instrument, designed to protect Reuters core values, but having no economic value of its own. In this way, we sought to distinguish it from the majority of ‘golden shares’ designed to uphold the interests of a particular person, family, or other grouping.”
I can only hope that the unbroken line of individuals that have carried the torch of the principles forward year after year will continue indefinitely. What is at stake is more than just a corporate ethos and goes beyond even the imperative of preserving the value of media organizations. Lack of integrity—and a media that does not stick to good journalistic practice—can create a very dangerous situation for the rest of the world. America felt the full extent of journalism’s power when Katharine Graham and two of her Washington Post reporters had the courage and tenacity to investigate the Watergate break-in to its culmination—resulting in the downfall of the president himself. But over forty years later, the country is reeling from the one-two punch of an assault on the free press and the prevalence of television “news” shows that are thinly disguised propaganda machines. For every just force, there is an opposing unjust force, and the power to vanquish a corrupt president can manifest as the power to protect one.
The present struggle over the freedom of the press and the maintenance of truth in reporting and disseminating the news can be traced back at least as far as the period between the World Wars in the twentieth century, when governments threatened to take control of information. In 1941, Reuters took strong measures to prevent being taken over (specifically by the British government); it was then that the Reuters Trust was formed and Trust Principles put in place. In the 1980s another kind of crisis arose: the danger that information might be taken over by the superwealthy. If there is cynicism in the belief that anything and anyone can be bought, it is only because it happens with increasing frequency.
At the heart of these issues is the preservation of truth—of conscience itself—by maintaining the independence of the means of producing and disseminating information. A September 2017 Reuters US poll found that national confidence in the American press had risen to 48 percent, up from 39 percent the previous year. That is grounds for cautious optimism, but it is still only one small step back from the brink. Trust is crucial, but there must also be the means for self-correction from within each media institution, a way to preserve and protect the company, the press, and the public simultaneously.
It is interesting to consider Reuters’ reaction to the onslaught—against both the news business and the truth itself—coming from Washington. On September 18, 2017, Reuters editor in chief Steven Adler introduced a project called “The Trump Effect: Tracking the Impact of the President’s Policies.” He wrote, “Shortly after Donald J. Trump became U.S. president last January, I wrote a memo to the Reuters staff providing guidance on how to cover the new Administration. The gist was that we should proceed as we would with any leader in the world, whether that leader admired journalists or viewed them as the enemy. That meant trying not to take sides or to make ourselves the story but rather to work dispassionately on behalf of Reuters users, who would need honest, carefully sourced, vigorous reporting on what this presidency meant for them.” He continued by explaining that the Trump Effect would present hard data, video and text stories, and interactive graphics that would demonstrate—for better or worse—prevailing administration policies. The project has a dedicated website and is available to anyone, free of charge. The Trump Effect may be the closest thing the US (and the rest of the world) has to a single source of unbiased American political news.
In early 2018, I was unhappy to learn that the board of the Thomson Reuters Corporation had voted to approve a strategic partnership with the private equity firm Blackstone, which would entail Reuters selling Blackstone a 55 percent majority stake in its Financial & Risk unit. In the filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the details of the venture included the makeup of a new consociation: “The new partnership will be managed by a 10-person board composed of five representatives from the Investors and four from Thomson Reuters. The President and CEO of the new partnership will serve as a non-voting member of the board following the closing of the transaction. At the closing of the proposed transaction, F&R and Reuters will sign a 30-year agreement for Reuters to supply news and editorial content to the new partnership. Under the agreement, F&R will pay Reuters a minimum of US$325 million annually. For the duration of the news contract, Thomson Reuters will grant F&R a license to permit F&R to brand its information feeds and products/services with the ‘Reuters’ mark.”
I had a fairly bad first impression of the Blackstone deal, and was not apprised of how it developed. I see private equity firms like Blackstone as slaughterhouses. They are designed to seek companies that are not well managed, that cannot exploit their own potential, or are floundering for some other reason. A company like that is a sitting duck if a private equity firm goes after it. Thomson Reuters indicated that they would use some of the purchase price from Blackstone to pay off an estimated $3 billion of debt and would use the lion’s share of the remaining money to “repurchase shares via a substantial issuer/bid/tender offer made to all common shareholders.” While I understand the lure of the deal when the money is on the table, it is one’s attitude toward the future that ultimately determines how to proceed. If that attitude is pessimistic, with no courage and belief in the future, going with the money on the table is the next step. But if the attitude is confident, with an entrepreneurial spirit that is encouraged by Blackstone’s interest, then the next step is to garner sufficient confidence to reject the offer and secure a loan to pay down the debt. I believed Thomson Reuters should have had that confidence. Apparently, they did not.
I was relieved when I learned the specifics of the deal, which make it very clear that the ownership of Reuters is still within Thomson Reuters. Technically, what Blackstone is doing is leasing the use of Reuters’ news and editorial content. The term of this lease is thirty years, which might as well be an eternity. But nonetheless, the ownership has not been ceded to Blackstone, which is what I originally feared was the case. Reuters remains in charge of managing the news, and Blackstone cannot change or manipulate it. We shall see how it goes. But I don’t like it.
In the face of overwhelming global pessimism (and growing cynicism), I nonetheless remain optimistic about the future. In taking a reckoning of the power for good, it is clear that sometimes a single force is enough to accomplish a Herculean task. In the case of the Watergate cover-up, uncovering the tentacles that snaked through the White House and reached all the way to the Oval Office—the force of the Washington Post was enough. But it was not a legacy of righting wrongs that gave the Post its power—it was the active support and guidance of Katharine Graham and her editor in chief, Ben Bradlee, both of whom were steadfast in their requirement that Woodward and Bernstein uphold the highest journalistic standards, and who were unflinching in their courage in publishing the results of their reporters’ investigation, in spite of the exceptional potential for negative backlash.
In the final pages of Castro and Stockmaster, Michael Nelson writes, “Pehr Gyllenhammar had acquired for the trustees a standing which was unthinkable when I worked for the Company. Reuters was fortunate that, when Thomson sought to buy Reuters, the Chairman of Trustees was a man of such vision as Pehr Gyllenhammar, who had become Chairman in 1999… I derived some satisfaction from the fact that I had introduced Gyllenhammar to the Reuter family.”
Having put in twenty-seven years as a member of that Reuter family, I can think of no more welcome validation than the suggestion that my own affinity for integrity affected Reuters in the same way that they affected me. It is a privilege to have worn the mantle of principle for so long, and if I have passed that mantle on to someone else, then all that I hoped to accomplish at Reuters has come to pass. I hope the next generation of directors will be able to say the same.
CHAPTER TWO
Heritage
Heritage (n): c. 1200, “that which may be inherited,” from Old French iritage, eritage, heritage “heir; inheritance, ancestral estate, heirloom,”
