50 February-March 2026

February-March 2026 51

By George Monbiot

Speaking

power to

truth

From the neutering of BBC

journalism to the obedience of the

mainstream press, media in the

UK have become a lobby group for

wealth, but citizen journalism is

rewriting the rules

s a student, I’d hammered on

the doors of the BBC’s Natural

History Unit, insisting there was

a major gap in its coverage:

investigative environmental

reporting. If they took me on, I argued, I could

help them ﬁll it. The phone rang as I was

leaving the house for one of my ﬁnal exams.

It was the head of the unit, saying: “You’re so

fucking persistent you’ve got the job”.

My immediate boss, the head of radio,

instructed me to “get the bastards”.

Investigative journalists were much freer

then. It was easier to obtain permission to

set up a fake company, pose as a buyer and

penetrate criminal networks and unethical

corporations.

We broke some big stories. On one

occasion, we amassed powerful evidence to

suggest that a ship leaking oil on a sensitive

coastline had been deliberately scuppered.

That programme won a Sony award. On

another, I had the head of customs in Abidjan,

in Ivory Coast, oering to sell me chimpanzees

for experiments. It was gripping and felt

meaningful: we could see the dierence we

made. This was all I ever wanted to do, and I

thought I was set up for life.

On 29 January 1987, disaster struck.

The BBC’s investigations had infuriated

the Thatcher government, particularly the

Secret Society series, which had exposed

clandestine decision-making, and the

Panorama programme ‘Maggie’s Militant

Tendency’, alleging far-right views among

senior Conservatives (which they denied). The

BBC board forced the resignation of Alasdair

Milne. The following day, when my boss

came into the oce, he told me: “That’s it.

No more investigative journalism.” How can

you have journalism if it’s not investigative, I

countered. “Don’t tell me that. It’s come from

the top”.

It wasn’t just my career that hit the buers:

it was my worldview. I had naively believed

that humanity’s problem was an information

deﬁcit. Shine a light and change would follow.

Now, I began to see, while the pen might be

mightier than the sword, the wallet is mightier

than the pen.

I was recruited at the tail end of the “great

compression”: a period of radically lower

inequality. The two world wars had destroyed

much of the political power of capital,

enabling high taxation of the very rich, the

creation of a welfare state and a widening

spectrum of politics and opinion. Since then,

as the money and power of the very rich have

multiplied once more, the governments they

ENVIRONMENT

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50 February-March 2026

February-March 2026 51

I ﬁnally saw the

bleeding obvious:

you cannot speak

truth to power if

power controls

your words

The mainstream media, with a

few exceptions, is a single-issue

lobby group, whose purpose is to

assert the rights of capital

support have sought to crush dissent.

When Milne was sacked, I had been

working on our biggest investigation yet: into

the transmigration programme in Indonesia

run by the Suharto dictatorship – and

funded by the World Bank and the UK and

US governments. The policy involved moving

hundreds of thousands of people to the

country’s outer islands, to displace and corral

local populations. It was a brutal, ecocidal

and, in West Papua, genocidal scheme. I

sold the story to a publisher instead. But I felt

unready, so I took a six-month job producing

current aairs at the BBC World Service. It was

an excellent schooling in global politics, but I

realised I could never thrive in a newsroom.

On a slow news day, we were debating the

lead for our programme among several dull

options. Ten minutes before transmission,

the editor strode into the studio, clapped his

hands and announced: “Great – 110 dead in

Sri Lanka!”

I spent the next six years working freelance

in the tropics, investigating some extremely

dangerous stories, scraping a living by

writing books and making occasional radio

programmes. When I returned, I found the BBC

and other broadcasters had become furiously

hostile to environmental programming. I

decided to try print.

I entertained another crazily naive belief:

that I should work only for the rightwing

press, reaching people who would otherwise

never see such stories. I managed to place a

couple of articles in the ‘Telegraph’, though

they were severely trimmed and relegated to

the back pages. I knew a sympathetic junior

editor at the ‘Daily Mail’, who commissioned

me, across three years, to write 21 articles. All

but one were spiked by her seniors. Finally,

I had one published, on the impacts of car

pollution. Discussing my proposal, an editor

had asked me: “So what’s the solution?

More research?” No, I answered, “stronger

regulation”. Reading the published article,

I discovered that the solution was “more

research”.

I ﬁnally saw the bleeding obvious: you

cannot speak truth to power if power controls

your words. I was lucky to be taken on by the

‘Guardian’. It remains among the very few

mainstream outlets, anywhere, in which you

can freely criticise the real elite.

Three weeks ago, after a long absence,

I appeared on the BBC’s ‘Moral Maze’, to

discuss media power. I was shocked to

discover how far things have gone. The

‘Telegraph’ columnist Tim Stanley “argued”

that the media can’t be predominantly

rightwing, because GB News says it has

been “captured by the loony left”. The

rightwinger Inaya Folarin Iman called the

idea that billionaires inﬂuence the media

they own a “grand conspiracy” and “false

consciousness”. Such people are now so

dominant that they no longer even have to

make sense.

Power is the rock on which truth founders.

It will always ﬁnd willing enforcers: no one

ever lost money by telling billionaires what

they want to hear. The mainstream media,

with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby

group, whose purpose is to assert the rights

of capital.

But perhaps the ground is shifting. Citizen

journalism is ﬂowering, through the ‘Bylines’

network, ‘openDemocracy’, ‘Double Down

News’, ‘Novara’, ‘Declassiﬁed’ and ‘DeSmog’,

and in particular at the local level. Most

established local newspapers are a graveyard

of good journalism. But they’re being pushed

aside by innovative new outlets, such as the

‘Bristol Cable’, Glasgow’s ‘Bell’, ‘View Digital’

in Belfast, Manchester’s ‘Mill’, the ‘Leicester

Gazette’, ‘West Country Voices’, Birmingham’s

‘Dispatch’, the ‘Oxford Clarion’, the ‘Hastings

Independent’, the ‘Waltham Forest Echo’,

‘Inside Croydon’, the ‘Sheeld Tribune’ and

the ‘Liverpool Post’.

Something is stirring; something that could

become very big – a citizens’ revolt against

the propaganda of power. We ﬁght for the day

on which the pen beats the wallet.

www.monbiot.com. This article ﬁrst

appeared in the Guardian

According to truthtellers Double Down News

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