The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 190. How the Media Still Misunderstands Trump (Tina Brown)

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

Why does Trump understand the media better than the media understands him? Are tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos more dangerous to journalism than Rupert Murdoch ever was? What did Tina Brown see change in Trump from the '80s to now, and when did he turn "dark"? Alastair and Rory are joined by Tina Brown, author of the Substack 'Fresh Hell' and former editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, to discuss all these questions and more. Find out more about Truth Tellers here. __________ Search IG.com to find out more and/or Look for IG in your app store. __________ Instagram: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Twitter: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Email: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Joe Petit Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. I really believe that Fox News has been the single most damaging thing that has ever happened to America. We interviewed Gavin Newsom a few months ago and he said without Rupert Murdoch, there is no President Trump. The incredible thing that Trump proved, and he's so good at it. He understands the media is so much better than the media understands him, even now. There's no journalist really who's going to say,

I just had a long conversation with the president, but it's all rubbish and I'm not going to print it. Because they know they'll never get another one. They'll never get another one. And also it's like, you just got a scoop. Post-truth is a strategy. People like Trump deploy it, people like Putin deploy it. We've really got to the point where you just think,

well, what is really happening? The disinformation and the confusion has become so toxic because people literally don't know what to believe anymore. This episode is presented by IG. Sell in May and go away. Maybe a weird saying in finance, but as many politicians know, a pithy phrase isn't necessarily an effective strategy. And looking into Futsi 100, performance shows that this maxim would only have worked for two of the last 10 years.

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Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility, Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for Calendar Year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Welcome to the Restis Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we are with Tina Brown. And I suspect the two countries we most talk about on the rest is politics,

not necessarily in this order, are the United Kingdom and the United States. And Tina is very well-placed to talk about politics, media and culture in both. I straddle. Indeed you do. And you're now an American citizen. We can talk about that. But you're born in Britain.

Editor of the Tatler at 25, editor of Vanity Fair at 30, by which time a pretty big deal in the US and eventually became an American citizen. But in addition to sort of knowing the media world and magazine world inside out, also founded one of the first digital news sites and one of the most successful, author of several books, including our dear royal family that Rory loves so much. And of course, married to, sadly now departed one of my heroes who became a friend, Harry Evans, great journalist. And actually in London recently, because she founded in his honour, the Truth Tellers Summit, which essentially is trying to get journalism to play a better, more positive role in the fight back against the sort of politics that Roy and I talk about all the time.

She knows most of the big players in the transformation that's happening right now in America from Donald Trump down, and she's got very strong views about all of them. Thank you very much, Ali. I know that Harry was very fond of you, so it's great that you said that about him. And Truth Tellers really, you know, tries to valorize great journalism, which is what he did, you know, and he believed in how important it was in not just media is not just a sector, you know, it's the critical infrastructure of civilization in a sense. And he believed that very keenly. And that's what we do at Truth Tellers. We put those people on display and say, truth matters.

Tina, let's start back with your childhood. So it seems from a kind of distance when it's described is that it's quite bohemian. It's kind of films, there's kind of Lawrence Relivier, there's a kind of glamorous father and mother, a rebellious girl. I mean, was it a kind of glamorous bohemian childhood? I would say it was a slightly sort of split-level childhood in the sense that my father was a film producer, and so I was sort of exposed to all those kind of actors, producers, directors. But we also, we lived in the Thames Valley because he used to work at Pinewood Studios every day. And so I was sent to these kind of posh country day schools and posh boarding schools. So I had this other life, which was these kind of Debbie girls who used to go to Jim Carnas and things,

which gave me a kind of skew-eyed view of sort of realms of society, which I think actually helped me be a journalist, so that when I took over Tatler, which was essentially, you know, the house organ of the sort of the silly people, as it were, I was able to make it into something kind of more satirical and more journalistic, while at the same time being able to kind of pretend that I could, you know, pass as it were, in all those Debbie balls and things. Tell us a little bit more about the character of your mother and father. Were they loving? Were they kind?

My parents were absolutely wonderful. I mean, my mother was hysterical. She was very, very subversive and funny and iconoclastic. My father was a big sort of lovely teddy bear of a man, sort of country gentleman look in that era of filmmaking, which was, you know, the sort of, he made the Agatha Christie's. films and actors were all kind of, you know, of the Lawrence Olivier type. So there was, he was a wonderful guy, but they were very, very warm and supportive of me. And I was very rebellious and very iconoclastic like my mother. And I was constantly being asked to leave

these boarding schools because I just was just trouble. You know, it wasn't that I was going out meeting boys, getting drunk, whatever. I just was giving a lot of mouth, you know, to the staff. What were the specific expulsion causes? Well, I led a demonstration on the lacrosse. pitch against the fact that we weren't allowed to have clean underwear more than twice a week. And why did you care about that? Why was the synest to you that got you motivated? Well, I mean, I cared about it because I didn't like it. And I led a march across the lacrosse pitch. And I was, you know, thrown out because of it because, you know, school was very annoyed about it. I mean, they found me just somebody who was disruptive. So, but every time this happened,

happened three times, actually, each time my father would drive up with my mother and he would say to the head teacher, you must feel so incredibly disappointed. to have failed with this brilliant girl. I mean, what a terrible thing to be such a kind of unable to handle, you know, people who are different. Was there not one of these headteachers whose body form you mocked? Yes, that was the other thing. I kept a diary.

And, I mean, again, they were in the wrong. They were snooping in my diary. And they caught me writing about the head teacher as having, I described her bosom as unidentified flying objects. And she didn't like that. So I was thrown out again there. Again, my parents arrive in the car. Darling, we're loading up the trunk.

We're going. You know, how terrible for you to have failed with this wonderful young woman, my daughter, and off we would went. And then, of course, in the car, they would then give me hell, you know, like what the hell are you doing? But they always have my back. And Tina, were there no teachers who understood you, related to you, who you admired and who you developed bonds with? Well, you know, actually, yes, I was very good at English, you know, very, very good at English. I was always sort of first at English. and in those days we sort of didn't really care about doing anything except being good at one subject.

I didn't care that I was terrible at maths, games, all those things, because I was very, very good at English. So my English teachers always did like me, and I did get lots of sort of prizes for, you know, essays and all that. The history teacher really loved me, Mr. Bartlett. I mean, I still think of him with affection. So, yes, I mean, I had some very good teachers. Did they understand your character? Did they understand where your rebellion came from? Were they good at giving you space?

I think Mr. Bartlett understood it because he thought the schools were ridiculous, too. I mean, these were these boarding schools that were very sort of St Trinianzy, if you like. And so, yeah, some of the staff, like Mr Bartlett, who had a wry sense of humour, thought that I was, I had it right. When did you decide that you basically were a journalist and a writer? Well, I started to realize that, you know, what I just needed to do was to write, you know, to write about things. I had a writer's eye, you know, I was seeing things in a skewy way. And so when I got, well, I started writing plays, actually. That was my first desire.

And I did write plays. when I was at Oxford, I wrote a play called Under the Bamboo Tree, and we did it at Oxford, and then we took it to the Edinburgh Fringe. And from there, actually, it transferred to the Bush Theatre, and so it was kind of done on the fringe in London. And both the plays I did, actually, were done at the Bush Theatre on the fringe. So that's where I thought I was going. I thought I was becoming a playwright. But at the same time, I'd also kind of signed up to work on the Oxford magazine, which was called, rather unfortunately, today, Ices. And I started writing everything in it.

I started writing everything in it. My best friend was the editor and I kind of began to feel somehow that I loved the kind of collegiality of journalism. I love sort of being in that office, you know, in the ISIS office, hanging out, choosing the pictures, writing the captions. I started to really love all that, you know. So although I always thought that I would be a playwright eventually, it sort of graduated to doing that. and I started writing and I wrote a piece that was picked up by the new statesman. They noticed it and that's when I was first assigned. Tell us a little bit about the kind of social life of this.

Because you're one of the first journalists who's really pointed to this, loving being in the office and hanging out with people. And that was also a culture often of drinking. It was a culture of socialized. I mean, give us a sense of 70s and 80s culture. These were big offices eventually when you got to tap around New York. In journalism. Yeah.

Well, I mean, journalism was just wild. exciting at that time. And I was obsessed in that time with the New Statesman magazine when it was edited by the great Anthony Howard. I used to rush to the sort of news agent on Thursdays to get my copy of the New Statesman because at that time everybody really good was writing for it. So when I wrote this piece in ISIS that was admired by the editor of the New Statesman and he asked me to write for the New Statesman, it was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to me. And the New Statesman at the time that I was writing for it, the literary department was Martin Amis, James Fenner. Julian Barnes, you know, Claire Tomlin. I mean, it was just an amazing time when all these kind of young talents were congregated in Great Turnstile Street. And so coming into the office of the New Statesman was just incredible. And that's where I met Martin Amos, who became a, you know, a big boyfriend of mine at the time. In fact, the way we bonded was he used to write for the New Statesman under the byline of Bruno Holbrook. and so we both happened to be at a sort of literary agents party.

And I was chatting to this charming, rather short but very funny guy. And we talked about the new statesman and he said, well, who do you like reading in the new statesman? I said, I'm obsessed with Bruno Holbrook. And there was a kind of pregnant pause and he said, I am Bruno Holbrook, at which point, dissolve. The rest is a very steamy night. And when you, and I said in the introduction, so you became an editor of, albeit the Tatler, not, so you're not talking news statesmen, you're not talking, you know, the FT, but you were 25. What did people see in you at 25 that made them think she's an editor? Well, what happened was that, you know, the new statesman quickly led to my writing for the Sunday Times look pages, as they were called, under Harry. And during that time, I had caught sight of Harry from a distance and he became an instant, you know, love at first sight, idle. Another dissolving.

Another dissolving. Another dissolve. But not quite yet. He was the huge icon at that point. I was nowhere near that at that moment. But, you know, I became a freelance. I was writing in the Sunday Times all over the place. And this real estate guy bought the Tatler, which was at that time, you know, a shiny thing with a staples through it.

And it was just a picture of a sort of bun-faced, Deb on the cover and horse and Jim Carter pictures. You know, 4,000 people read it. But he wanted to turn it into a real magazine. You know, he decided he was going to buy it and turn it. into a glossy magazine with a nice spine and good pictures and looked like Harpers and Queen. So he asked everybody in London to edit it, you know, and he didn't know anyone. And they all said, no, why would anybody go and do this? Ridiculous job.

It was a silly job. And I think, you know, the great gossip columnist Nigel Dempster actually recommended me to him. Because I had been writing quite a lot about sort of society, as it were, because that's what people tend to assign girls, right? I mean, I was a woman. And so it was like, you go, why don't you go and write about, you know, I don't know, the queens, whatever or something. but I did it with a kind of irreverent style. And he asked if I had ever considered editing, and I hadn't actually at all.

But I don't know, I just sort of loved it as soon as I did it. You know, I leapt in and realized I could hire all my wonderful friends. And I just took to editing because it was very much like, to me, like theater as well. You know, it was very similar skills. And my father had been doing films. And it was all about gathering talent, getting talent going, you know, finding them, assigning them. The skills are very similar, actually, between theatre, film and editing.

Any one of those professions I could have done the same. One thing that's very weird about that, that period, 70s, 80s, even 90s, is that you have these incredibly wealthy people who want, for some reason, to own magazines, newspapers. And it sometimes, you know, you built massive circulation. You grew the number of readers. But even then, the economics for it was a bit odd. You know, frequently, what you were doing is you were reducing the losses of these things rather than to. turning them into massive profit-making enterprises, is basically, I mean, I don't know, from a distance when I look at the 70s, 80s, it looks like it's a world where these very wealthy people

are prepared to pour millions into things, which basically means that people like Martin Amos and Julian Barnes get lovely salaries, earning a lot of money, writing elegant articles, without necessarily being a revenue stream that adds up the end. Well, it wasn't true, of course, a Tatler when I took over. When I took over Tatler, I had a circulation. I had a budget of 10,000 pounds, you know. Budgets were in a US, you know, four years into Tatler, it was bought by the big American magazine company, Condonast, which was the chairman was SI Newhouse Jr. He bought Tatler because he loved what I was doing. And then he started Vanity Fair in New York, which was a revamp, you know, a relaunch, if you

like, of the great magazine of the 20s and 30s, which had died, you know, just before, you know, during the war. And he wanted to relaunch it to be a sort of rival to the next. New Yorker at that time. So he asked me to come over and do it, which was the most extraordinary break anyone could have had, you know, to do. But he really sort of believed that, you know, what they needed after launching it and it had been a catastrophe. They'd had two failed editors and they poured all this money and had a huge, glamorous, you know, noisy launch. And they did a turkey, you know, and it had just flopped. And so they thought, let's just bring in youth, you know, from London. And I had nothing to lose. So, of course, I was wildly excited and I leapt across the Atlantic.

Just to develop this more. So with Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, they were projects that required necessarily somebody like you, because as you say, you can spend a lot of money on these things and they can flop and it had flop twice before you took over. But it's also an odd business model that maybe doesn't necessarily exist today, which is that, you know, I remember when I was first writing for things in New York and the 90s, it was staggering how much money I could make. And I was never quite sure. Dreamy days. Yeah. Dreamy days.

Well, actually, you see, it wasn't nonsense to do it because. you know, it was a prosperous industry. People were buying magazines, advertising, you know, was strong. I was stunned when I got to the New Yorker because having had a 10,000 pound budget, I guess, could not believe that they were doing things like buying the entire chronicle of a death foretold by Gabriel, you know, Marquez and paying him like $100,000. I mean, it was just utterly like Alice in Wonderland to me. So I was stunned by it. But I also, you know, it was a wonderful thing to be able to assign and fine writers and be given that freedom to bring writers in. But we did have budgets. I mean, the sort of picture of being a kind of wanton culture of spending wasn't actually right. I mean,

it's become a kind of iconography of that time to say that like we all had these massive, I mean, I had a budget. I had to adhere to it. Otherwise, I would have been fired. But there were decent budgets that allowed me to pay a staff writer, say, you know, $150,000 a year, you know, to do six articles. And, you know, come on, that was a real. That's a lot of money. That's a living. That's a real living. And some of those New Yorker journalists could travel the world, go to extraordinary places. Yes. You'd come there, travel, their hotels. Yeah, we could. We could do that. Yes, yes, because from Vanity Fair, I went to the New York. I was the next thing I did. Also owned by sign Newhouse. But no, it was an amazing time. But we also, you know, it was a good investment because it had been losing $60 million. Absolutely. But that's what it took to launch a huge, $250,000 copies. This was Vanity Fair. How could it lose $60 million? Absolutely. But that's what it took to launch a huge, maybe. national magazine in America, you know. So, but by the time I left, you know, I turned it completely around and the spending worked is the point. I mean, you know, we created something of enormous quality and success. So no longer losing 60 million, but still losing a bit? When I left, it wasn't. No,

no, the Vanity Fair, I got it to profit, like making five million a year. Then by the time, you know, a few years later, it really began to, but the turnaround is the hard part, as you know, and we took it from 250,000 to 1.2 million and, you know, that's where it stayed. And then on to the New Yorker, which, you know, was losing as well. And I got the losses down there. By the time I left, I hadn't quite got the losses down, you know, to profit. But, you know, it was on the way to success. But, and the spending worked, and it was the right thing.

And what was great about Sign Newhouse, actually, when I went to the New Yorker, I had to actually fire 75 people and I hired another 50. But he let me do it so that I could give people time to go, as it were. He didn't say come in bloodbath hire. he allowed me to hire and then get the people out. Benign dictatorship. Benign dictatorship. Always the best.

Always the best. Exactly right. Now listen, Rory obviously wants to rename the podcast. The rest is magazine management and business models. But let's try to get back to politics. I'm having a good time here. I'm sort of like,

what else do you want to know? How much you know? It was good. Just one political thing. One of the things, and this is an interview with you and not about Harry, but he's saying, said something that I found really, really interesting, which I think is partly what truth tellers is trying to do. He said, there is no post-truth world. We talk a lot about the post-truth world.

Post-truth world, as represented by Trump, as represented by Johnson when he was around, as represented by Farage, but most of all, possibly, represented by quite a lot of our media. So why did he say there is no post-truth world? Is it the truth not that we're living in it? No, Harry just absolutely would not accept that we're living in a post-truth world. What made him furious was the idea that it had become this, well, we're living in a post-truth world, as if we kind of accepted this grotesque state of affairs. And he did not accept this grotesque state of affairs, and nor did he think we had to live in a post-truth world. He believed that journalism was there to repudiate that whole concept and to keep doing the right journalism,

to get it right, to be living in a fact-based world, you know, adhered to rigor, inquiry, you know, telling it real, and publishing without fear or favor. So, I mean, he absolutely did believe in that. Well, he believed in that. You believe in that. I believe in that. I believe in that. But it's not the world that we're in. In some places it is. I mean, the thing is that, you know, I do feel there is sometimes a condemnation of our whole profession in a way that you don't see with like, you don't go to a crappy hospital and blame the entire medical profession. I mean, you know, there's a lot of bad stuff out there, which I don't even consider journalism. And it's just digital slop, let's face it. Or ranting, which is equally frustrating. But there's also a lot of very, very good journalism going on. and brave journalism.

129 journalists were killed last year, you know, why are they doing it? Why are they going to these war zones? They're not doing it for money. So actually, our profession is full of heroes, is the truth. And they're doing it in an unsung way, and they're dying for it very often. And they're being harassed and hassle for it.

But they are so rigorous, many of them, and they care so much. I mean, yesterday on our stage, we had so many. A lot of them, the harassment is coming from owners, from editors who are controlled by owners. That's right. And, I mean, that is the horrible part, which is that.

But that's very, that's, that's, that's the majority of media outlets now, I would argue. Well, I would argue also that, yes, there is a huge amount of that. And you could argue, yes, you can only be as brave as you're allowed to be, right, by your owners. But that is, of course, where independent media is coming into that breach. And they're leaving in droves. I mean, it's amazing how, you know, the Washington Post was taken over by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who's essentially destroyed it. I mean, you know, he really has.

I mean, his desire to kind of curry favor with Trump now. and make it into an absolutely mouthpiece in terms of its opinion side, the actual investigative style is still okay. But the journalists wouldn't have it. They just poured out. Journalists, the best ones, actually just won't do it. And I think that's admirable. I guess this has been a story though for quite a long time.

Murdoch, Beaverbrook. I mean, this idea of owners controlling what we read has been an issue in democracies for a long, long time. I mean, talk us through this and how this works. Well, that's absolutely right. I mean, we mustn't forget that, you know. I mean, look at William Randolph-Hurst. I mean, you know, it was kind of a monstrous kind of one-sided view of the world. And maybe, you know, one can argue that all the plurality now gets you away from that.

I think the rich people are always going to want to buy media. I was very amused to see now that James Murdoch is buying New York magazine. I mean, it's like they just can't keep away. Because what they realize is, and this is sort of gratifying, all of these wealthy people without media are just boring rich people. You know, nobody really gives a damn about the world. quite frankly. So you can buy the tiniest thing and have more kudos in the world than some guy with a real estate fortune or a tech fortune who nobody cares about. So media gives them a profile still, which they really want. What is aggravating, of course, is they take over media and they

don't give it any respect. That is the thing that drives me insane about the tech people, is that they have no respect for the creators. They have none. They wish to have all the basements in the world, you know, for them and their amazing, brilliant skills. I personally think that writing words is ought to be as well paid as writing code and it, you know, it has far more life in the end than some ephemeral algorithm, which, you know, is, you know, something new isn't reinvented every day, whereas, you know, show me a sonic by Shakespeare and, you know, all I can tell you is it's going to last longer. Do you think these guys, do you think the musks and the Zuckerbergs and the Bezos is, do you think their influence upon the world and upon politics and media is

is even more corrosive than something like Murdoch? Yes. I think Murdoch has a lot to answer for. I think that he degraded journalism over, you know, three continents for, oh my God, what, five, six decades. It's unbelievable. Although latterly, I mean, I think that he's been a good steward of the Wall Street Journal and latterly the Sunday Times seems to be doing a lot of very, very good work.

But the danger of the tech people is, I mean, their power and their wealth is just so astronomical. Just astronomical. And they live in a different universe, not just a different world, but literally a different universe. I mean, they are in a stratosphere of, you know, separateness for everybody else that they truly don't think that humanity is particularly important. They just don't. They don't think humanity's important.

Can I just, before we get back to the tip, you can I lean into a little bit for the two of you on Murdoch? Because Alice has done a lot of Murdoch in that. He did a mini-series for us on Murdoch, and you've thought a lot about Murdoch. That's an amazing statement you've made. you know, he's destroyed journalist, corroded journalism over three consonants for 40 years. Just help a general audience understand a little bit about what that means,

what journalism was like before and what kind of damage Murdoch did, and then maybe bringing Alastro. I mean, actually, one of the problems with Murdoch is he's so talented, actually. He's so good at it. But I would, you know, I really believe that Fox Dews has been the single most damaging thing that ever has ever happened to America, you know, because of its success, you know, so everybody then emulated it and rushed into the bottom, as it were.

And he's the one who really first polarized politics to the degree that it has, because he gave the right wing their own place to be, separate from everybody else, and let them rant and rave. And, you know, now it's very hard to even get a conversation between the two sides because Republicans now, they won't go on other shows. You know, they only go to Fox. It's their absolute, you know, their...

So, haven't. Fox's wasn't his first move, was it? I mean, he'd done the same of the times, which of course, Harry Evans. Tell us a little bit about Harry. Because, I mean, Harry wrote that amazing book, Good Times, Bad Times, about his, you know, the whole story of being, I guess, conned by Murdoch into taking over and then slowly realizing that all the promises that are made were literally absolutely worthless. Correct. Well, I mean, Murdoch, when you track the pattern of Murdoch, it's a pattern of seduction and betrayal every single time. He's really good at the seduction.

I mean, I saw it. I was with Harry when he was being seduced. I thought he was a buccaneering slag. Harry didn't dissolve, though. No, he didn't. But he did think that because Modoc actually is talented about media. So if you talk to Modoc about newspapers, he knows stuff. Unlike Jeff Beasor, who hadn't got a clue how to run a newspaper, Murdoch does actually know how to run a newspaper.

Tina, I'm going to interrupt because not everybody listening is going to know who Harry was when this happened. So just situate who Harry was and then how this conversation with Murdoch happens. Harry was the most sort of celebrated crusading, you know, very well-regarded, respected editor of the Sunday Times in England. And, you know, he was celebrated for his great thalidomide campaign where he, the campaigned for 10 years to get compensation for the victims of the thalidomide drug. He broke the story of how Kim Filby was a Soviet, you know, a Soviet spy. He did the great DC-10 air crash story. I mean, he just did these groundbreaking investigations with the insight. team, his investigative journalist, and it was a golden period. Now they're making a TV show,

by the way, about that period. It's called Dragon Slayers. And Matthew Reese is playing Harry, by the way. Yes, I know it's wonderful. It's great. It starts filming in the fall and I've just, you know, I think Harry gets his... Autumn, we call it in your birthplace. In the autumn. Yeah. And Harry gets his great wish, which was to be four inches taller with Matthew Reesbury. So it was a great period in British newspaper. And this is a 70s. This is the 70s. But then there were the union strikes, huge amount of print strikes, and that was a really frustrating time, you know, when the paper was closed at one point for about nine months, because they couldn't get the unions to agree to what was then called, laughingly,

the new technology. There were upstairs, in a floor of the Sunday Times, there were all of these computers with hoods over them, and the union saying, you will never use, no human hand will touch those keys. This will be the union. You will give your copy to a union member, and they will input it, okay? So that was the scene setter why, obviously, when Harry met Murdoch, Murdoch was like, oh, I'll get rid of that lot and I'm going to like, I'll open the paper, you know, so he seemed like the great buccaneer who was going to come in. And P.S., he did do that. That is the thing. And Harry will always give him the credit for that. He did break that whole situation, moved sunny times to whopping in an amazing greenfield's operation. It's sort of

literally dead of night. So that was pretty admirable, actually. However, unfortunately, I know, I'm sure. It's more with the unions. I know you are. Listen, the print unions were. Listen, the print unions were an absolute nightmare. They were a nightmare. By the way that Murdoch did, it was pretty vile. It was absolutely vile.

Yeah. You know, as Murdoch put it, however, the carnivores liberated the herbivores, which was quite a good way of putting it. All right. So I'm giving him that credit. However, you know, he's just, journalistically, he broke every single promise. He said, you're going to have total editorial freedom and I won't come anywhere near it. Like, within, soon as he got there. Pretty much the same day.

It was like, he wanted him. Harry to support Thatcher. He was very angry when Harry would publish stories that were not for Thatcher. He wanted to support Thatcher because Thatcher was for his business interest, as simple as that. And Harry was just supposed to tow the line, and he just wasn't going to do it, you know. So, what can't bring you both him? So Murdoch's views are pro-Thatcher, pretty anti-monarchy. He's quite Republican, right?

For a while. Yes, he's anti-monarchy. Basically, he's for his business interests. I mean, that's the end of it, you know. And he was very, very clear about what he wanted. I think over the years, by the way, he's been more undercover about it a lot of times. But what he does is now really, I mean, most of the time, I will say, as I say now with the Journal and Wall Street Journal and the Sunny Times, it's the very good newspapers, I think.

But, you know, most... You don't you think that because his big interest has always been his business, you mentioned Fox News, he recognised that having used his papers in Australia and then the UK to polarise and to delve pretty deeply into post-truth as well, I would argue, where it didn't really matter if story was true, it was the impact that really mattered, that then when he realized that model could be transformed and amplified in television, that's become his big thing since then. Then, of course, he then expanded into film and all the other stuff. So he's kind of, I think he's moved away from newspapers, isn't he? He has, but it's always his first love.

In fact, recently he launched the New York Post in California, a sort of mad, crazy venture because no one in California ever, has never read a newspaper. But isn't that because he hates Gavin Newsome? Yeah, he hates Gavin Newsom. I mean, he sees, he still thinks that. He still thinks that. the tabloid front page is an instrument for harassment and shaming. And it is, and we all love reading it. But that's purely what would motivate him to do that. Explain the harassment and shaming. That's really interesting. So as a former politician, you know, I've been hit on front pages. And that's a lovely phrase you got harassment and shame. But I'd never really thought about it as that. Absolutely. You know, he invented monstering, really, didn't he? And I'm afraid it's done with

so much flair that, you know, it's compelling and that's the problem. So. And yet, you know, what I feel is a kind of conventional rather politician, you know, when I'm monstered on the front page, you know, and daily mail runs, minister gives green light to criminals or, you know, minister says his, you know, constituents hold their trousers up between. I feel sort of unbelievably distraught and can barely face anyone for the next few weeks. You know, whereas, whereas one has the sense, you know, Trump or Boris Johnson or all these kind of people, it doesn't seem to matter. They don't seem to get monster. They don't seem to be able to be shamed or harassed.

You can't. I do monster and monster. I mean, they don't, they, that's, that's their superpower, isn't it? Not caring. Everybody else in a human being does care and should. But they're also so good at what I call this terrible, adjacent sort of mini-monstering, which is like Rory Stewart, whose nanny was the best friend of Peter Mandelson's boyfriend who was a friend and a whatever, whose father was like a client who had sex with a teenage girl. I mean, you know, it was like, it's this thing where it's like this. endless guilt by association. And right now they're really monstering the mayor of New York, Mamdami. I mean, anything Mamdani does, you know, he's like having dinner with a jihadist as far as the New York Post is concerned. So, I mean, it's relentless. But Fox is particularly awful. We interviewed Gavin Newsom a few months ago and he said without Rupert Murdoch, there is no President Trump. Now, I don't know if I believe that, but it's interesting that he said that. The other thing I'd say about the monstering, they don't like it when it happens to them, But of course they have their own little club.

So, you know, Dacre will never monster Murdoch. Murdoch will never monster Daker. And on it goes on. It's a sort of form of kind of freemasonry corruption. So it's interesting, they know the power of it, but they hate it when it happens to them. Of course they hate it, but that's why they own things. So it doesn't happen to them. And most of the time, people don't really want to do it to them because their powers of retaliation are huge, obviously.

So it doesn't really happen. I mean, in the case, I think it's absolutely right what Newsom said about Fox. Do you? Oh, absolutely, yes. I mean, you know, Fox was just his total kind of canteen. I mean, he could just go there any time he would phone into the morning shows. And they would give him like 10 minutes on the air just to say whatever garbage would spew from the, you know, the trash chute of that endless loggerere that he has. But he is, I mean, the incredible thing that Trump proved, and he's so good at it.

I mean, he understands the media so much better than the media understands him even now. because now what he's done now is he just gives everybody access. I mean, every marginal loser of a reporter has the president's phone number. I mean, anyone is virtually can phone Trump and get him on the phone and he'll go, spew out whatever's in his head, mendacity, make it all up, you know, whatever. We've just won the war in around this morning, like, you know, and because it's exciting, I mean, there's no journalist, really, who's going to say, I just had a long, conversation with the president, but it's all rubbish and I'm not going to print it.

Because they know they'll never get another one. They'll never get another one. And also it's like you just got a scoop. So he plays the scoop weakness. But they're so weak. I mean, look, you mentioned Bezos. So there's the owners that are so weak. Oh, I know. And the 40 million for Malani and all that nonsense. The editors are some of them, there are some exceptions. I'll give you that, both editors and journalists, but most of them just so weak. Let me give an example. As you say, you're a woman in the media. Every time I see that, Trump turning in those press packs on the woman reporter, the woman Caitlin Collins from CNN. But he does it piggy.

Remember on the plane when he called one of them piggy? How could I forget? Right. Why doesn't everybody just say, fuck this, we're out of here? Well, they should. I mean, in that instance. Well, why don't they? Well, I think it might have been on Air Force One, so they might not have been able to jump

out of the airfully. But they could have got back to their seats and said, you know, when you want to talk to like human beings, come back. Well, I actually think they should be more of a body in that sense. They did do that with the Pentagon. when Pete Hegsteth said. And he's now filled it with all these crazy influences. And of course, as Emma Tucker said yesterday on the stage, I mean, you know, the stories only got better coming out of the Pentagon.

Because actually being in that bubble where you're sort of, you know, embraced is actually not good for journalism anyway. So being kind of kicked out of the Pentagon just meant, okay, right, we don't have any access issues. So we'll just go for the stories and they just, you know, are better reporters because of it. I sometimes think that with the lobby in Britain, actually. Let me bring an Alist on this. But I was very struck as again as the politics. how timid the lobby journalists were, how important their access was, how much they wanted to flatter politicians. Being kicked out of the lobby may be quite powerful in terms of...

Well, do you remember Tony Bevin's? He was... Tony Bevan's independent. He was the one who said, this is ridiculous and I'm leaving. Of course, he had his cake and he ate it because he had people like me who would come straight out of the briefings and tell him what was being said. But I think the current lobby, my complaint with them is not that they're trading access the whole time. It's one that Keir Stahmer gives them far too much access. We're talking. We're in the wake of the local elections. He goes out and makes a statement on the back of the local elections and then literally takes the questions

from the people who've been spent most of the campaign saying how useless he is. It's like, fight back a bit more. And I think my problem with them is the relentless trivialization of politics as a kind of blood sport and a game. And I think when you say Trump understands the media better, I think that's what he understands. He understands that ultimately they like the froth.

They'd love to be talking about all the gold in the white house. Of course they do. As opposed to, why haven't we actually talked about the Gaza peace plan in the last several months and where we might be on it? And I think it's that trivialisation that I think that the insiders do. And if they don't, Caitlin Collins being quite a good example, I think, they get smashed. Well, they do, but they also, they're breaking great stories, though. I mean, you know, yesterday on the stage we had, you know, Reuters do great stuff. I think the New York Times is holding the line and doing great stories.

stuff, Washington Post. I actually think they are doing great stuff, a lot of them. I mean, you know, the Wall Street Journal published the Epstein birthday book. You know, they had that story for five or six months as they verified and verified and verified it and they knew that Trump would come for them and they knew it and they did it anyway and they were sued, you know, and he did go ballistic and they're holding the line. So, you know, good stuff is really being done. What Trump understands, I mean, one of the things that I've sort of realized about him is he always says, we'll be dealing with that in two or three weeks. Why two or three weeks? Because he knows that's the length of time that anybody can hold their attention on anything. It's gone. Two or three weeks.

He knows it's like 21st, 22nd century. And yet the amazing thing, if you look back over the Iran war coverage for the last two and a half months, is that he can literally have every day. Every day. Donald Trump says we're close to a peace deal with it. Donald Trump says the straights are about droven. It never happens. I know it doesn't. And I think this is where the disinformation and the confusion has become so toxic because people literally don't know what to believe anymore. We've really got to the point where you just think, well, what is really happening in the street? That is what I've always argued that post-truth is a strategy. People like Trump deploy it, people like Putin deploy it.

You know, these leaders, either dictators or with editorial tendencies, they have recognized that post-truth in this incredibly chaotic media landscape is their friend. Is their friend? Absolutely. It's true. But, you know, again, you know, at Truth Teller Summit, we had this incredible panel about these visual journalists now. I mean, they're doing incredible work with body cams, drones, you know, surveillance video and so on. And you see when stuff happens now, in real time, they can verify the truth a lot of the time.

I mean, it's, there was the whole of, you know, the Minneapolis, you know, ice raids and all of that. As the Department of Homeland Security, Christy Noam was coming out on television saying, the person they killed, the protests that they killed was a terrorist, you know, who was attacked the police. Literally they could show they'd put together all of the video immediately, which completely gave the lie to it. And it was watched by like, you know, 40% of the American public. I mean. But that's And Navalny made his name. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So these new tools, you know, have there really got a lot to offer. Can I get to the bottom of something? Which I've never understood. Maybe two of you help me. When, let's say, a radio program. at 7 o'clock in the morning says, President Trump has today announced a new peace deal on a run.

And then there's nothing that follows to say, on the other hand, he has announced the same peace deal every day for the last two and a half months. And these are the reasons to be skeptical about it. Why does that happen? Why is the default kind of respectable public service broadcast? I think it's wrong. He just vents and everybody prints it, you know, and they shouldn't.

I think a lot of its laziness. But let's be honest, last year, giving away no trade secrets, I think I'm right that eight of our 10 most listened to episodes had the word Trump in the headlily. I'm sure. So they probably think people are still massively interested in Donald Trump, as opposed to, you know, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is announcing the da-da. So they're thinking Trump keeps people in. I think it's driving people away. I've now got to a point where when I hear Trump leading the news, I zap it off because I'd prefer to go away and read it later.

I'd give another example recently. In fact, to be fair to CNN, they did a very good montage recently of the various gradations of statements that Trump has made about the ballroom. It's not going to cost the taxpayer a single penny. And it's gone from that to 200 million, 400 million, and I think they're talking about a billion. Okay. But whenever he mentions the ballroom, as he did with your friend the king, none of the journalists ever bother to go back and set a context. So he's captured this sense of everything I do in the moment is news for you people. Or is it not more complicated?

What's odd is you're right? Somebody like CNN will catch the context or the New York Times will write an earnest article talking about all the contradictory statements. But that isn't mainstream. It's not what then happens when the normal news channel reports a billion on the ballroom. They don't bother to do that. And these are his statements going back at a time. So when that guy rushed through an event when Trump was at the White House Congress, The White House Correspondence dinner.

And the guy rushes through security. And it's a massive event around the world. Okay. Now, the fact that he was three floors apart, you know, it didn't matter to the media because it was dramatic. Secret service agencies jumping on Trump, dragging out vans, all that. It was dramatic. And then it was like, it wasn't actually that big a deal.

But then what was really interesting was like within minutes, there were dozens of MAGA influencers, with huge followers saying, this shows why we need Trump's ballroom. So they don't care about the mainstream because they've got their own. Tina said they've got Fox News. It's their safe haven. They've got their own infrastructure around it. I mean, the thing is, more viewers than Fox News now are these individual content creators with their massive followings?

Of which we're too. Of which you are too. I think one of the interesting problem, one of this problem is. No, but it is problematic because there's a whole series of questions. You know, Alastra and I is launched very, very quickly, and we're lucky to have quite a large listenership. But we don't actually have all the infrastructure and costs of a normal newspaper, so that's affecting the business models. You know, we can regularly, without being mean, but some of these channels that we've mentioned, we could have five, six times the number of listeners without their fixed costs. And therefore, it makes it difficult for them to pay their journalists, keep running their businesses.

No, I mean, you cannot do investigations without the structure. That's the point. You've got to have lawyers. you've got to have four or five crack investigators. You've got to have time, which is the biggest, you know, deprivation of most journalists because they're taught a file, file, file, file, how could you possibly go out and do the checking? That's really the corrosion is the fact that they don't have the time because there's no money to get them the time. Exactly.

So to put it, just to bring that, I know keep coming back to money, but I think money does matter because in a way that the revenue streams these things better. That investigation, five, six journalists, the lawyers working for six months on something, is somebody deciding that they're going to commit, I don't know, a million dollars to something that will only generate revenue at the end. Well, the truth costs money. That's one of the panels of discussions that we did in the first year, actually, truth costs money. And that's the thing that I most resent from the tech side of it.

They have the money. They absolutely have the money. And if they wanted to, they could say, we're going to use this money to, you know, amplify and protect the truth by actually funding journalism. They do the opposite. They have no respect for it. it and they destroy it. And, you know...

Lies, disinformation, misinformation, misinformation, polarization, makes them money. And also, presumably your point there, right? Which is that if you're just thinking about your revenue stream and you were simply been counting, the million dollars that you've spent on a six-month investigation may just not generate the revenue that you can generate by just... Well, of course it doesn't.

News is never going to generate the revenue because the fact is that no advertiser ever wants to be around reporting about a war or whatever, so they're never going to get any advertising. it's all got to be subscription-based. And, you know, it'll never be a business model that really brings in a lot of money. I mean, it will bring in some, if you're good and have a big audience of subscribers, but it's not going to be a major profit business.

And that is what their greed won't sort of stomach, essentially, even though they could easily afford it, easily, easily. Okay, Tina, Rory, quick break, and then back for more. Welcome back to the rest of policy leading with me, Alice de Campbell. And be Rory Stewart. Tina, you've known Trump for, a very long time. And one thing you said, I think it was in your substack,

I read somewhere that you said that the one thing that really surprised you was how dark he's become. What did you mean by that? Was he ever light? Yeah, he was, he has changed. There's no doubt about it. I mean, when I first met him in the 80s, he was this funny, you know, braggie New York character,

a very typical New York character, you know, who was sort of built the Golden Tower. And I first met him when he was married to Ivan. and they had, you know, they had this big lunch party, you know, and all the kind of, Ivana kept trying to kind of make him part of the New York sort of society scene, which, you know, as soon as they got divorced, you never saw him again anywhere, actually. But, you know, he was, I was sort of sat next day. He said, oh, Ivana made me go to the opera, you know, three hours. I mean, nothing to eat. I mean, God, Pavarotti, who cares, who needs. And it was funny. You know, you just thought, he's just this funny, vulgar, funny guy. So he was irreverent. He was irreverent and he was funny and all the rest. But I think that he always. always had this chip on his shoulder, the man from Queens who wasn't really in the in-crowd of the sort of real estate big shots. Wanted to be always, but not wasn't. And help us understand that, because people talk about this chip a lot. But it's not exactly like an English class chip.

It's not exactly like your maidenhead chip of wanting to hang out the dukes. It's some sort of different thing. No, it's not class-based, but it's out of boroughs based, you know, if you know what I mean. He never felt that he was given the respect of being in the sort of, group that was like the big players. So it's relevance, respect power. He wants to be at the table where the important people are. Correct. It's not so much that people are being snooty about his background or his accent. No, not particularly. It's just that he felt that strongly, that he wasn't. And were people like Mort Zuckerman, Zookabber bigger? I mean, was that the idea?

Bigger, but they also didn't take him seriously. I mean, because frankly, he wasn't that big. That was the other thing. I mean, despite his obsession with being big, he actually wasn't, you know, compared to someone like Sheldon Solo, who was a massive, you know, real estate person in New York. I mean, Trump was just a guy who built a tower and had some, you know, licensed his name. And, you know, he really wasn't in, in, in that realm. Never really was. Did you sense back then that he was a bit of a sleaze bag? I didn't sense it. I knew it. I mean, it was obviously a bit of a slees back. And it was like, you know, the Ivana Trump divorce, which really, I think catapulted a lot of the bad stuff. Because actually, I think Ivana Trump was rather good for Trump in a sense. You kind of kept him.

But when he left her for Marla Maples and Marla Maples talks about on the front page of the post, no doubt, dictated by Trump, best sex I've ever had, page on the front page of the New York Post. So he's always, you know, he's always been obsessed with his own press, et cetera, but he got darker. And I mean, I discovered it, in fact, when his business started to go wrong. And I was a person who published the art of the deal as a book extract. And that's how I got to sort of first meet him. And so that's really why I was at the lunch, et cetera, et cetera, because he did this book. I thought when I read it, this is very funny. Nobody will believe it. It's all nonsense, but it's fun, you know. So I published it in Vanity Fair. And then the next time we wrote about him, we did a really sort of quite a tough investigative piece about his business and how it was going wrong in Atlantic City. And he was so angry. It was by the reporter Marie Brenner that we were at a dinner one night and one of those charity dinners. Marie was at my table. And as Trump went by, she suddenly felt something cold. and she turned around and Trump had emptied a glass of wine down her dress, right?

I just couldn't, but you couldn't believe someone would do that. He saw him like he'd gone and he emptied the wine and then he was gone across the other side of the room. Later when I went to the New Yorker as editor, we got him again. I signed a writer called Mark Singer to do him. And it was a brilliant piece because, I mean, I have to say, I did sort of seduce Trump. I took him out for breakfast and I said, no, no, no, that other piece we did when I was at Vanity Fair. It's all different at the New York. And then he did him again.

Oh, it was a great piece. It was an absolute classic piece. It had the classic line of Trump saying to him. One shouldn't trust journalists. Yeah, exactly. It had the classic line of Trump saying, this is off the record, but you can use it. In those days, it was answer phones, you know,

and Mark kind of sat there one day, and there was this like 10-minute profane, like, rant, you know, on his machine. And when he published his book, Mark sent it to him, and Trump sent it back saying, Mark, you're a loser. It's like your book's no good, you're a loser, which he's framed in his office. But he was very angry every time he was criticized. There was no making up.

There was no like, oh, times bygone, et cetera. No, he was angry. You know, he always talked about wanting to run for office. And actually, in our Vanity Fair piece, all those years ago in the 90s, the first Marie Brenner piece, she wrote about how he had Hitler's speeches on his desk, mine camp. that piece made that item made a great deal of news at the time. He denied it, but it was true. And it still gets quoted.

So he was obviously beginning to be really interested. Did you remotely think he could ever be president? No. In fact, when I went to Talk magazine, which was the thing I did after doing The Daily Beast, we actually did a kind of spoof shoot with Melania Trump sort of half-naked

on a mocked-up oval office with an oval office seal. in her in a bikini. And I think he was in the picture, too, Trump, sort of sitting at a desk, sort of pretending to be the president. So no, I mean, it was all a huge joke. But I was also at that famous dinner, the White House dinner, where Obama roasted him.

And, I mean, I know it's now become folklore, but it was true. I was sitting right behind Trump. And I saw his neck turn from sort of pale pink to sort of flaming magenta, you know, because Obama really roasted him, and it was him at his most, because Obama can be really sort of, it can be pretty condescending in a way.

You saw the room laughed, and Trump was just, and what he got out of that was he looked around that ballroom, and he thought, he saw what he now thinks of, the liberal elite, because they are the liberal elite. I mean, all these news organizations laughing uproariously at him. And I think it really did. crystallized for him. King Charles did it rather more subtly. Well, he did.

Brilliantly, I will say. Absolutely brilliantly. Come back to Trump for a second. He must have somehow gone from being really angry with you, you know, writing negative stuff about him and Banty, Farrow, whatever, to a breakthrough where he must at some level of thought, actually, it doesn't matter that the whole liberal media is going after me. It doesn't matter that they're saying I have my camp on my desk. It doesn't matter that I'm being monsters. by Tina Brown, I can somehow have a strategy where they can literally say, I've incited January the 6th rebels to take the capital. I've denied the election. I've stolen hundreds of millions of dollars. I've done incredibly immoral, illegal things. And I'm still going to get reelected

again. Well, he did. And he figured out, I think that, I mean, if you just keep lying, lying, lying, you just keep denying, denying, denying, lying, lying, lying. I mean, we've... Exactly. He created that universe where he couldn't win the journalists in that regard, but he could change the reality on which they report. I mean, he has been a distortion field himself in which he has just changed. I mean, you could have a picture of him, like, say, getting on a plane and going somewhere. He will say, I never was on that plane and I didn't go somewhere.

And it's like, but, but, but he just keeps saying it. And in the end, everybody just gets tired. It didn't develop this because it's so fascinating. It is. It's the total change. I mean, you would have thought that actually in the end, that relentless attack from the biggest, most established media organizations the world would mean that you could not be elected a second time as president. So what's going on? What has he worked at him?

Well, I think what has changed is that he's succeeded. I mean, the force field has taken force. what I find so interesting about the second term is he hasn't just done it to America. He's done it to the world. He's colonized the world. I mean, it's like I was talking to James Harding, you know, and when he was in New York and he was talking to his news editor and, you know, and he put down the iPhone and he said it's incredible. This is ridiculous. Every story that I'm being offered for the Sunday news agenda is Trump. It's like what about what's happening in the UK? It's like he's on the front page of every organization, not just in America, but the whole world. And he does it by, you know, I'm going to take over Greenland. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to come out of NATO. I mean, and everybody puts it in, you know, in their news organisation. So he's sort of, the Trump show has essentially gone global, completely global. Look, we do the same because he is a hugely, we said when you've got elated, this is going to be a hugely consequential presidency for all sorts of reasons. Most of them I would argue bad, but you can't ignore it. What I think you can do is not imagine

that every time he says something, you have to cover it. Because so much of the time, it's absolute bullshit. It's true, but he's doing very consequential things, though. I mean, that's the thing. It's not just saying things. He's doing very consequential things. He's genuinely very dangerous. I mean, he's worked out the one way to dominate the news.

Who's going to report the local elections if the guys have had a launch a nuclear bomb at Iran? I mean, the whole, I mean, so if you genuinely become Dr. Evil, you can guarantee that everyone's going to put. And I mean, I think you really do see the slide now into the complete autocratic posture, essentially, because what he's understood is that you get the media owners, and he doesn't have to tell the press individually. If you get Larry Ellison, you know, and he, who's such a Trump supporter and friend and ally in the tech world and his son David, to take over CBS and CNN, you don't need to worry about individual stories. You've got the bloke in charge

who's going to make sure that it goes your way. Do you think he's a fascist? I think he's become one, actually. I think that he's kind of, he's like this sort of evil angel at this point. I mean, it really has become so. I did not think so much in the first term, but I think that as he's got more and more and more power, and look at the things that he's doing. You know, gold statues of him is, you know, gold everywhere and, you know, the ballroom and putting his name on every single building. And I mean, it's totally like a Saddam Hussein putting his like statues of himself. I mean, we're in a place where he just wants the Trump Kennedy Center. He wants it to be the Trump Kennedy Airport. He wants it to be. I mean,

you know, he's gone out of his mind. One thing that is very difficult to report is when you're dealing with somebody who's genuinely done evil, horrifying, brutal, damaging things, it's also true that part of what has enabled them to do it is a certain kind of charm sense of humor, which then becomes very difficult to talk about. One of the classic examples of somebody you spotted as a wrong unvery early. compared to other people, was Jeffrey Epstein. But presumably part of the story there, too, is there must have been a certain kind of charm or sense of humor

that got all these famous Nobel Prize-winning physicists and economists and actors to come to his house. I wouldn't have said that Jeffrey Epstein had charm, but he understood how to do this extraordinary sort of Rolodex game, where it was like, get Rory Stewart, and by getting Rory Stewart, you get Ali Campbell. By getting Ali Campbell, you might. get Tony Blair by getting Tony Blair. You know, so he was able to do this kind of extraordinary

dance where he, I mean, the emails, I think, just show the amount of time and volume of this kind of endless, often kind of concierge-like networking. I mean, it was really incredible to me how he's always, in writing to people saying things like, you know, I can get your kid a job or, you know, shall I send a car to the airport, or you could use my plane. I mean, it was all this. And I think that the private plane I've decided is the sort of ultimate, you know, origin sin essentially. Once you've flown in a private plane, you never want to fly commercial ever again.

People will crawl on glass just to be on that private plane. Let's just... And everybody wants to be on the plane. Let's lean into this just a little bit more because, as I say, you were very, very good about, you know, saying, I don't want to go to this, you know, a paedophile dinner with Woody Allen and the rest of them, right? So, and therefore, I'd like you, though,

to talk a little bit about this, society, this culture, this kind of New York networking, this kind of road decks, how you end up putting Stephen Hawking and Larry Summers and Bill Gates and Woody Allen and what's happening when you get an invitation to this fancy house? What is it that an ordinary British or European listener doesn't quite understand about what's going on in this whole culture and this world? Well, I mean, I go back to the plane. It was really critically important. I mean, everybody thinks, you know, oh, Clinton was there for the girls. Clinton was there for the plane, right? He needed to get someone to fly him around the world. Once you've been the president, who's got a plane? It's available.

And he had one. And so that was the major thing with Epstein. Other people just wanted, they thought that he might give them money for their thing. I mean, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was in it because, you know, they wanted academic grants. His wife wanted one. You know, so everybody's got there. He understood that everybody had a weakness, a pulse point, that he could sort of tweak in that sense. At the Daily Beast, when I was the editor, you know, we were the first to expose the fact that he had got this sweetheart deal in California, in Florida rather, with the DA there who only charged him with one harassing one girl, sexually assaulting, sexually propositioning one young woman, as opposed to the volume of people

that we then, you know, revealed he had. He always had incredibly powerful lawyers who, I mean, he really understood how to work the network and he did. And how did these people convince themselves to continue. seeing him after he had been convicted the first time. Well, that's what's incredible, isn't it? They really didn't seem to care. They just didn't seem to care.

Or is it that he told them, oh, it's a misunderstanding? He did. He was very good at obfuscating what had actually happened. It shows how lazy people are. I mean, when I was invited to dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's, you know, for Prince Andrew, I mean, it was a classic invitation. We had just published about a few months back these six pieces about the fact that he, you know, he'd actually raped these young women.

So this PR calls me, and she says to me, you know, I'm giving, oh, teen, I'm giving a wonderful dinner tonight for Prince Andrew. It's going to be at Jeffrey Epstein's house. And the other guests are Woody Allen and Charlie Rose. And I was just thinking, and that's when I yelled, you know, what the hell is this? It's the pedophiles ball. She said, oh, oh, oh, what do you mean? She said, it's all been overblown about Jeffrey, overblown, she said.

I'd have offended me even more because we published six pieces. So my actual journalistic animal proper was offended. It was like nobody's reading the Daily Beast and they don't understand. I said, Peggy, you're out of your mind. We've published six pieces. She's a pedophile. She goes, no, it's all just overblown. All of that was just not. It was just somebody who was just a shakedown. And that's what he put around. And it stuns me that people with so many, I mean, for instance, I can't believe that Prince Andrew didn't have security people saying to him, are you aware? You're like what he's done. Like we. Or Peter Manelson, who stayed in his flat when he was. Why are you hanging out with him? You're a person with public, you know, persona. Peter Manelson, as deputy prime minister, stayed in his flat when Epstein was in jail. I know. It's really stunning. I mean,

I guess people's judgment gets completely eroded by, I'm afraid, by money and corruption. I mean, there is a leading lawyer at lawyers Goldman Sachs, you know, Kathy Rumler, who's, you know, she writes in one of her emails, you know, by the way, you know, I don't have any nice Manola Blanick shoes or something. And he writes back, we can remedy that. Well, she must have been earning $700,000 a year at least as a partner in Goldman Sachs. Much more. Much more. I'm sure much more. I'm not afraid with those salaries, but I'm going baseline, okay?

She could buy her own Manola Blanics, let's put it that way. So he just understood. He understood the people who had vanities, who had, you know, weaknesses, who had greed. It's a very nasty skill to have, but he had it. I mentioned in the direction of your books about the Royal Family. How much has Diana played a role in British and global culture, would you argue? Oh, massive. I mean, just absolutely massive still.

Oh, yes, absolutely massive. I mean, I think she, I mean, certainly in America, she is the role that everybody, you know, remembers and loves. It has been to the king's detriment, you know, because he couldn't sort of shake off the very, at this point, like Pass A myth, you know, that he was, you know, responsible for every bad thing that ever happened to Diana. This visit actually completely has rebranded, Charles. The state visit, you know, I hate to use the word rebranded, but I'm now thinking in the American. It has completely rebranded him. It's as if people saw him and they've never seen him before. They were so impressed. I think he's really become now something that I never, you never would have expected. He's now become for Americans, I'm talking now, I don't know about so much here, sort of a moral leader.

Because, you know, he spoke with such kind of judicious but absolutely sort of perfect tone about the things that so many people care about is the truth, you know, the erosion of truth, but without actually saying that, the need to have, you know, to heal our differences, to be people who can talk to each other, all these things that he said, and he forced Congress to listen to them. They don't listen to anybody or anything. They just sitting there like, you know, doing their own social media all day long, you know, raising money on one phone, social media on the other, don't pay any attention. And he made literally both sides of the aisle pay attention. And the American public, really paid attention. I was watching actually, I went to the garden party, which was wonderful,

and they just seemed like people who had stood above the fray, who we needed so desperately. And Charles, you know, Zakin was seen in a different way. So I was actually extremely pleased, as a fan of him, to see that he was finally, I mean, God, about his age, 75, whatever he is, getting some realization of what his role has actually always been. And your take, if I recall right, from the books you wrote, essentially that whole sort of Charles Diana thing was that, to paraphrase something Trump said about Charlottesville, there was bad going on on both sides. Look, I mean, she was a child. I mean, the thing about Diana, I mean, now that I have, you know, a daughter in her early 30s, I think, you know, Diana was 19 when she met Charles.

I mean, he was an old 32 and she was a very young 19, you know, bopping about in a sort of Sony Walkman while he was, you know, meeting Lawrence van der Post for dinner. It was such a kind of awful thing. I mean, they'd met 13 times when they got married. So these things today just feel genuinely cruel. It was cruel. Plus, she was the only one in the setup who didn't realize it was an arranged marriage. I mean, you know, he was in love with somebody else. So put it all together.

And it was a very cruel situation for Diana, I think. And I feel for her in that sense. But I also felt for him because he was sort of, he wanted to marry somebody else and he couldn't. And, you know, he tried to do the right thing. And it was an awful mistake. for them both, and they were stuck. So I don't, you know, I've never felt sort of judgmental of him in that sense. I think it was an awful, an awful situation that he was trapped in.

That's my view. My final thing, Tina, is often now when I go to the US, particularly over the last couple of years, people are barely talking about the UK or Europe. I go to these kind of fancy conferences and the story basically is America, amazing, China dangerous. Oh, and by the way, I forgot to mention Europe doesn't. Well, I think one thing that Americans will never understand is Brexit, because they can't understand why a country, I mean, this is the country of the Tesla truck and the Big Mac, okay,

England chose to be smaller. They don't get that. How do you choose to be smaller? They don't understand it. They just wrote us off at that moment. And secondly, they don't even know the name of the prime minister. I doubt if anybody you could speak to know, there is someone called Sir Kier-Stama as prime minister.

England has shrunk. The last prime minister they paid attention to was Tony. Blair. And they don't, they don't think it's really relevant now. I find that sad, you know, as a Brit, because of all the glories that we know we have. But I don't think there's been a great job done of actually exporting those glories, I have to say. And now, I mean, it just looks like with all these, they don't even know, all these different prime ministers coming and going. It suddenly feels like sort of Italy or something. Nobody knows what's going on. So, I mean, But Charles, I mean, the king has done a lot for soft power. He really has. I mean, I think the king has been the best thing that's happened in that state visit for years, as a matter of fact. So maybe it's a turning point. I hope so, actually.

Well, love to talk to you. Love you to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you for being so frank. Thank you. That was very enjoyable. I've probably made an awful lot of mistakes. No, no. Thank you for coming on. So, Rory, that sort of went against one of my rules of this podcast that we don't just interview. journalist, but I think Tina is much more than a journalist. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating rule of this, given that you're a journalist, you've given

us Anna Winter and Tina Brown, who are definitely journalists. And I might use this as a Trojan horse to bring in some more, because actually I do think sometimes when you're talking about current affairs, journalists are some of the most thoughtful, interesting people in the world. I thought that was very good. I enjoyed that actually more than our interview with Anna Winter. I thought she was more relaxed, more open, a little bit more sparky, and I thought some of her insights into New York society, very difficult to achieve. I mean, she, you know, you've known for a long time. I've known Tina for quite a long time. And certainly when I was visiting her and Harry in their beautiful house in New York right next to one of the great British residences, she was very much kind of

a queen of New York society. So when she talks about Trump, when she talks about Jeffrey Epstein, she's really getting to the heart of a lot of what American money and intellectual credibility and celebrity and societies about. I mean, she and Harry were an amazing couple, and Harry was a real, I think he was one of the last of that truly great journalist. And she's right, I'm probably too hard on journalism most of the time. There are some great journalists out there, but there are many like Harry Evans. And she said, I think it might have been in one of her substact columns,

Fresh Hell, her substates, very good. I think she said this thing, and she said, I've heard of say often, the great thing about Harry is right to the end. He had this real capacity to be outraged. And, you know, the last conversations I had with him were about, yeah, about where politics was going, where the media was going. He really offended him. It offended him that people could sort of lie in public and nothing happened to them.

And it offended him that journalists just went for the easy option every time. A lot of them. And I think she's actually, you know, the truth teller summit that she's, that she's, that she's started in his name, in his honour. I think that's partly about taking on that fight that he was having as well. On her big story and your big story around post-truths and Trump, what I thought was interesting is she's reminding us that there's the big fact of his personality. There's the big fact which we didn't get into, which is why many people vote from, which is to do with a lot of the social and economic problems and anxieties and anger amongst the American voting population.

But I thought she was also very good on the big structural facts. You know, we've talked a lot about the way that social media changes things and the emergence of podcasts change things, but also just the fact of money. You know, where is the advertising revenue? When she's running these newspapers, I mean, she says in New Yorker, you know, she took it from losing X tens of millions. I don't know what, 70, 80 million a year. And she gets it down to only losing a few million a year. But she's also operating at an era where when she moves to New York, when she's at the top of these newspapers, the big television and newspaper houses are generating

revenues of $50 billion a year. And that has collapsed off a cliff, right? They're minnows compared to what they were. And that means that the whole ecosystem of foreign correspondence, deep investigative journalists, has gone. And therefore, they have to be more dependent on press releases. I mean, you know, even when I was, when she was editing newspapers and I was a young journalist in Indonesia, where now you'd be lucky if you got a sort of part-time person being

paid, you know, $300 for an occasional article. There were full-time correspondence from the Wall Street Journal, from Bloomberg, from Reuters, the Financial Times, all had their people sitting there working full-time, which isn't true. No, well, look, when I was in the Daily Mirror, when I was in the Daily Mirror, we had offices in Paris, Bonn, Rome, Washington, New York, Los Angeles. They've all gone.

And you were flown out to do a full interview with the Eritrean leader? Yeah. Which, again, they wouldn't fund anymore. If you said, I want to go out to Eritrear and spend days sitting with the Eritrean leader. No, it's going to pay for your flights. No, not at all.

No, see, it has changed. And what Tina's done incredibly well is sort of, you know, surf the waves of change. So magazines, digital campaigning. And now, you know, she kind of just, as you say, she goes around as being a very, you know, big thing in media and political circles.

The other thing I love about her is that she's, you know, she's incredibly frank. I don't think it was a single question we asked her where you thought she was finessing. No, whereas I'm afraid with Anna Winter, one felt more that she was being a little careful with her words and a little bit more discreet, didn't want to offend key people, then.

Well, I mean, Jeff Bezos, what did you do this year? Basically funded the Met Garlet. where she runs. Yeah. Keep them on board, yeah. Anyway, I enjoyed that, and I'm glad that you did. Thank you very much.

See you soon. Bye-bye.