Post # 85
February 5, 2025
Claire Bodanis
In a dark month for truth, Claire finds inspiration for FW’s reporting work from an unlikely pair: a Victorian hymnwriter and a modern day CEO.
Last Saturday I was enjoying a quiet meander down the High Street in Dumfries, having just managed to battle my way onto the last train north to visit Mum in Scotland before the weekend storms began. The sun was shining and all in all, I felt we’d got off pretty lightly, considering how badly our poor neighbours further north in Glasgow and across the sea in Ireland had fared.
But as I turned a corner, my heart sank, on seeing a gathering under the twin flags of Scotland and Palestine. Why so despondent? I feared that the vitriolic anti-Jewish rhetoric peppered with misinformation and outright falsehoods so prevalent at such meetings in London had made it to this benign corner of the UK.
I was about to change course and mind my own business when I thought, no. Don’t be so quick to judge. First, I should listen to what they’re saying, since they might have a point of view I’ve not heard or considered. And second, if these good folks are indeed repeating misinformation about the situation, then I ought to speak up. And who knows, they might even listen, as the chap round the corner in North London listened during last July’s general election campaign. So I joined the crowd, and I listened.
Unfortunately, the first thing I heard was a rousing call to begin chanting ‘From the river to the sea.’ After a few minutes, I put my hand up. One of the organisers came up to me and said they were very keen to hear questions, so I asked if they knew what this chant, as espoused by Hamas, meant. Namely, at the most benign interpretation based on Hamas’s charter of 2017, the dismantling of the state of Israel. Or, if Hamas’s founding charter of 1988 is to be believed, the total annihilation of the Jews. Her response? Quite kindly, she said: ‘No, no, it doesn’t mean that. It’s a Zionist anti-Palestinian chant that we’re taking back – it’s not antisemitic at all.’
Making no headway on the accuracy of this point, I moved on (very politely) to ask if they were aware of the history of the founding of the state of Israel by the UN in 1947. Before I’d even got onto the subject of UN Resolution 181 – which created the state of Israel through a vote by the UN General Assembly, and envisaged two states, one for the Jews (Israel) and one for the Arabs (Palestine) that was accepted by the former and rejected by the latter – I was enthusiastically interrupted by another of the organising team. He told me I was quite wrong. The state of Israel was not created by the UN, but created decades earlier by Zionists aiming to wipe out the native Palestinian population.
I’m not usually at a loss for words but beyond asking why they thought that, then explaining the history and getting into a ‘yes it was’, ‘no it wasn’t’ kind of pointless argument, I really had no idea what to do. So I politely disagreed with them, asked them please to check their sources because – especially when argument is heated – facts really matter, and walked away.
Should I have tried harder? Maybe. Did I blame them? Not really, because they were clearly well-meaning if not very well-informed folk who, like so many people today, believe the unverified information they read on social media. They didn’t know any better.
Unlike the CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies, who should and do know better when it comes to factual accuracy and the importance of truth to healthy debate. We can expect more from them; we can rely on them to lead the way when it comes speaking up for the factual record. Can’t we?
If the performance at Davos of the CEOs of Bank of America, Blackstone, Banco Santander and TotalEnergies – and of the World Economic Forum (WEF) itself – is anything to go by, the answer is; no, we can’t.
I came to this conclusion when, returning from my somewhat depressing trip into town, I thought I’d catch up with the news. I watched a playback of Trump’s speech to Davos, and the Q&A with said CEOs that followed. I was not expecting much of Trump, but, given the risks called out by WEF and much discussed at the forum around climate change, geopolitical strife and misinformation, I expected more of them. Much more.
But how many of them challenged Trump’s untruths and half-truths[1] about his election victory? Such as, his win was ‘a massive mandate from the American people like hasn’t been seen in many years’, when in fact his margin of victory in the popular vote was around 2.2m, compared with Biden’s win of c.7m in 2020?
Not one. Well, it’s a political matter – not really their bag, perhaps.
How many of them challenged Trump’s untruths and half-truths[2] about the economics of trade, for example with the EU?
Not one. And that is their bag – or should be.
How many of them challenged Trump’s stance on climate change and pulling out of the Paris Agreement? Or his categorisation of the whole diversity, equity and inclusion agenda as ‘nonsense’?
Not one. And that most certainly is their bag, given the statements and commitments they’ve made in the past about these issues.
Could it get worse? Unfortunately it could. Not only did not one of them challenge a single falsehood, but every single one of them behaved to Trump as a sycophantic courtier to an all-powerful king. With the world watching, these CEOs had the opportunity to set the factual record straight, yet they did nothing. Instead they curried favour with their congratulations, and, in the case of Bank of America in particular, meekly took Trump’s reprimands.
What kind of message does that send to their own people, to their investors, to their colleagues, their wider stakeholders, to the world at large?
A message that truth is irrelevant; might is right; principles mean nothing; morality is on the rubbish dump.
That’s not a world I want to live in, and it’s not the one I thought I was living in. But how long, I wondered, until what we do at Falcon Windsor, promoting truthfulness and accuracy through reporting, becomes an anachronism? How long until I can no longer challenge a client on a point of accuracy because facts themselves have become tradeable concepts? How long before no one will even care? Or, if they claim to care, don’t have the guts to do anything about it?
While I was relieved that no UK CEOs were on that panel, and none of our clients, I did wonder: would they have behaved any differently? Would they have challenged falsehood and put the record straight? I really hope so, but could I be sure?
To misappropriate St John of the Cross, last Saturday was surely a dark night of my soul.
But Sunday – appropriately – brought reprieve in two ways, for the soul and the mind.
First, I was brought up sharp from my choirstall snoozing when the offertory hymn was announced.
‘Fight the good fight with all thy might!’ commanded the hymnwriter, with an appropriately rousing musical accompaniment. ‘Run the straight race through God’s good grace,’ he exhorted us in verse two.
Now I know this kind of muscular Victorian self-confidence isn’t to everyone’s taste, religious or otherwise, but it certainly served to galvanise my demoralised spirit, reminding me as it did that we must never give up, however hopeless or overwhelming the odds. That the truth is always worth fighting for, however small or insignificant our own contribution may be.
And what of the mind? Later that day, I got an answer to the question of whether any of our CEOs would have behaved differently, when I logged into my Tate & Lyle account. (For those who don’t know, Tate & Lyle is FW’s longest-standing client; in fact I’m just starting work on my 23rd annual report!) Opening my email, the first thing I saw was a message to the whole company – a large proportion of whom are Americans based in the US – from the CEO, Nick Hampton. Its title? ‘Our continued belief and commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion.’ What followed was a clear and unequivocal restatement of Nick’s own and Tate & Lyle’s principles, in light of the week’s news about other companies stepping back from the agenda and the catalysts for doing so.
Would that Nick, and others like him, had been invited to question Trump at Davos. But here’s hoping he is just one of many CEOs who are standing up for their principles, and keeping facts and evidence front and centre, both in the US and around the world. Because, as George Orwell said (whose book of essays I keep close at hand): ‘However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.’[3]
Soul and mind restored, and with Orwell at hand, please rest assured that I, and Falcon Windsor, will continue to fight the good fight and run the straight race when it comes to the truthfulness and accuracy of reporting – and indeed of any other matter that comes our way. Because progress in tackling the many challenges facing the world right now will only be possible when facts are facts and expertise is respected, however inconvenient those facts or that expertise may be to our own agendas.
[1] For a useful fact checker, see PBS (a relatively trustworthy, non-commercial US public broadcaster).
[2] The Washington Post, which has maintained at least some editorial integrity despite being owned by Jeff Bezos, did an analysis of the economic claims in Trump’s speech.
[3] Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays by George Orwell.