Let Truth Roar

Here comes the first Wednesday in May, and the annual Truth Tellers Investigative Journalism Summit in London shines on my calendar again.

I co-founded this exhilarating event, now in its fourth year, to honor the editorial legacy of my late husband, Sir Harry Evans, the peerless editor of the Sunday Times, whose courage, tenacity, and integrity were the North Star of our profession. What’s the collective noun for a room packed with 500 investigative scribes, broadcasters, documentarians, and podcasters, all top of their game and raring to go?

A vanguard? A reckoning? A seawall? An Evans? All four, I hope, but mostly the last.

The summit, at the new Vision Hall at King’s Cross, is a raucous rebuttal of the squall of political lies, social media dross, and half-baked conspiracies that have sapped public trust and comprehension. Harry once wrote, “The cleverest agents of the secret police are inferior to the plodding reporter of democracy.” So true, of course, but not many plodders made the cut at the summit. We have seven Pulitzer Prize winners, a Nobel laureate, eleven far-flung foreign correspondents, and media beasts who roar through the headlines. And on the stage and in the audience are gritty, resourceful newbies funding journalism on a credit card.

When Reuters and Harry’s alma mater, Durham University, joined me to birth the Truth Tellers Summit in 2022, we never thought it would become such a meaningful convening on the media calendar, even though our inaugural edition featured a closing salvo from Watergate legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But it seems to have fulfilled a mission that our chaotic world needs: a rededication to the belief that rigorous journalism is the bedrock of public trust— in whatever form it appears. Oracle Harry again: “In the end, it’s not the delivery system of journalism that matters. It’s what is delivered.” No matter what Claude tells you, you cannot automate trust.

None of the jubilation of Truth Tellers obscures the fact that it’s a dark time for the media. A record number of journalists– 129– were killed in 2025, and 18 more so far this year. Christina Lamb, the veteran Sunday Times foreign correspondent, wrote last week, “the blue flak vests with PRESS in white letters to distinguish ourselves are now too often acting as bullseyes.” Each time I’ve met up with Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni, who, media editors should note, has electrified their coverage in the five years of her tenure, she has been mourning the death of yet another colleague. (Four in five years.)

Fallen Reuters journalists: Issam Abdallah, Hussam Al-Masri, Danish Siddiqui, Ryan Evans

Press On

Billions of dollars are spent to weaken, subvert, demonize, and delegitimize the media. Worldwide democracy is back to the levels last seen in 1978 - a full 72 percent of the world’s citizens live under authoritarian regimes, where they are locked inside the black box of state-controlled information. The weaponization of visas is being used to stifle press scrutiny, a pre-emptive form of censorship in countries that don’t want foreign reporters snooping around their secret, dark places.

The press is not just a nuisance anymore, a pesky fact of life. We are the enemy. Lawfare, harassment, and disinformation campaigns are weaponry sans frontiers, shared by some of the world’s worst people. The trick of labelling sources as “leaks” – see Pentagon Pete – is insidious. Most sources are, in a sense, leakers. Several U.S. administrations, not just this one, have always been ready to criminalize this service to the public. The moral force of a source is to release information that someone, somewhere, doesn’t want you to know. We’d probably all still be inhaling cancer sticks if CBS’s Lowell Bergman had not cultivated Jeffrey Wigand, the one-time VP of research at Brown & Williamson, as a source, who eventually went public and gave the lie to the “it’s not addictive” testimony of venal big-shot tobacco executives. (That was all chronicled in the 1999 film The Insider, based on Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”)

Three members of the Sunday Times Insight Team: (from right) Phillip Knightley, Elaine Page, Marjorie Wallace, and Harry Evans

Across the 1970s, Harry’s Insight team took on powerful corporations, the legal establishment, and often the government itself. The newspaper’s commitment was to its readers and to the truth. Harry was backed by an owner, the Canadian entrepreneur Sir Roy Thomson, who trusted him in his many righteous stands against Westminster and big business. Roy’s grandson, beloved friend, and Truth Tellers supporter David Thomson is now just as stoic a defender of journalism in his role as chairman of Thomson Reuters. David is rare. When editors today want to challenge the interests of the rich and the powerful and ask, “Who’s got my back?” most of the time the answer is: no one.

Got your back: (from left) Sir Roy Thomson and Thomson Reuters chairman David Thomson

The weakening of press potency against corporate interests has only deepened since the digital detonation of its business model in the early aughts. Two decades later, conscience-free AI is working to complete its human override, its destructive power left to be restrained by the amoral commercial imperatives of competing inventors.

This is an Outrage!

One of the things I most admired about Harry was how motivated his editorial impulses were by outrage. As the young editor of the UK’s Northern Echo, he recoiled at the injustice of a young Welshman executed on the wrongful charge of murdering his wife and child. Harry campaigned for and won him a posthumous pardon that helped bring about the end of the death penalty in the UK in 1965. He was disgusted by the class-bound establishment cover-up by the British Foreign Office of the treachery of Soviet spy Kim Philby, and his Sunday Times Insight team forensically cracked it open. He was heartbroken by the shattered lives of parents of the deformed children exposed to the poison of the maternity drug Thalidomide and pursued its heartless manufacturers in the pages of the Sunday Times and in court for ten years to win them just compensation. His outrage was always fact-driven, even while being emotionally vivid. He was allergic to ranting cable heads and talk radio blabbermouths. I toast one of his newsroom rejoinders, “In journalism, it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out.”

Tyrannosaurus Trump: DJT orates at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida (May 1, 2026)

One of the worst results of the Trump effect on us all is the numbing of outrage. It set my hair on fire last week when he used the T word - treason - a Putin word - to call out anyone who says the Iran war is not going as well as he asserts. The liberty to criticize the institutions of power without losing your life, or livelihood, or good name, is the very definition of a free press.

Folding Cards

Trump deliberately addles the press by granting access that is meaningless. First cudgel, then seduce. The personal phone number of the president is now saved in the cell phones of any media rando. Trump knows that the scoop impulse of the news cycle will afford a rush to post or broadcast whatever pours forth from the Oval Office trash chute. Caring about lies is slowly but surely becoming Old School. Note how snark-infested media critics use scoffing phrases like “First Amendment purists” to characterize those who value a skeptical distance from power. Such tonal lapses are the first cracks of condonement. They are a sell-out to corporate overlords and predatory billionaires who regard media properties as trophy buys and the people who work in them as moth-eaten collateral. Journalistic integrity? It’s an opt-out feature.

Thanks to the president’s logorrhea and his nonexistent impulse control, the Big Story of Trump seems to have taken over the world. Local news headlines are constantly elbowed out by the unending son-et-lumiere of the Oval Office. It’s easy to forget that the Trump melodrama is actually remote from most people’s lives. One need only read Harry’s swashbuckling memoir My Paper Chase to be reminded of the enormous respect that the newspapers of “secondary” cities still commanded fifty years ago on both sides of the Atlantic. Now that so many of them are gone, we see what happens when we lose coverage of our smaller daily worlds. Partisan influencers move in. Community bonds move out. Harry loved the rise of new artisanal local news platforms, but mourned their lack of profitable muscle to smack down malfeasance. The press is not just a corrective; it’s also an adhesive. Journalists talk freely to power so that we can feel freer talking to each other.

In a morning of documentary screenings after the summit, we give a sneak preview to the wonderful little film All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, in which director Jeanie Finlay inhabits the lives of a community of Teesside fishermen who find their nets are suddenly full of dead crabs after recent industrial dredging has contaminated the river. The smoothie-chops Tory mayor blows them off. Local media’s coverage is fitful and desultory. Politicians have bigger things to do as a once-vibrant hometown livelihood collapses.

The wise man: Harry in his Manhattan home office on E. 57th St in 2017 (credit: Jason Bell)

If Harry had been at his desk at the Northern Echo when the doughty band of fishermen came to see him, their story would have reverberated in ten points across the front page. And driving this decision, of course, would be his outrage. Pure. Moral. Irrepressible.

You can watch Truth Tellers live on May 6 at SirHarrySummit.org or broadcast on C-SPAN for the first time. The summit will feature an onsite bookshop through a partnership with the beloved Mayfair booksellers Heywood Hill.

The summit is made possible with the generous support of Postcode Lottery Group, led by Sigrid van Aken, that has contributed to so many fledgling journalistic non-profits; Thomson Reuters; the Ford Foundation; and the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Foundation.