Reality feels fake: How journalism can restore shared truth in an age of crisis

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, sat down to write an article about something she'd felt for years but couldn't quite name. It took her longer than expected—years, in fact. She found herself unable to concentrate the way she once could, her attention fractured by the constant pull of her phone, her thinking scattered before it could deepen. When she tried to outsource the work to an artificial intelligence tool, the result was hollow and pompous. What finally got her unstuck was simple: she locked her phone away, turned off the internet, and talked it through with colleagues and friends. The answer had been there all along. We need to talk to each other.

Viner is writing about a world that feels increasingly unreal. The crises are real enough—environmental collapse accelerating toward a point of no return, democracies outnumbered by autocracies for the first time in two decades, a surge in violence unseen since the Second World War. Russia's war on Ukraine has dragged into its fifth year. In Gaza, human rights groups describe what Israel has done as genocide. Sudan has displaced more than thirteen million people, with hundreds of thousands killed. In two days last October in the city of El Fasher, up to ten thousand people were massacred. The United States and Israel launched an illegal war on Iran that killed more than thirty-three hundred people. Yet politicians speak as though minor adjustments might suffice. The disconnect is dizzying. You start to wonder if you're losing your mind.

But the crises themselves are not the deepest problem. They are being driven and amplified by something more fundamental: an information crisis unlike anything in recent human history. We are drowning in data, Viner writes, but we lack the social structures to manage it. Digital technology was supposed to unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. Instead, it has been engineered to produce conflict, to prioritize engagement over truth, to elicit anger and numb attention. A handful of wealthy men, mostly based on the west coast of the United States, run the platforms that shape how billions of people understand reality. They care about profit, not the public good. The result is a landscape where truth has been downgraded, where deepfakes and AI-generated content are so rampant that your brain can no longer compute what you're seeing. We once talked about fake news. Now reality itself feels fake.

The human cost is staggering. In 2024, one hundred twenty-nine journalists and media workers were killed—the highest figure since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data more than thirty years ago. Fifty-four of those killed were Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Nine were killed in Sudan. Four in Ukraine. There was once a convention that a press vest offered some protection in a war zone. That convention is dead. The powerful are working harder than ever to prevent journalists from doing their work, flooding the information environment with propaganda and lies, using trolls and bots and AI to make truth impossible to discern. Some simply kill their enemies.

Loneliness is growing, particularly in places like Britain where austerity has already weakened the social fabric. Disconnected people search for community online and find it in simple narratives about who to blame: elites, women with jobs, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants. Social media influencers offer an empty sense of belonging while extolling individualism and misogyny. The pandemic accelerated the atomization. We are all searching for connection, but the platforms designed to connect us are designed instead to isolate us, to make us angry, to make us doubt what we can trust.

Viner argues that good journalism—transparently funded, independent, rooted in the public interest—is part of the solution. The Guardian's ownership model matters. It has no proprietor demanding political returns, no shareholders demanding cuts. The Scott Trust owns the paper in perpetuity, with the sole purpose of serving the public interest. This freedom allows the editor to stand up to the powerful, to represent democracy against autocracy. When Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post and worth more than two hundred twenty billion dollars, prevented his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, then seated himself at Trump's inauguration alongside Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, everyone could see why independent ownership matters. Bezos later ordered the Post's opinion pages to champion only personal liberties and free markets, then laid off hundreds of journalists. The contrast is stark.

The Guardian's work is rooted in reporting that others won't or can't do—investigations into Peter Mandelson's failed security vetting, Microsoft's role in military surveillance, Nigel Farage's racist behavior and funding sources, the murder of colleague Dom Phillips in the Amazon, the victims of the Minab school bombing in Iran. The paper collaborates with other news organizations, valuing the public interest over competitive ego. It works tirelessly to establish facts and, when wrong, corrects itself. But facts alone are not enough. The paper also publishes stories and ideas that inspire hope, that offer credible visions of a fairer society. It covers culture, sport, fashion, wellbeing, travel—the things that make life worth living. It aims to be nourishing, the opposite of the empty feeling that comes from mindless scrolling.

The Guardian's global audience came partly by accident. After 9/11, American readers seeking alternatives to their own media's unified voice found the Guardian online. The paper's international reporting is not filtered through the lens of any government's foreign ministry. It reports on what matters to ordinary people, not what matters to the powerful. It connects dots between countries, showing readers in New York that free buses and universal childcare are normal in parts of Europe. The paper is rooted too—founded in Manchester in 1821, it has dramatically expanded its Manchester office in recent years and has more reporters based outside London than a decade ago. It has launched investigations into how its original funders made wealth through transatlantic slavery, expanded coverage of Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and created a ten-year restorative justice initiative with descendant communities in Jamaica and the Sea Islands.

The paper's staff should reflect the world they cover. In 2024, the Guardian hired its first dedicated Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan. The following year, Hurricane Melissa, a category five storm, struck Jamaica. While other international news organizations had to fly reporters in, the Guardian already had someone on the ground with built relationships and understanding. Natricia reported on the immediate impact, the role of climate crisis, the effects months afterward, how Caribbean countries prepare for the next hurricane season. The coverage was not about stranded western tourists. It was about the people living through it.

Viner writes that all of this is about putting human values and community at the center. Silicon Valley CEOs preach convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability—anti-human values that have told us the world is perilous and interaction wasteful. We have withdrawn while being told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways. The Guardian aims to be different. It builds communities and hosts conversations among readers and journalists, on its own site and beyond, in person and online. It encourages debate. In the London office, every morning, an open meeting brings together journalists from junior to senior to discuss the issues of the day. Sometimes they disagree strongly. This is part of being human—how we manage disagreement is a measure of our humanity.

The paper's business model is built on voluntary contributions. When Viner became editor in 2015, the Guardian had been loss-making for years. Most advised putting up a paywall. Instead, against conventional wisdom, the paper asked readers to give money for something they could access free. They understood what the Guardian was trying to do. In the last financial year, readers directly gave more than one hundred twenty-five million pounds. Almost one point five million people contribute every month, a number increasing daily. People give from everywhere on the planet—Nauru, Svalbard, Vatican City, Antarctica. Many say they give so others can read free, to be part of something that matters, to keep good information available as a political act. Because readers are not forced to pay, they do not feel like consumers or commodities monetized for clicks. They feel like members of a community.

This forms a virtuous circle. The ownership model enables public-interest journalism available to all. The audience, not forced to pay, feels like community members rather than consumers. The Guardian equips this community with facts and ideas to understand and engage with the world. The community sustains the Guardian's work. Journalism is not a content business. It is civic infrastructure, human infrastructure, societal infrastructure. It is the connective tissue that fights isolation and sustains democracy. In a world of apocalyptic narratives, it should offer a better story about how to survive hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. Facts and ideas together make space for hope—not blind optimism, but faith that we have the power and agency to change the future. Connecting with each other is where we start. To fight for the Guardian and organizations like it is to fight for the human right to live in a reality that is shared and true and that we can each help to shape. Hope and connection are how we survive, together. How we stay human. We are not alone.