Mark Thompson is the chief executive officer of the New York Times. He is also the former director general of the BBC and, before that, the chief executive of Channel 4. Last year he published Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong With the Language of Politics, a condemnation of current political discourse that was described by this newspaper’s Andrew Rawnsley as “elegantly argued… in cool, nuanced and forensic prose” but also a “blistering flame-thrower about the consequences of the digital revolution”. For the paperback edition, Thompson has added a postscript that deals specifically with the fallout from Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US.

What made you want to write this book?

Mark Damazer [former controller of Radio 4, now master of St Peter’s College, Oxford], a friend from the BBC, asked me if I wanted to give a series of lectures on public languages, on rhetoric. And I said no, I don’t know anything about it and I’m not interested in it. This was back in 2012. And then I spent about a week turning it over, and by the end of the week I figured out that actually I did have something to say, and that something had gone wrong in the relationship between politicians and the media and the public.

If the economics turn dark and people feel they’re making big sacrifices for Brexit, the public mood could change

Are the media responsible for the lowering of trust in politicians? I’m thinking of the maxim made famous by Jeremy Paxman: why is this lying bastard lying to me?

That’s the title of one of the earlier chapters in the book. It’s complicated, because you want a media which holds politicians to account. The media’s job is to challenge. But the tipping of a proper, tough-minded challenge into Pavlovian cynicism is, I think, part of the issue. The irony is, although the self-image of the media has been that we don’t trust any of the politicians, it’s become clear, both in the UK and the US, that many members of the public regard the politicians and the media as members of the same elite, the same club, and the frantic attempts of the media to distance themselves from the politicians have been ineffective.

You argue that it’s vital to see the other side of the debate and also to reassert the importance of the humanities, but we live in an age of “safe spaces” and the growing sense among humanities students of an inviolable right not to be offended. Is this overstated or a genuine problem?

The idea that institutions, whether publications or universities, should do their best to reflect the vulnerability of minorities seems to me a humane and proper thing to do. But in the end, that open debate and freedom of speech is the solution – or helps with finding a solution – to discrimination and prejudice. In other words, freedom of speech helps protect minorities, so I do worry about political correctness, which is one of the ways people lose confidence in public language. Many liberals in America are aghast that the ACLU went to court to argue for the white supremacists’ right to march in Charlottesville. I think they should be allowed to march, under the rights of the first amendment. That doesn’t mean I’m in any way sympathetic to what they’ve got to say. Such a march is almost bound to cause distress, but the current state of racial tension, which is very high and painful, exists partly because of decades of not confronting and arguing these issues through.

You characterise the quandary of the left as a need to reconnect with its white working-class base while refusing to make the required compromises. How can it find its way out of that trapped position?

I mention the art of listening, and I think they need to sit down and genuinely listen to people’s anxieties – and in the case of the British left, it might well be around topics like immigration – and try to understand on a human level what’s going on. The unfortunate reality is that almost all politicians have to build coalitions of people. In much the same way that old TV companies struggle to gain large audiences in an era when cable and satellite provide micro channels that work for narrow-targeted audiences, politicians are stuck with a large analogue channel in a digital moment when people like niche entertainment.

You don’t believe that the Brexit decision should be reversed by parliament or a second referendum…

There are some European countries like the Republic of Ireland and France where, as it were, the electorates may be prepared to countenance being given a second chance to resit the exam and come up with the “right” answer. With the UK, the referendum was regarded at the time as being definitive by the majority of the country. To return to it risks seeming like a stab in the back by the elite. But this thing is still in flight. If the economics turn dark and people feel they’re making big sacrifices for Brexit, the public mood could change. But at the moment it seems to me very unlikely, and dangerous for politicians to talk about it for fear of losing more public trust.

You point out that those who saw Brexit as a vote against spin, jargon and prevarication are destined for disappointment as we try to extricate ourselves from Europe. Isn’t it the case that the public doesn’t want to hear about complexity and compromise? What politician wants to speak in those terms?

I thought for what it’s worth Macron didn’t do a bad job of fronting some of that up during the French election. And German politics has a quality of realism to it. In the UK and US there is a greater temptation to make simple promises and simple ideas – Corbyn on tuition fees, for example. There has been a collective loss of nerve in the UK and US. The public aren’t stupid. They’re going to know there are choices to be made. I’m not arguing for perfection but a return to a minimum level of realism about the fact that you can’t have your cake and eat it.

The idea of an elite has lost a lot of political credibility, but the fact is that elites are required for their expertise, knowledge, wisdom. Does a defence of elites need to be made?

Certainly, if you want to carry on with a system of representative democracy, you can’t do it without the public voting for people who bring something particular to the table. The Michael Gove “I think the country’s had enough of experts” is fine, but what is the alternative? Elites are always losing the confidence of the public and always feeling like they’re out of touch – it’s the eternal story of democracy – but it does feel bad at the moment. There is a sense in the US that Washington, meaning the entire political and judicial establishment, can no longer be trusted. And the president is leading the charge. Something novel is happening.

From your vantage point in the States, does it seem that the American public is beginning to get wise to what you call Trump’s “indeterminacy”?

No. Or, rather, the country is polarised. It looks like Trump’s core supporters and most Republicans do not see the dissonance. If you look at Trump’s two recent speeches, one in Reno and the other in Phoenix, the Reno one was a relatively straightforward, teleprompter-led presidential speech, whereas Phoenix was a vintage example of off-the-cuff extempore Trump. You have these two different voices coming simultaneously out of the same mouth, which he seems at ease about, and many of his supporters seem to be OK with it too.

I think the 'we know best' impulse is at the root of a lot of the problems we’ve got

You quote Hannah Arendt on the readiness of audiences in totalitarian societies to believe the worst and to forgive lies because everything is a lie anyway. Do you see signs of audiences in western democracies falling for that trick?

Yes, I do. I think you want a sceptical electorate, but this business of people almost putting their fingers in their ears and turning away from the conversation is dangerous for democracy. A lot of these pressures on western countries around automation, globalisation, and mass migration are probably going to get more intense. And if we’ve got to this state at this stage in the game, what’s worrying is what the world will look like in a decade, unless there’s some improvement in the political culture.

You say that in the battle between truth and falsehood, Silicon Valley and random voices on the internet cannot be relied upon. You argue in favour of newspapers, and supporting them with subscriptions. But will newspapers survive in an age where people expect information to be free?

That’s a gigantic topic. Some newspapers and some sources of high-quality journalism will survive, but there’s going to be a terrifying reduction over the next few years. There’s a real danger of proprietors thinking there’s a painful transition to get through, and you just need to keep your costs as low as you can to survive, which in a practical sense means denuded newsrooms. That’s really dangerous, because you can’t ask people to pay money if the quality of journalism is poor. Newspapers that have already wrecked their newsrooms, I don’t see much hope for them.

The BBC is under pressure, from social media to Netflix – can it justify its licence fee in the future?

I sincerely hope so. The threat of market failure of commercial journalism is greater than it’s ever been. And one piece of public policy that’s been foolish is the assumption that you wouldn’t need or want a public service broadcaster because the market will provide. We can already see in the UK and rest of the world that it’s not playing out like that. The need for a well-funded public broadcaster is going to grow over the next five to 10 years.

What can Britain learn from American politics and journalism?

With American politics right now you might say: whatever you do, don’t do this. Most British journalists, and historically I include myself in this, find the deliberate seriousness of American journalism a bit much to take. But I’ve come to admire and respect the sense of public mission and determination to get things right and check facts and really bottom out stories.

As a member of the liberal elite in the US and UK, what lessons have you learned from writing this book that you now try to follow?

I think, trying to open your ears and listen to everyone with humility, and to try to understand all of the perspectives. Don’t assume that traditional elite mode of “we know best”. I think the “we know best” impulse is at the root of a lot of the problems we’ve got.

How long do you plan to spend in the States?

I don’t know. I’m 60, God help us all, and I find myself in the middle of another of the great news periods of my lifetime. I’m not planning to walk away any time soon.

Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong With the Language of Politics? by Mark Thompson is published by Vintage (£10.99) on 7 September. To order a copy for £9.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

‘Real listening is not the same as collecting and analysing data’: An extract from Mark Thompson’s Enough Said

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Vituperative and personal… the sound of public discourse in 2017’: Piers Morgan and JK Rowling, who argued over Trump on Twitter. Photograph: PA

In a speech in February 2017, Tony Blair declared: “The one incontrovertible characteristic of politics today is its propensity for revolt.” He said it to make a what’s-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander point – given that they revolted once by voting that Britain should leave the EU, why shouldn’t the British public be encouraged to revolt again and reverse the decision?

But the word “revolt” is an odd expression to use of voters in a democracy. The people who voted Leave, and those who installed Donald Trump in the Oval Office, weren’t the angry fans of a football club: they were shareholders who found themselves with a majority of seats on the board, and the right to choose any strategy and any manager they wanted. And yet – to Tony Blair and many others who found themselves on the losing side in both Britain and America last year – the results did indeed feel like revolts.

So how do the opposing sides describe each other today? As luck would have it, two British public figures threw out some helpfully paradigmatic adjectives when they clashed recently on Twitter. Their debate, if that’s the right word for it, was about Donald Trump. When JK Rowling tweeted how satisfying it was to hear Piers Morgan being abused on American TV for defending Trump, he quickly hit back:

“The superior, dismissive arrogance of rabid Remain/Clinton supporters like @jk_rowling is, of course, precisely why both campaigns lost.”

Exactly six minutes later, the creator of Harry Potter responded with this:

“The fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologism of celebrity toady Piers Morgan is, of course, why it’s so delicious to see him told to fuck off.”

Superior, dismissive, arrogant, versus fact-free, amoral and bigot. Note how vituperative and personal the language is. This is the sound of public discourse in 2017.

The public only stopped listening to the establishment when they realised the establishment had ceased to listen to them

Insults like these are flying back and forth across the western world. Populists and their supporters are racist, sexist and barbaric. They have no plan. And they lie. What about those hated elites and their followers? Smug, controlling, corrupt, quite unable to understand or empathise with the lives and concerns of average citizens. And they lie too. As for their supposed allies in the media, let me briefly channel the 45th president of the United States: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing #nytimes, #NBCNews, #ABC, #CBS, #CNN), is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people!

We are every bit as bad, in other words, as those other “enemies of the people”, the British judges damned in the same terms by the Daily Mail in the autumn of 2016 for having the insolence to rule that Parliament be allowed to vote on the triggering of article 50. In America, the new president clearly finds the men and women he terms “so-called” judges almost as irritating and inconvenient as he does a free media.

2016 was the year when many people on both sides of this divide in Britain, America and elsewhere came to believe that they were living among strangers – neighbours, friends, family members even, whose worldview and values had been revealed as quite alien and incommensurable with their own.

So how have thoughtful observers made sense of these unexpected political developments? Let’s call on a pair of early witnesses, each of whom points us towards an underlying explanation, the first explicitly, the second by implication. The first witness is the distinguished New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik. Through the magic of the internet, I sat in my Manhattan apartment and listened to him on BBC Radio 4 just a few days before the US presidential election. Gopnik warned fellow liberals against believing that Donald Trump’s astonishing run at the presidency was the result of genuine economic or social injustices. ‘No,’ he said, we must not delude ourselves. Trump’s rise is due to the reawakening of deep, atavistic passions of nationalism and ethnic hatred among millions of Americans. And it was capable of being reawakened for the tragic and not very complicated reason that such passions are always capable of being reawakened everywhere in the world, and at any time.

Elsewhere in the talk, Gopnik described those “atavistic passions” as a “pathogen”. Imagine some long-known and long-feared plague sweeping through our towns and cities once again for no other reason than our susceptibility as a species. In the Tempest, Prospero calls Caliban “this thing of darkness”. For Gopnik, there’s a zone of darkness in all of us, or at least in many human beings. His explanation for the Trump phenomenon, then, is anthropological – and it’s a pretty pessimistic anthropology at that.

Contrast this with a remark I heard the political philosopher Michael Sandel make at Davos in January 2017, after he’d sat through a week of discussion about the rise of populism which was high on disapproval but depressingly low on self-reflection: Why is Davos man still so deaf to the legitimate grievances of ordinary people? By “Davos man” – and we might add “Davos woman” – Sandel meant the world’s political, business, academic and, yes no doubt, media elites. A rather narrower group of people than Adam Gopnik probably had in mind when he used the word “we”. Close enough though.

Michael Sandel’s remark implies rejection of at least some of Adam Gopnik’s argument – “legitimate grievances”, he claims, are an important part of the story. But, although he does not spell it out, Sandel’s remark also directs us to another, rather different thesis – that one reason for the present political disruption is the failure of the world’s elites to listen and respond to ordinary people. His actual question – why, after everything that happened in 2016, are they still not listening? – reminds us that the underlying drivers of the populist revolution may still be at work, dividing not just elites and non-elites, but different generations, classes, regions, nations, races.

Since ancient times, students of rhetoric have regarded an ability to listen as a critical element in public discourse; the philosopher Martin Heidegger went so far as to define rhetoric itself as the art, not of speaking, but of listening. But our conception of rhetoric shrank until the term came to be used almost exclusively to refer to set-piece oratory, or as a pejorative to call out false or manipulative public language. The importance of listening was not quite forgotten but, in the hurly-burly of contemporary politics and media, it became increasingly instrumental and inhuman.

Journalists aren’t the ‘elite’ – or from any other class either Read more

Real listening is not the same as collecting and analysing data, though it is often treated by political and business leaders as if it is. Nor is it the same as launching a PR-driven “listening exercise”, as if your normal practice, whenever the public comes close, is to don noise-cancelling headphones.

Nor does it mean lecturing the public without regard to the reality of their lives. “That’s your bloody GDP, not ours,” as an angry woman told one political scientist when he was discussing the potential economic consequences of Brexit in Newcastle.

You can’t truly listen if you don’t respect, and at least attempt to empathise, with the person speaking. In Britain and America, the public only stopped respecting and listening the establishment when they came to realise that the establishment had long ceased to respect and listen to them.

2016 was the year when elites on both sides of the Atlantic had to face the consequences of their own failure to listen. There had been warning signs of course, not just of public alienation and distrust, but of the use of social media to bypass the communication channels of conventional politics, and to organise dissent. Western leaders had already watched something analogous happening during the “Arab spring” of 2010-11. But when the dam finally burst in the UK in June of last year, and in America a few months later, it still came as an almost complete surprise. Politicians and pundits who had been genuinely convinced that they were “in touch” and had the evidence to prove it, were taught a brisk but brutal lesson in humility.