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Emily Maitlis joined City St George's academic and author Dr Ayala Panievsky to discuss the challenges facing journalists today and what can be done to still hold power to account

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Hundreds of students gathered at a lecture theatre at City St George’s, University of London on Wednesday 29 October for the launch of Dr Ayala Panievsky’s first book: ‘The New Censorship: How the War on the Media is Taking Us Down.'

Dr Panievsky, Presidential Fellow in the Department of Journalism, was joined by journalist and podcast host Emily Maitlis of The News Agents for a conversation on democracy, populism and the media.

Opening the conversation, Maitlis addressed students in the room and shared the story of how she forged a friendship with Panievsky through their shared commitment to holding power to account.

“I wanted to find someone who was already talking about these issues, and that person was Dr Ayala Panievsky," said Maitlis

“You will know Ayala as your Presidential Fellow, researcher, author and teacher. To me, she was my first online friend,” said Maitlis. Sharing how the pair first met, Maitlis said she was asked to deliver the 2022 MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival just a few months after she had left the BBC.

“They gave me 17 days to come up with a thesis and speech. It was clear to me in this interim place of just having left the BBC – with all its wonder and creativity – and being just about to start something radically different, that I wanted to talk about a shift in journalism.

“I ended up calling the speech ‘The Boiling Frog’ – the sense that politics had changed so much in the last decade. The world had moved on and, as journalists, we just hadn’t caught up with where populist politics was. We didn’t know how to fight back, and we spent a lot of time sounding very defensive when people accused us of ‘fake news’ because we didn’t seem to have the right tools at our disposal.

Maitlis and Panievsky took questions from the audience

I ended up calling the speech ‘The Boiling Frog’ – the sense that politics had changed so much in the last decade. The world had moved on and, as journalists, we just hadn’t caught up with where populist politics was. We didn’t know how to fight back, and we spent a lot of time sounding very defensive when people accused us of ‘fake news’ because we didn’t seem to have the right tools at our disposal.

– Emily Maitlis

Populism and journalists as ‘enemies of the people’

As a former journalist herself, Panievsky works worldwide with other journalists to improve the future of news. She spoke to Maitlis about the lack of self-awareness in journalism at a key time when populism is on the rise.

“Traditional media still has immense power, even when we think about the impact of social media and AI,” said Panievsky. “Legacy media remains powerful, and I was trying to understand why journalists at these organisations were coping so poorly with the rising populist threat.

Dr Panievsky, Presidential Fellow in the Department of Journalism

I’ve interviewed hundreds of journalists, and while they are very good at criticising other journalists, there is often very little self-criticism. When I spoke to Emily, I was shocked at how determined she was to question herself and understand how to do better

Panievsky said her research explored how journalism has changed over time and how journalists can face interviewees who view them as “enemies of the people”.

The cookery lesson and the video game

In response to Panievsky’s comments, Maitlis said she found this research to be a great help when it came to thinking about how to face challenging interviewees.

“Ayala is writing the blueprint for journalists, explaining the ways in which they might get shut down. Everything I read from her research was incredibly helpful because it gave things a name and spelt them out for me. I realised I wasn’t battling this alone, and it wasn’t just in my head.

I was standing in a studio night after night, getting mic’d up and getting my questions ready and thinking, ‘I’m going to face Sebastian Gorka from Maga-land and he is going to spend the first 10 minutes trying to shut me down, not even answering the question and telling me I come from an organisation that shouldn’t really exist.’ It was like a cookery lesson. I was looking to Ayala for the recipe and asking: ‘what do I do next?’ I was on live television, and I needed the right tools.

Maitlis spoke about one of her most successful interviews, explaining that Panievsky has identified common diversionary tactics to spot in interviews.

“I would say the best interview I did was under time pressure at the Republican National Convention last year with an election denier called Kari Lake, who was standing for the Senate race in Arizona. She’d already stood as governor, hadn’t won, and then decided to discredit an election official.

“She accused me of needing my head examined and all the rest of this. But because I knew at the back of my head what her arguments would be, I felt like I was in a video game. I had very little time to prepare for that interview, but as we spoke, I started to build my case up for whether she would accept the results of the election if she lost in 2024. I describe it as being in a video game because all I had to do was keep my car on the road while she was flinging accusations at me. It was like tin cans being thrown in my direction.

But all I had to do was focus and ask the questions I wanted answered. People get personal in an interview so they can lead you down the track they are much happier with you going down. But your job is not to sell us your personality, it’s just to get your question answered.

The facade of journalism

Discussing the topics covered in her new book, Panievsky spoke about the new forms of media that exist and the danger of popular figures filming content that looks journalistic but does not uphold the same ethical principles.

“We need to create a distinction,” said Panievsky. “There is nothing wrong with right-wing media or left-wing media. But today it is very easy to use the facade of journalism to do something that is essentially very different and is not related to the kind of journalistic practices that we teach at City St George’s.

“We need to come up with a new way to evaluate media organisations, while remembering that partisanship is not the problem. The problem lies in conspiracy theories, manipulation and hate speech, and we are seeing this a lot with media outlets that are using the look and feel of journalism to spread horrific lies.”

A new centre for journalism and democracy

The book launch was the first event hosted by the University’s newly launched Centre for Journalism and Democracy. Professor Mel Bunce, Professor of International Journalism at City St George's and Deputy Dean for the School of Communication & Creativity, chaired the event and spoke about the real threats facing journalists today and how the centre will address these.

“I’m very privileged and proud to be the director of this new centre,” said Professor Bunce. “This is a scary moment for press freedom around the world. Last year, more than 120 journalists were killed doing their job, making it the deadliest year on record since the Committee to Protect Journalists began counting 30 years ago. Countless more were arrested and attacked.

These are not abstract threats to us – City St George’s – is the largest training centre for journalists in the UK – and we have thousands of alumni in newsrooms around the world. We’re setting up this research centre to shine a spotlight on the issues facing journalism, asking what the implications of these are for public life and what we can do about them.

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