Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today edited the Guardian newspaper in London for 20 years.

Unusual longevity in a highly competitive business,

but especially remarkable because the two decades in question

saw the media landscape utterly transformed by the internet. When Alan Rusbridger took the top job

at The Guardian in 1995, newspaper sales were still the measure of success. By the time he left,

he'd transformed the Guardian into a major international digital brand with a reputation for groundbreaking investigative journalism.

But the digital revolution has gone much further than taking newspapers online.

The biggest information providers are now the social media giants who style themselves

as platforms, not publishers. Nonetheless, they have huge influence in today's worldwide flow of information.

What has all this change done to our notions of what is news

and what it means to be a journalist?

The current global COVID pandemic is in many ways a test of our information networks.

When accuracy and truth-telling really matter, are we equipped to distinguish fact from fiction?

Well, Alan Rusbridger joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Very pleased to be here.

Alan, your latest book, News and How to Use It, is subtitled

What to Believe in a Fake News World. Do you really believe we're living in a fake news world?

I'm afraid we are. We're living in an age of complete information chaos. And all the surveys of

trust show that the media is doing very badly.

People don't know what to believe any longer, who to believe and who to trust.

But to call it a fake news world is surely to undermine the importance of so many different

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