was unceremoniously decapitated. The politicians and their unelected helpers remain serenely in place.

At some level the public recognizes the importance of decent, robust journalism, even if there is currently a drifting away from large swathes of the mainstream media. It's probably also true that most of the public are a bit more sophisticated than we are in understanding the limits of what we do. Maybe it's time we took Broder's advice. Let's advertise the fact that journalism is a partial, hasty, incomplete and flawed business. The readers know it. They might trust us more, not less, if we owned up.

RUSBRIDGER IS EDITOR OF THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER

© 2005