Nicholas Karides

In the 80th minute of Liverpool’s Premier League match against Nottingham Forest last Saturday with the score stuck at 1-2, my brother anxiously wrote on our “You’ll Never Walk Alone” group-chat: “Fuck Bezos, we need a goal”.

The dark and troubling news that Liverpool’s 11 players chasing the equalizer had recently transitioned into the employment of a consortium which included the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos suddenly became entirely irrelevant. Football, at that moment, was, as it should be, solely about what was happening on the pitch. Ten minutes before the final whistle Liverpool needed an equalizer.

Our group chat feed had strained bitterly groaning about the American oligarch’s participation in the consortium that purchased a 38 per cent stake in LFC for around 2 billion euros with, reportedly, first option for any further sale of shares. It was, for me at least, a severe blow for my relationship with the club. Not as distasteful a capitulation as when the state-owned Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund purchased a majority stake of Newcastle United in 2021, but, for Liverpool’s standards, close enough. Bezos may not need to sports-wash like the Saudis do but his style of vulgar capitalism leaves an indelible stain on LFC.

The man who shamelessly sucks up to Donald Trump, the man who destroyed the credibility of the once revered Washington Post, a newspaper that Katherine Graham and Ben Bradley had painstakingly nurtured through the turbulent Nixon years, the man who invented the online bookshop only to begin pulverising books used for MI scraping, now had a say over how our boyhood club would be governed.

His money and potential boardroom presence would contaminate the essence of what Liverpool Football Club was about: Scouse socialism, community, family, solidarity, fair play, plain old northern decency and, not least, a strong anti-authoritarianism. Despite the absence of the latter, apart from some modest protestations, Liverpool had succumbed. Other clubs could bend prospective buyers’ due diligence like Beckham, if they wanted to but, for Liverpool to fall prey to this type of elite capture, was unfathomable and, in the end, unforgivable.

To the uninitiated, those who may have not come to football through childhood, being attached to a club, savoring the perfectly weighted pass, jumping to the beautifully worked goal, sulking in defeat, waiting for the perfect write-up in the sports pages can, not surprisingly, seem irrational.

But what is increasingly and depressingly irrational to us, those on the inside, is how the perfectly weighted pass and the beautifully worked goal have become a mere side show to the obsessive corporatism that has taken over the game; the global oligarchy’s pouncing for financial diversification by buying into clubs, the outrageously overpaid executives and players, the shady transactionalism, that whole Infantino culture.

Anfield can still offer glimpses of the authenticity of old, even if these are often carefully curated as props for those TikToking their way up into their executive boxes. Eighty minutes before the Bezos expletive, Anfield paid tribute to one of the icons of that standard, its one-time No 7, Kevin Keegan, who had passed away in the summer. My generation grew up with Keegan’s effortless goal scoring, his genuine joy and soft modesty. In the arbitrary manner in which children end up supporting a football club, he opened the way to my Liverpool experience. All because, quite randomly, my father had attended a match at Anfield in 1976 and had secured an autographed black and white photo of him that still stands framed in my office.

I would be devastated when a year later, in 1977, Keegan decided to leave Liverpool for Hamburg SV in a transfer worth 400,000 pounds. Aghast at the mere concept of transfers and certainly ignorant of the tax-regime that had apparently forced Keegan to emigrate, it was an early introduction to the monetary dimension of the sport. With that 400,000 pounds, and 40,000 more, Liverpool would secure the services of a new No.7, a Scot by the name of Kenny Dalglish, whose football ethic and dedication would define a new era and forever exemplify the spirit of the club.

This past Saturday, 5o years after my father’s first Anfield visit, his grand-daughter stood at the Kop under the KEVIN 7 mosaic tribute and later cheered as the goal Liverpool desperately chased arrived in the 82nd minute.

It resulted in what Bill Shankly would often define as his purpose as manager “to bring happiness and pride to the community’. As true and as plain as his fundamental tactical instruction to “pass and move.”

There are likely to have been many young parents at Anfield on Saturday with sons and daughters who will have been mesmerised by the spirit in the stands and the thrill of the football on the pitch. Bezos’ encroachment has hurt the pride of many Liverpool fans but it cannot interfere with the genuine joy of seeing the ball hit the back of the net. Because, at its purest moments, football is never about financial returns; it is always about a return to childhood.

Η ερευνητική δημοσιογραφία απαιτεί εχεμύθεια, αυστηρό έλεγχο, λεπτό χειρισμό και διασταύρωση πηγών, ατέλειωτες ώρες έρευνας και επαλήθευσης γεγονότων, βασανιστικά μέτρα προστασίας κατά της παρακολούθησης από κακόβουλους παράγοντες, θεσμικούς και άλλους, και συνεχή συντακτική και νομική υποστήριξη.

Αν και έχει εδραιωθεί στην δημόσια συνείδηση ως μοναχική διαδικασία δεν σημαίνει ότι αυτή πρέπει να είναι εγχείρημα ενός μόνο ατόμου. Κάθε άλλο. Η ερευνητική δημοσιογραφία δεν πρέπει ποτέ να είναι εγχείρημα ενός μόνο ατόμου.

Στη Κύπρο όπου τα συστημικά μέσα μαζικής ενημέρωσης, τα mainstream, τα οποία στην χειρότερη περίπτωση εξυπηρετούν —στην καλύτερη συμβιβάζονται με— το κυρίαρχο πολιτικό-οικονομικό σύστημα, η ερευνητική δημοσιογραφία – εννοούμε αυτή που απαιτεί μήνες δουλειάς – έχει καταλήξει να εκτελείται από λιγοστούς μοναχικούς δημοσιογράφους που νιώθουν την ηθική υποχρέωση να ερευνούν ζητήματα δημοσίου συμφέροντος.

Κι αυτό, κυρίως, επειδή τα mainstream δεν έχουν την παράδοση, τις δομές και τους πόρους να επενδύσουν σε αυτή, αλλά πιο καταθλιπτικά, επειδή δεν έχουν την διάθεση ή και την τόλμη να ρισκάρουν να βρεθούν στο δίλημμα να ξεσκεπάσουν ζητήματα που ενδεχομένως να τους προκαλέσουν διλήμματα σε σχέση με τα πολιτικά ή οικονομικά συμφέροντα τους ή ακόμα τις ιδεοληψίες των ιδιοκτητών τους ή και των μεγάλων χορηγών και διαφημιστών τους.

Για χρόνια η κυπριακή κοινωνία μάθαινε για σοβαρές υποθέσεις διαπλοκής που συνέβαιναν στην χώρα μόνο όταν τις αποκάλυπταν διεθνή ερευνητικά μέσα ενημέρωσης. Τις πλείστες φορές τα πατριωτικά ένστικτα της κοινής γνώμης καθοδηγούνταν να αμφισβητήσουν τις προθέσεις των διεθνών μέσων και κατόρθωναν να μειώσουν τον αντίκτυπο και να θολώσουν τα ευρήματα. Έτσι οι ένοχες καταστάσεις δεν διορθώνονταν και οι ένοχοι σπάνια λογοδοτούσαν.

Υπάρχουν φυσικά θύλακες καλής δημοσιογραφίας – όπως και πολλοί καλοί δημοσιογράφοι – και συχνά αποκαλύπτονται σοβαρά σκάνδαλα. Αυτά όμως τείνουν να αποτελούν συνήθως μέρος κομματικών ανταποδόσεων μεταξύ πολιτικών ή επιχειρηματικών παραγόντων, οι οποίοι εκμεταλλεύονται τα παρακμάζοντα μέσα ενημέρωσης ως μέρος του παιχνιδιού τους.

Σε μεγάλο βαθμό αυτή η τάση επαληθεύτηκε πρόσφατα όχι από την διστακτικότητα για ερευνητική δημοσιογραφία αλλά, απρόσμενα και περιέργως, από την αβλαβή κάλυψη της γενοκτονίας στην Γάζα από τα κυπριακά μέσα στα οποία κυριάρχησε μια άβολη αλλά καθαρά στρατηγική αδιαφορία. Προφανώς για να μην θιγούν σχεδιασμοί και αφηγήματα της κυβέρνησης και τα οικονομικά συμφέροντα εκείνων που την στηρίζουν.

Έτσι, αναπόφευκτα, κάποιοι δημοσιογράφοι, σχεδόν δονκιχωτικά, αναγκάζονται να λειτουργούν στο περιθώριο, παίρνοντας ρίσκα χωρίς να έχουν την άκρως απαραίτητη στήριξη των μηχανισμών ενός στιβαρού και ανεξάρτητου δημοσιογραφικού οργανισμού. Ενός εκδότη ή εκδότριας που στο πλαίσιο της εποπτείας και της δεδομένης τήρησης των κανόνων δημοσιογραφικής δεοντολογίας να μπορεί να ενθαρρύνει και να στηρίζει τους/τις δημοσιογράφους και να αναλαμβάνει την τελική ευθύνη των ερευνών τους.

Ή, ακόμη, όπως ίσως θα έπρεπε να είχε γίνει στην περίπτωση της πιο πρόσφατης έρευνας του κ. Μακάριου Δρουσιώτη, να αρθρώσει αυτό που ο αρχισυντάκτης της Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, διαγράφοντας προτάσεις από το προσχέδιο ενός κειμένου στα πρώτα στάδια της έρευνας για το Watergate, είχε πει στους Woodward και Bernstein: “Get some harder information next time.”

O κ. Δρουσιώτης, στην περίπτωση της έρευνας του Κράτος Μαφία, είχε εξασφαλίσει τις απαραίτητες ‘σκληρές πληροφορίες’, όπως ο ίδιος ισχυρίζεται, διότι ήταν ‘μέσα στο δωμάτιο’ όταν τα γεγονότα εκτυλίσσονταν. Η επιβεβαίωση σημαντικού μέρους των αποτελεσμάτων της έρευνας του από το πόρισμα της Αρχής κατά της Διαφθοράς είναι ενδεικτική.

Η πιο πρόσφατη ελαττωματική έρευνα του όμως –η οποία, αυστηρά ομιλούντες, δεν μπορεί να θεωρηθεί καν δημοσιογραφική– στοίχισε στον ίδιο αλλά κυρίως διάβρωσε την εμπιστοσύνη του κοινού στην δημοσιογραφία σε μια εποχή που η δημοκρατία την έχει τόσο ανάγκη. Το βαρύτερο πλήγμα εναντίον του δημοσίου συμφέροντος και της δημοκρατίας ήρθε όμως από την θρασύτητα του πολιτειακού κατεστημένου το οποίο έχοντας πληγεί από την πρώτη έρευνα του κ. Δρουσιώτη εργαλειοποίησε τις αδυναμίες της δεύτερης και ενεργοποίησε απαράδεκτο διωγμό κατά του δημοσιογράφου.

Μια πολιτεία, με ασυνέπεια αναλογικότητας, η οποία με άνετη υποκρισία εκστομίζει κούφιες διακηρύξεις υπέρ της ελευθεροτυπίας και της ελευθερίας έκφρασης αλλά με την ίδια άνεση, επέλεξε να εκφοβίσει τον δημοσιογραφικό κόσμο μετατρέποντας ένα δημοσιογράφο σε διερευνώμενο και καταγγελλόμενο. Φτηνή προειδοποίηση προς όλους όσους ενδεχομένως τολμήσουν να διερευνήσουν κάθε επόμενη περίπτωση διαφθοράς. Μια ύπουλη κίνηση που θέλει να διευρύνει και να συσκοτίσει την απόσταση ανάμεσα στην εξουσία και τους πολίτες εξουδετερώνοντας τον μεσάζοντα, τα μέσα ενημέρωσης.

Αναμενόμενο ίσως από μια πολιτεία που μόλις παρέδωσε την προεδρία του Συμβουλίου της ΕΕ αλλά ακόμα δεν έχει κυρώσει την ευρωπαϊκή οδηγία περί προστασίας των δημοσιογράφων και των δημοσιογραφικών πηγών (EMFA). Κάτι που όφειλε να πράξει από τον Αύγουστο του 2025¹.

Κόντρα σε αυτά όμως, η υπόθεση Δρουσιώτη πρέπει να αποτελέσει την αφετηρία για ένα νέο ξεκίνημα της κυπριακής δημοσιογραφίας. Αντί – όπως φαίνεται ότι γίνεται – να διχάσει τον δημοσιογραφικό κόσμο θα πρέπει να τον ενώσει έτσι ώστε το ερευνητικό έργο να μην καταλήγει να γίνεται δοκιμασία του ενός αλλά αποτελεσματική συνεργασία των πολλών.

Υποσημείωση: Μια πρώτη σχετική προσπάθεια αποτελεί το Κυπριακό Δίκτυο Ερευνητικής Δημοσιογραφίας CIReN, μια πρωτοβουλία του Ινστιτούτου Μέσων Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης ΙMME με την στήριξη του Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project OCCRP.
Από το 2024 το CIReN αποτελεί ένα αυτόνομο, ανεξάρτητο μη κερδοσκοπικό οργανισμό κάτω από την συντακτική διεύθυνση και ιδιοκτησία των δημοσιογράφων του. Xωρίς επιχειρηματικά συμφέροντα από επενδυτικές ή τεχνολογικές εταιρείες, χωρίς διαφημίσεις, χρηματοδοτούμενο από ιδρύματα που στηρίζουν την ανεξάρτητη δημοσιογραφία, από συνδρομές και δωρεές των αναγνωστών του και, πιο σημαντικά, από συμπράξεις με άλλους δημοσιογραφικούς και ερευνητικούς φορείς: www.ciren.cy

^I https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EL/legal-content/summary/european-media-freedom-act.html

When researching and then writing a study on how the Cypriot media covered the war in Gaza, published by the Institute for Mass Media and Universitas Publications earlier this year¹, I toyed with the idea of including a ‘note for the record’ to state that the study had been free of any usage of MI.

No questions had been put to chat-bots, no request to identify, sort, summarize or, especially, create content, was asked of the machines. In the end I abandoned the note idea as superfluous, coupled by the concern that it might have been perceived as pompous. It was also dismissed because I have long favoured the term Mechanical Intelligence (MI) to the misleading AI, which would have meant having to explain the rationale in ways that would be self-referential and, in the end, distracting.

The study did not request of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformers to bundle readings and produce metrics or, as I frequently hear from devotees of the sport, to ‘take this text and make it better using my style’. Instead, it relied on the actual human reading of texts, watching hundreds of news bulletins and, importantly, taking notes when talking to journalists, academics and experts. The findings relied as much on recording and scrutinizing the reporting as on understanding the motives, dilemmas and tensions experienced by journalists when they were preparing it.

Terminology

MI is by far a more appropriate acronym than AI. The latter attributes a certain mystique to what is in fact a machine process: The word ‘artificial’ is deliberately camouflaged in a techno abstraction rendering it un-belonging and irresponsible. We say ‘artificial’ as if it is independent, otherworldly but if, instead, we used the term MI, we could begin to grasp that the machines physically exist, that they are actually located somewhere and, crucially, that they belong to someone.²

To paraphrase Ben Tarnoff³, calling it MI is the difference between seeing this ‘intelligence’ as an actual technology rather than a theology, and by consequence the owners of these operations as business people rather than high priests of a new religion. Indeed, business people who are dangerously ruthless having built their empires through unlawful data collection and exploitative methods, and remaining staunchly dismissive of regulatory oversight.

It is useful to remember that the overwhelming majority of people are neither technophobes nor technophiles. They neither dispute the beneficial dimension of MI nor do they underestimate the risks and social ramifications. Dazzled by what has become available, yet skeptical of the imposed sense of inevitability that has accompanied it, they have, nonetheless, succumbed to the stress of being left behind and have surrendered.

Students

None faster than students, though some, it seems, with a great deal of trepidation. There’s a lot of talk of professors of courses in which writing is important who are increasingly being handed papers that are inexplicably tidy and ‘too beautiful’, almost identical but mostly flat and ‘soulless’. An American professor quoted in the New Yorker recently said before all this “students used to work hard to come up with their own ideas. I’d help, and the’d struggle. But they’d come to something that was their own. That doesn’t happen anymore and I grieve that”⁴

Another, in an attempt to identify MI generated essays without having to resort to MI detectors, is applying pressure by randomly selecting students to read out their essays in class where “it was quite obvious that they hadn’t written them”.

Writing is inherently difficult. It has to be. ‘Easy’ has never been a goal in education. But it has become one at a time when universities, especially those that have capitulated to commercial imperatives and are themselves eager adopters of MI, are not willing to seriously stand in the way of its uncontrolled expansion. They prefer to be seen as trapped and unable to return to basics mostly because they are unwilling to do what is necessary to defend the idea of education.

So what type of students are they producing: Who are you really if as a student you submit an MI-generated assignment which you cannot even begin to explain when asked to defend it? Who are you –and what will you become– when in conversation you do not have the vocabulary to articulate the most basic premise hidden in the MI generated paragraphs that you’ve submitted as your own?

Perhaps we’re coming to the point where intelligence will be measured as one’s capacity to efficiently utilize MI, and that will be what universities will end up teaching. Will universities be necessary? Will MI complement intelligence or replace it?

The cases of students whose in-class experience exposes an empty shell so far removed from their slick submissions reflect the broader context of our collective dual-existence: the digital versus the real, the tension between the person you want to be seen to be when uploading your post on social media from the person you really are when you are sitting in front of a blank page. It is tempting to think that for a student whose digital existence is more essential than their offline existence, it might be effortless, indeed natural, to surrender themselves to the embrace of MI. Relationships with chat-bots are bridging an already blurry space between the real and the digital.

For the rest of us too, at a time when our capacity for attention is being tested by the infinite scroll, convinced as we have become that we no longer have the time to think, it is easier to opt for the machine, always available to spurt out with unthinking speed its accumulated data to help us save time. But save time for what, if not to be attentive to something as meaningful as thinking and elaborating one’s own thoughts?

Just like students, journalists are being caught in this pressure of efficiency and the temptation of convenience. To survive they have to endure a messy online existence under growing pressure from their media to produce more and faster copy. But unlike students, they know that MI is contaminated by malicious algorithmically-instigated disinformation and slop, and that submitting to that puts their intellectual integrity and professional credibility on the line.

At a time when public trust in the media is at such a low, surrendering to the machine to do the writing will prove the final blow for journalism. One hopes that just as some professors are resisting the tide and protecting their students, editors, even publishers, will do the same to protect their journalists.

Notes:

1. Media Coverage of Gaza – https://imme-universitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/MEDIA-and-GΑΖΑ-2026.pdf

2. AI in the Sky – https://nicholaskarides.home.blog/2021/06/

3. Frankestein’s Regrets – https://www.thenation.com/article/society/artificial-intelligence-ai-paradox/

4. https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/the-despair-of-the-professor-in-the-age-of-ai

Photo: Edward Hopper, Office in a Small City, 1953

‘Rage giving’ in the USA should signal a new beginning for public media everywhere

Public broadcasting was always used by governments to manage public opinion. The explosive growth of commercial television in the last quarter of the previous century mitigated the effect introducing a pluralistic landscape, not just in news but across all aspects of TV and radio production. The re-balancing worked for a while but as corporate media began to accumulate more power themselves, they too began to manipulate the news agenda against the public interest.

Mostly they did it in collusion with the governments of the day which were convinced over the years to de-fund and incapacitate public service media, in exchange for the political support of profit-making broadcasters. Public broadcasting struggled to keep up with the new corporate giants which devoured everything in their path, pandering to capital, lobbying governments and stretching market logic to its limits. But, while viewers got caught up in the distracting spectacle on offer and as transparency of ownership was blurred through financialization, public trust disintegrated.

Then came the web and large online platforms hijacked news management flows and numbed our brains. By then the impact of broadcasting – public, and by this time, private too – began to shrink.

Tech-oligarchs, not TV owners, took charge of the game, algorithmically curating everyone’s news intake, including that produced by broadcasting, which was itself forced to jump on platforms to compete. The ‘silent management’ that public broadcasters once exercised and private corporate media later took over, fell into the manipulative hands of irresponsible online platforms whose algorithmic trickery distorted public discourse, eroding human agency and endangering the democratic process.

Public broadcasting in fact became so irrelevant that when Donald Trump returned to power last year he did not even seek to ‘capture’ it as any self-respecting autocrat would have done; he opted instead to de-fund and ultimately shut it down. Public broadcasting was seen as a waste of public funds but mostly as the hub of liberal thinking MAGA wanted silenced.

Trump sought servility from a very willing, as it turned out, tech-oligarchy. He also facilitated his friend Larry Ellison’s purchase of CNN which is now likely to create a new private monopoly as he merges it with CBS News. As a result, last month, after 60 years of existence, the non-profit public corporation in charge of annually allocating 500m dollars to public radio and tv stations across the US announced that it was dissolving as a result of federal funding cuts.

Things may not be as bad in Europe, yet. Public service media (PSM) remain crucial in guaranteeing informed democratic discourse, quality news and access to accurate, impartial, and diverse information (admittedly in varying measure; better in Sweden and Denmark, less so in Hungary and Romania). But the climate is changing. Assisted by Russia’s effective and still underestimated disinformation establishment, charlatans like Nigel Farage in Britain attacked the BBC as ‘the enemy’ and autocrats like Viktor Orban repurposed Hungarian public broadcasting as a propaganda tool.

While the EU remains resolute in safeguarding the independence and integrity of PSM, incentivizing member states to invest more is not happening fast enough.

Which is why societies have to be reminded of a fundamental but completely forgotten notion: Public Service Media belong to the public. They are there to serve the citizenry. Not the state, not the governments, and certainly not the appetites of would-be autocrats. Unlike commercial outlets, and certainly unlike pernicious online platforms, PSM are mandated – obliged – to offer content that supports informed citizenship, political pluralism, and social cohesion. In a context in which public trust in news has disintegrated, PSM are expected to counter disinformation, offer serious and balanced reporting and represent minority voices.

For this to work we all need to snap-out of the mindset that treats PSM as an economic burden and see them as key institutions with a democracy-protecting role. In several US states Trump’s de-funding of public media has resulted in increased citizens donations to save them, a movement described as ‘rage giving’. It’s an interesting signal.

In Cyprus, the government of the day has always held sway over public broadcasting by appointing the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation’s board. But it is the political parties – by approving its government-proposed annual budget in parliament – that have consistently leveraged their power with demands over its news coverage. They have to back off.

The CyBC, which admittedly is plagued by long standing administrative weaknesses, should be reformed and then allowed to fulfill its crucial public duty role. Its news division’s budget should be substantively boosted to help bring innovation to its newsrooms and journalists must be offered the continuous re-training denied to them by years of cuts. At a time of AI infiltration into most news outlets, at the expense of quality journalism, the CyBC should be strengthened to deal with it ethically and by doubling down on human-led journalism. It also has a central role to play in promoting media literacy in the country.

Despite its problems Cypriots still have a soft spot for the CyBC as the recorder of the country’s turbulent modern history. In some way this may apply to Britons and the BBC. Yet, mostly because of the war of attrition by profit-making channels and the populist tendency of belittling rather than strengthening public institutions, they have lost the public’s trust. It’s a reversible trend once citizens awaken to the notion that these media are theirs and are there to serve them. A notion that also needs to be digested by the political establishment, whose instincts, regrettably, remain stuck on restricting rather than supporting editorial independence.

“Read The Wandering Jew Has Arrived” remarked Mark Lee Hunter, the investigative reporter and scholar, when few in the conference hall reacted when he mentioned the work of the French journalist Albert Londres. At a time when journalism was losing ground, he argued, students of journalism were “getting skills but not enough history”.

Lee Hunter was speaking in September 2023 in Goteborg, three weeks before Hamas’ murderous rampage in southern Israel.

Albert Londres (photo above) wrote The Wandering Jew before the Holocaust. Published in 1930¹ it makes awkward reading today with its condescending colonial tone, but it stands as a masterful example of investigative journalism², and is considered a major French literary work.

Londres had immersed himself in the lives of Jews in the East End of London and the Muranow ghetto of Warsaw and witnessed the wave of antisemitic pogroms in central Europe that fueled Zionism. He then traveled to Palestine where thousands of Jews had begun to move in the late 20s buying up land and clashing with what he estimates were 700,000 Arabs there.

His examination of the ‘Jewish condition’ was sympathetic to the cause but also raised concerns about what he described as growing Zionist intoxication. At some point Londres remarks: “You had enough of living under the boot. Everyone can understand how good it must feel to raise your head up high. But if you go around with your head in the air you cannot see what is happening around you.”

While highly personal, his work offered unprecedented insight at the time. It is said to have helped shift public opinion on the plight of the Jews and affected policies on a range of other issues including forced labour and the exploitation of Black Africans. Londres’ unique strength was that he recorded the facts on the ground, documenting the cruelty and injustice and confronting his interlocutors with the implications of their actions.

Without veering into the circumstances of how the ‘wandering Jew’ finally arrived in Palestine or the strife that has engulfed the region ever since, the key fact on the ground today is that the state of Israel exists.

But it is also a fact that this internationally recognised state has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. It is a fact that the IDF’s military campaign has pulverized the enclave and that the Palestinians trapped in it are being starved. It is a fact that the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and his former defense minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And it is a fact that the state faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.

To this depressing list one must now add the disgraceful fact that this state is targeting and killing journalists.

According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists Israel is engaging in a “most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists” while arbitrarily detaining and torturing others in retaliation for their work. Last month Anas Al Shariff and Mariam Abu Daqqa were added to the list of 184 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel³.

Its audacious war on journalism must be seen in the broader global context in which journalism is being vilified by autocrats like Trump, Orban and Netanyahu who have persistently sought to discredit the journalistic profession. What would petty politicians know of the history of generations of war correspondents who risked their lives to bring out the brutal reality of war and counter the official speak of military authorities? The Fisks, the Efthyvoulous, the Andersons and Foleys who roamed the Middle East and always found ways of infiltrating high-risk war zones for the story because they demanded factual accuracy, the enemy of the aforementioned populist trio.

It is impossible today, in the age of total surveillance and drone targeted assassinations, to expect media organisations to ask of their correspondents to enter Gaza. Which is why international media must continue to insist collectively on gaining safe and unrestricted access while continuing to support their Palestinian colleagues there and to shame Israel for its actions.

On Monday evening Channel 4 News’ foreign correspondent Paraic O’Brien’s speaking from Tel-Aviv about developments in Gaza ended his dispatch with the following remarks: “One more thought if I may; those images you saw in our report from inside Gaza were brought to you by journalists who live and work there. Journalists like myself are not allowed there; And those journalists just like many Gazans are looking for food for themselves and their family but they are doing so at the same time as wanting to shine a light on what’s happening in their home”.  

That ‘home’ has become a far darker place than the ghettos which the journalism of Londres first helped bring to world attention. Israel knows that world attention today is erratic and malleable. It knows also that an ill-informed, confused and increasingly compliant global public is less likely to insist on holding it to account for all that it is doing.

Notes

1. The Wandering Jew Has Arrived, Albert Londres, 1932. English Translation 2017.
2. The Albert Londres Prize is the highest French journalism award – first awarded in 1933.
3. CPJ: https://cpj.org/data/killed/2025/?status=Killed&motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=Confirmed&type%5B%5D=Journalist&start_year=2025&end_year=2025&group_by=location

Intellectual integrity can be defined as acknowledging the need to be true to one’s own thinking and to hold oneself to the same standards one expects others to meet.

We demand it of our public intellectuals: the academics, writers and critics to whose independent thinking we count on to make sense of the world’s ambiguities and of whom we also expect to deliver their verdicts with fearlessness and moral consistency.

In illiberal societies such voices are revered by the oppressed and feared by the oppressors. In our own liberal societies, they challenge our schizophrenic collective conduct, bring clarity to the blurriness of our times and expose the inconsistencies of those who govern over us.

Even before Trump’s poisonous attacks on universities began to drive a lot of intellectuals out of their ‘safe houses’, the capacity of academics to live up to their role had suffered from the commercialization of education and the corporatization of their institutions. For years, even in the freer more radical British intellectual scene, academics were being pushed to conform to the whims of the new finance-dependent education order. In some instances, intellectuals end up sitting comfortably within the system they had tasked themselves to judge or disrupt; some ride the social media circus having become celebrities that manufacture intellectual content as commodity. Genuine, dedicated intellectuals are threatened with extinction.

More painfully, there are now those who transition from the lecture hall to the political circus, from ivory tower scribblers to robotic teleprompter readers. Some academics are lured into appointed public office as experts taking on ministerial positions. The decision to take the plunge is no doubt tough; to be fair some jump in with a genuine belief that they could inject integrity into the political process. Professor Michael Ignatieff’s experiment in Canada as recounted in his book Fire and Ashes is a must read for public intellectuals aspiring to transition.

An academic’s eternal tension between their theory and their practice is ultimately tested during crises. Nothing has tested their -or indeed our own individual – intellectual integrity as deeply as the genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Last month at the European Union’s Council of Ministers the Dutch foreign minister submitted a motion for “a review to establish whether Israel had violated its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement” an agreement that is “based on respect for human rights and democratic principles”. A belated but welcome shift in the EU’s weak reaction so far, given that the review was first proposed by Spain and Ireland as far back as February 2024.

At the Council, Cyprus was represented by its foreign minister, Constantinos Kombos, a public intellectual, a founding member of the University of Cyprus’ Department of Law and until his ministerial appointment in 2023 an Associate Professor in Public Law there.

Mr Kombos, who has since then built a reputation as a quiet and effective minister, argued against the Dutch proposal, objecting to exploring whether Israel may have violated the EU’s red lines. He did say that Cyprus considered the humanitarian situation in Gaza to be tragic and unacceptable and that Israel must allow the flow of aid. But he rejected the motion in terms of the procedure and the benefit which would arise. His concern wasn’t the content, he said, but whether this move would lead to anything useful, especially without EU experts on the ground in Gaza¹.

In the struggle to increase pressure on Israel and as time was running out for starving Palestinians, the Cypriot objection on the basis of technicalities stunk of hypocrisy. It was foolish, but in the end, also irrelevant, as the motion was supported by 17 of the 27 members, with 9 against and one abstention.

Cyprus’ pitiful position was not unexpected as it had been preceded by a more blinding display of moral bankruptcy when the Cypriot president and Mr Kombos visited Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem last month. Their visit ignored the weight of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister who is held responsible for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for crimes against humanity. In his public statements², standing next to Netanyahu, the Cypriot president mentioned the situation in Gaza zero times.

Around this time of the year, during the University of Cyprus’ spring semester Mr Kombos’ Department of Law runs an obligatory six-credit course for second-year law students. In week 8 and 9 of Module 205, students are taught about the role and significance of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court – the one that indicted Mr Netanyahu.

The Cypriot minister’s academic self-destruction is of course a personal choice and would have been of little public concern if it had not also exposed the slow public death of Cyprus’ integrity as a country; a small and often ignored occupied state that has constructed its national narrative on the idea of justice and has for decades pleaded desperately for the respect of international law.

International politics always generate contradictions and politicians always rush to deny them. Public intellectuals, however, are obliged to expose those contradictions. More so when the sanctity of international law is at stake. Public intellectuals who opt to become politicians or ministers are not absolved of that burden of duty.

1. https://knews.kathimerini.com.cy/en/news/cyprus-talks-humanitarianism-but-ducks-eu-move-to-press-israel

2. https://www.gov.il/en/pages/pm-netanyahu-meets-with-cypriot-president-nikos-christodoulides-4-may-2025

I never cared much for Salman Rushdie’s work. I had tried to read The Satanic Verses not as the promising novel everyone said it was, but as the symbol it inevitably became when, instead of writing a book review, Ayatollah Khomeini decided to write an execution order. The fatwa started what Christopher Hitchens described as the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom, freedom of speech in particular.

My relationship with fiction already strained, I became one of those readers Rushdie identifies in his most recent book, Knife – Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape, 2024), as never having gone past page 15 of the Verses. I had little interest in the literature stemming out of the post-colonial immigrant experience in Britain and, in the end, could not invest in a novel purely to discover the basis on which a theocracy would justify issuing a decree for the assassination of its author. 

But, after several riots and assassination attempts, years of living underground, guarded by the UK Special Branch, not to mention many books, it became impossible not to develop a degree of interest in Rushdie. Where had he been hiding, how did he find the courage to reappear, to travel and lecture? Insecure, yet defiant, Rushdie told David Remnick that at some point he had come to feel that “all that” was a very long time ago, and that the world had moved on.

Move it did, yes, but not forward. In August 2022, over three decades after Khomeini’s death order, the 75 year-old Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York minutes before he was about to deliver a speech. He was stabbed repeatedly, suffering horrific injuries including the loss of his right eye.

In Knife, Rushdie does not name his assailant; he refers to him only as ‘the A’, to cover what he says are less decorous references he uses in the privacy of his home. Hadi Matar, born in California to Lebanese parents, had not bothered to inform himself about the man he had decided to kill. “By his own admission”, writes Rushdie, ‘the A’ had read “barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed.”

That Matar knew so little of Rushdie is indicative of the shallow digital life most people live these days. But it is not as jarring as the fact that – according to Ayatollah Khomeini’s son – his father had never read The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was actually a political ploy to assert Khomeini’s authority in Iran at a time when he was both physically and politically weak. Khomeini, it turns out, was less a fundamentalist and more of an ordinary populist.

Knife is Rushdie’s attempt to understand the latest attack and to expose the ludicrousness of theocratic politics. Parts are gory, others, where he imagines a conversation with Matar are awkward. But you cannot but admire the calm word-by-word revisiting of every blow and of every rehabilitated step.

Not merely a recording of a reluctant expert’s struggle, this is also an analysis of the new-found audacity of the populist onslaught on liberal thought and freedom of expression. Only last week India’s government sought the prosecution of Rushdie’s fellow Indian-born writer Arundhati Roy for comments she had made about Kashmir over a decade ago.

Art, Rushdie claims, challenges orthodoxy, it sets the artist’s personal vision against the received ideas of the time, the cliches and ideologies that depend on invisible sky gods. He calmly dissects and re-assembles the battle of stories, old and modern, and satirises the new malevolence. Good writing, he argues, will always outlast such ideologies and calls for the overturning of “false narratives of tyrants, populists and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live”, and not die, or, indeed, die for.

By documenting his ordeal, Rushdie has also afforded himself the chance to hit back at those who had joined forces with the Islamic attack on him in 1989. John Berger, Germaine Greer, Roald Dahl, even curiously, former US President Carter. And, to extend his gratitude to those who did come to his support. Among them his close friends Martin Amis and Hitchens who at the time offered the most lucid assessment on the subject: “It was a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved: In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defense of free expression.” 

The tensions Hitchens identified feel deeper and harsher today. Fatwas may no longer be necessary but the large ignorant crowds that were once steered onto the streets are today unleashed as digital mobs to riot on large online platforms.

It is where populist autocrats and their armies of influencers stab away at artists, writers, journalists and activists by spreading disinformation and hatred, always in an effort to silence them. As captive users of these poisoned and unregulated platforms ourselves, we are faced with a choice: become participant-observers in the rioting spectacle by consuming the illiberal sloganeering narratives or, resist by shunning the online trash completely, stepping back and returning to the study of the readings. Rushdie’s book and its cutting verses are as good a place to re-start.

Photo: Euronews

The complexity and hype surrounding Large Language Models make it difficult to disentangle the arguments about generative AI’s potential harms. But one can have little sympathy for those who seek the assistance of ChatGPT to sort out their understanding of the issue. It may be the strongest evidence yet of our species’ voluntary dumbification.

On top of the hype there’s the spin from the industry itself. The recent confessional drama by big tech leaders warning of the risks and coming out in favour of regulation is alarming but doesn’t seem that genuine. Sudden talk of an existential threat betrays that they may have not been telling the whole story all this time and, worse, that they might actually have already lost control of AI’s “deep learning” process.

Yet, despite their collective concern, we know that independently they are doggedly trying to stay one step ahead of each other. And while this is certainly an opportunity for watchdogs to reach for thick red pencils we also know, rather depressingly, that regulators will always lag behind accelerating innovation.

Then there’s the language. Not the language of Large Language Models per se but that which is used by us when it comes to talking about them. We have been unable to defuse the linguistic traps that keep feeding the hyperbole. In an interview¹ with the FT the science fiction author Ted Chiang protested about the use of personal pronouns when referring to chat-bots and lamented the anthropomorphic language such as ‘learn’, ‘understand’ and ‘know’ that are projected on them to create an illusion of sentience where, he claims, none exists.

AI is not a conscious thinking intelligence says Chiang describing the term as “A poor choice of words in 1954”. Had a different phrase been chosen for it back in the 50s we would have avoided a lot of the confusion we’re having now. His preferred term for AI? “Applied Statistics”.

Consider the ‘writing professions’: Legal firms have already began to advertise the services of their AI driven “digital lawyers” who “accept” and “understand” legal questions and who not only connect a client’s questions to laws and cases but claim to draft bespoke documents for signature. Essentially, in Chiang’s applied statistics logic, these services are supercharged search engines that draw relevance on the basis of words (which they don’t ‘understand’) and then simulate existing text formats to produce prose in acceptable tone and syntax.

Aside from mismatched or entirely made-up results (there’s the recent case of the US lawyer fined for his chat-bot’s hallucinatory court citations)² the engines lack comprehension of that which they deliver. Still, the client saves time and pays much less than the hourly rate a human lawyer would have charged for the work. There’s nervous excitement in the legal profession that entry-stage legal associates aren’t that necessary anymore. Of course, while legal AI is doing the work, entry stage legal associates are losing the capacity to learn to do it themselves, but that’s another story.

The same principle operates for data journalists who are assisted by AI that scrapes, sorts and catalogues swathes of data. Tools that sift through material identifying and matching information which journalists are then able to study for potentially dubious connections to expose wrongdoings. One hopes journalistic AI won’t soon be drafting the story. That should still require the journalist to challenge the veracity and value of the information, contemplate the repercussions, address the ethical dilemmas and employ the right language to make the story work. Not to mention avoid being SLAPPed³ by any clients of the legal AI community.

Yet with every passing month the capacity and popularity of Large Language Models is expanding. Despite their unreliability there’s a clear societal shift for the acceptance of their type of mimicry.

The result is that algorithmic systems take all the bad, incomplete -and let’s not forget often- malicious writing produced and feed it back into the large pool making it primary reference material that perpetually decays the information ecosystem. Shallow imitative writing that is hyped, even propagandist, is becoming an ingredient of our exchanges, a messy by-product of the cultural phenomenon we have embraced as ‘disruption’.

Throughout this year’s ChatGPT delirium from cheating on essays to writing marketing-speak and ‘supercharging’ businesses we may have forgotten that the skills developed by writing, questioning, double-checking and debating are what lead to better thinking and better judgment. At this rate the machines won’t really need to do much to achieve the much feared total take-over. We have already surrendered; willingly, unthinkingly.

Notes:

1. https://www.ft.com/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84

2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/23/two-us-lawyers-fined-submitting-fake-court-citations-chatgpt

3. SLAPPS: https://www.the-case.eu/

Cartoon by Tom Fishburn

It was painful to have to doubt Seymour Hersh’s explosive Substack story¹ last month in which he claimed that back in September 2022 it was US Navy divers that had sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline which links Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. Not because the events he reconstructed couldn’t be true but mostly because – on the basis of just the one source he used in his 5,200-word report – they can’t conclusively be proven to be true.

More painful is the thought of what it could mean to his legacy if indeed it actually turns out not to be true; the damage to that elusive super-power that few journalists possess, credibility. Not to mention the erosion of the public’s perception of his other stories over the years – however watertight they had been.

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) experts swarmed over Hersh’s pipeline story and began to produce detailed technical evidence in an attempt to debunk his claims. It was both infuriating and rather suspicious when some unashamedly chose the ad hominem path to make their point.

Seeing otherwise credible OSINT reporters spitefully ridicule the 85-year old ‘last great American reporter’, came across as crass and stunk of partisanship. He may or may not have got it right but their eagerness to take him down rather than genuinely help to bring journalistic closure seemed inappropriate.

Perhaps it is indicative of the new lone-ranger Twittering journalism. A noisy rebutting of “my journalism against yours” which fuzzes the facts and leaves the many malicious players out there free to continue to sabotage our capacity to get to the truth.

Some of the criticism against Hersh is clearly legitimate. Two source confirmation is basic journalism. Despite their tasteless glee, many experts appear to have correctly exposed plausibility issues in his story.

When news of the explosions first broke the New York Times called them a mystery and, until Hersh’s story, the prevailing, though counter-intuitive narrative, was that this had been the work of the Russians. In recent days OSINT experts such as Oliver Alexander² put forward new hypotheses, the latest being that a Russian vessel ill-equipped to the task of welding the pipeline back in 2019 could have been responsible for the rupture [though it is accepted that there were two explosions on two separate occasions on two different pipes]. 

Fiona Hill, former foreign affairs advisor to presidents Bush, Obama and Trump, told Unherd on 22 February that she initially thought it was the Russians³. Now, she said, she was not so sure. She didn’t believe it was the United States adding that some of her colleagues think Ukraine could have done it: “But I just want to make it very clear that I absolutely do not know who carried this out.”

For half a century Hersh broke difficult stories which when he got right changed the course of history and our notion of journalism. He exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam that led to the conviction of the US Army Officer who ordered it. More relevantly he had provided the first comprehensive account of President Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. Hersh was the reporter Bob Woodward telephoned in 1973 to thank him that he too had begun to report seriously on the Watergate story. Everyone had been doubting it. He and Carl Bernstein could not do it alone, Woodward admitted⁴.

It is not impossible that on this story Hersh’s one source – however reliable – may have double-crossed him. Detailed and convincingly argued as his catalogue of events is, it is not impossible for almost all of it to be untrue.

Now a Substack lone-reporter, Hersh no longer has Abe Rosenthal or David Remnick, his one-time Editors at the New York Times and the New Yorker to pull him back. His latest investigation is unlikely to have been supported by the painstaking fact-checking teams imperative for quality news reporting to achieve accuracy and sustain credibility. Without an editor he may have been too hasty, too eager. He may have been carried away by President Biden’s remarks over a year ago, weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which he defiantly said “If Russia invades…there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it”⁵.

Yet, this whole affair is not just about Hersh. It is about journalism more broadly. A journalism in which big stories still require the newsroom’s teamwork, the researchers, the team chasing multiple sources, the fact-checkers, the lawyers, and ultimately, the Editor who will shoulder responsibility.

There are very few experienced Quixotic reporters out there and Hersh is one of them. But, clearly, even he can’t do it alone. A journalism without the backbone offered by teamwork and without higher editorial responsibility tied to codes of conduct will always fall short. It will also fall prey to dubious lone-shooter reporting. Hired, malicious and partisan ‘journalists’ have already infiltrated our information sphere deliberately creating a lot of noise and doubt.

The deeper problem is that a public held in a state of perpetual confusion will become even more distrustful of journalism. It will believe nothing, even when important stories such as Hersh’s are, in the end, conclusively proven to be true.

Notes

1 https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

2 https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

3 https://unherd.com/2023/02/absolute-victory-over-russia-isnt-possible/

4 Reporter, A Memoir, Seymour Hersh published by Penguin: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/31320/seymour-m-hersh

5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8

Photo: NYT/Redux from the NYRB

A week after the death of Queen Elizabeth in September, India replaced Britain as the world’s fifth-largest economy¹.

A few weeks later King Charles acceded to the throne to become head of the Commonwealth while an Asian Hindu MP became Britain’s prime minister.

The first sentence captures the end of a royal era and the statistical reality of the new global economy. The second reveals the normative yet incongruous notion that King Charles heads the Commonwealth in which his country is no longer the powerhouse it once was. But, it also shows how Britain, with all its faults, still maintains an often accidental capacity to shock itself into progress.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader of the opposition, described Rishi Sunak’s election (it was more of a Tory coronation²) as a significant moment that proved that Britain was a place where people of all races and all beliefs could fulfill their dreams. Many didn’t think that they would live to see the day, he said, and described it as part of what made him so proud to be British.

Pride works best when there’s some recognition by those around you that it is deserved. Everybody knows Sunak’s move from 11 to 10 Downing St was forced upon the Tories. Sadly, there are few things left for which Britain can be proud of and a lot fewer for which it can be envied.

The National Health Service used to be one them. Labour’s Health Minister Nye Bevan had described the birth of the NHS in 1948 as “the most civilised step any country has ever taken”. It became in a very practical sense a representation of Britain’s true common wealth. Actual, shared wealth, not a crass rebranding of colonial exploitation, even though many might claim that it was achieved on the back of that colonial hegemony.

While it became inevitable that one day Britain would lose its primacy and clout in the Commonwealth³, it was not inevitable that it would lose the plot on the NHS.

In the 80s when the common wealth of Rail and Water were lost to profit, Margaret Thatcher had said, somewhat disingenuously, that the NHS, “was safe in our hands”. Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown introduced much needed reform with the latter famously saying that “the NHS is the best insurance system for the long term”⁴.

David Cameron’s happy-go-lucky capitalism further eroded the Bevan project and gradually gave way to kleptocratic alliances between reckless business interests and the new generation of irresponsible, opportunistic Tory politicians.

We have gradually begun to forget that a Britain that would have stayed in the European Union would not have operated the way its leadership now feels allowed to. Its EU membership had obliged it to live up to its status as a robust, mature European state. Despite the periodical shenanigans of its leaders it was anchored in common sense and its partners saw it as the home of political realism. Its civil service taught its European partners efficiency as its political class benefited from Europe’s culture of compromise. And while it often also provoked its partners, in a strange self-regulating way it was tamed by its reputation as the sane country it was perceived to be. Not any more.

As the NHS’ ambulance and paramedic strike takes hold, Health Secretary Steve Barclay – who it should not be forgotten served as Brexit negotiator – yesterday called on the public to use their common sense and to consider that the system will be under very severe pressure⁵. Of course it will be. Since Brexit the whole country has been under very severe pressure.

The problem is that the Tories are too self-obsessed to grasp it while Labour is too divided to admit it. More disconcertingly Bevan’s party also seems too timid to be able to do anything radical about it.

Photo: Nye Bevan at Park Hospital, Manchester, meeting 13-year-old Sylvia Beckenham, the first NHS patient; The Daily Herald, 6 July 1948.

1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/india-uk-fifth-largest-economy-world

2. Rishi Sunak became PM with less than 1 percent of the British vote. 

3. Need to be fair that the Commonwealth as an institution does good things in research and education bringing people together and supporting communities.

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190266/

5. https://www.indy100.com/politics/steve-barclay-common-sense-ambulance-driver

I doubt I fully appreciated the trouble my father had gone into to secure my first ever Centre Court ticket at Wimbledon in June 1979. I had desperately wanted to watch Bjorn Borg, my childhood hero, but instead we got his tenacious rival (pre-McEnroe), the player who invented the tennis grunt (pre-Sharapova), Jimmy Connors.

We watched the American World No.3 come back from a set down to defeat Marty Riessen in the second round and overawed as I must have felt just being there, I probably consoled myself that there was value in watching my hero’s arch enemy close up. Borg overpowered Connors in the semis and despite being pushed in the final by the freaky serves of Roscoe Tanner he went on to win his fourth Wimbledon title.

Until that moment there was really no talk of a ‘Greatest of All Time’ (GOAT). There were several ‘greats’, Perry (mostly for the British), Laver, Emerson, but no definable GOAT.

In the following year, 1980, in the second most spectacular Wimbledon final ever (the 2008 Nadal-Federer one was by far the best), Borg defeated the impertinent and painfully talented John McEnroe to win his fifth title¹. People then began to talk of a GOAT.

Five Wimbledon titles in a row, the Swede was on the cusp of greatness. In its cover story in June 1980 TIME magazine asked ‘Is he the best player to ever lift a racquet?’ ²

Then, after losing to McEnroe in his sixth Wimbledon final in 1981, GOAT talk was temporarily suspended. It was permanently terminated two months later when after losing in the US Open final (again to McEnroe) Borg not only shunned the award ceremony (for which he was booed by the crowd) but left New York and walked out of professional tennis. Completely. He had won 11 Grand slams. He was 26.

By coincidence at 26, in 2012, Rafael Nadal (pictured above with Borg) had also won 11 grand slams: 7 French, 2 Wimbledon, 1 US Open and 1 Australian. He too was on the cusp of greatness, though he had to put up with (but also be thankful for) the cruising dominance of his arch rival Roger Federer who had by then won 13 grand slams. At that moment both were behind Pete Sampras’ record of 14.

Today what makes the 36-year-old Nadal a GOAT contender is not just that he leads the pack having accumulated 22 grand slams but that he has done so in a career that has spanned two decades and, crucially, he has done it despite the degenerative Mueller-Weiss Syndrome which affects his foot.

The Spaniard has played with painkillers for most of his career. “I am not injured; I am a player living with an injury” he said recently. Mueller-Weiss syndrome is a rare disease where the navicular bone in the foot undergoes spontaneous osteonecrosis. This causes blood to be cut off from the navicular bone, causing pain and deformity³.

The glamour and the prize money often obscure how excruciatingly demanding the sport is. Nowhere else do players battle it out alone for four, sometimes five hours. At best, professionals – who essentially start an intensive junior career as early as their late teens – can on average look ahead to a 12 to 15-year long career.

Nadal turned professional at 15. He has been an impeccable one for 21 years. He is the only player that has been in the Top Ten for 17 years without fail. Federer who was born the year Borg retired is 41 and intent on playing more. Serena Williams, who announced she will retire after the current US Open, dominated women’s tennis from 1999 to 2017. She won her last slam that year two months into her pregnancy. With 23 to her name, she is, for the moment, ahead of Nadal, Djokovic and Federer.

Our media induced obsession with metrics drives competition and comparisons and generates ticket sales and television viewership. Numbers sustain narratives. Records and the desire to break them prolong careers. While going for his 23^rd grand slam at Wimbledon this summer Nadal had to withdraw in the semis following an abdominal tear he had picked up in the quarters. On the morning of his match, labouring over whether he should face the talented but insouciant Australian Nick Kyrgios, Nadal practiced for an hour just to test the injury. Kyrgios later admitted that he had practiced for only an hour a day leading into the championships.

Hard work and discipline are key ingredients of legendary status. What made Borg one was not the unconventionality of his strokes, the top-spin and the hockey-stick double handed backhand but his endless practicing and the cool discipline behind his stubborn desire to win. For reasons that those of us outside must acknowledge we cannot comprehend he suddenly lost that desire. Thankfully, and equally incomprehensibly, Nadal has not.

In the end the debate about the GOAT is misleading if not entirely inappropriate. There have been great players who have not broken records or reached ranking heights but who have thrilled crowds and brought change in ways that are less technical or statistical but certainly more significant. Arthur Ash, Martina Navratilova, Yannick Noah and Billie Jean King come to mind.

Their sporting lives were battles not just against their opponents across the net but wars of attrition against institutional discrimination and prejudice. Their grinding victories on issues of gender and race demanded a whole lot more than just talent and on-court hard work. The impact their careers have had goes well beyond the sport.

Perhaps instead of counting titles and tracking rankings we should focus on the greatest impact OAT. In which case, much as I admired Borg and continue to root for Nadal, Billie Jean King and Serena Williams are the clear winners – racquets down.

Notes:

1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnwYdF8a5ws

2 – TIME magazine June 1980:

3 https://www.orpha.net/consor/cgi-bin/OC_Exp.php?lng=en&Expert=566943