South African filmmaker Gavin Hood has written a letter of protest against plans to sell the UK’s The Observer newspaper to Tortoise Media, joining several other actors and filmmakers who have come out against the sale.
Hood made the 2019 feature Official Secrets starring Keira Knightley, based on the story of a GCHQ whistleblower charged for leaking a top-secret memo about the impending 2003 invasion of Iraq. The story was first investigated by three reporters from The Observer.
He joins several other cultural figures to have expressed their opposition to the sale, including actors Mark Rylance, Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller, Bill Nighy, Asa Butterfield, Toby Jones, Lesley Manville, Adrian Lester and Damian Lewis, filmmakers Stephen Daldry, Asif Kapadia, Mike Newell and Armando Iannucci, and producer Duncan Kenworthy.
Journalists from The Observer and The Guardian – which are owned by the £1.3bn Scott Trust – are set to strike on Wednesday and Thursday (December 4-5) over the proposed sale. They fear that loss-making start-up Tortoise could be a precarious employer for the 70 Observer journalists who would transfer across, and wouldn’t be able to support the liberal investigative journalism for which the paper is known.
Tilda Swinton and Samantha Morton have sent message of support for the strike, while Daldry and others are anticipated to turn up on the picket line outside the Guardian/Observer building near Kings Cross, London.
The Observer is the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world, well-known for its robust coverage of the arts and culture, and with a strong reputation for film criticism. It is feared that should the sale go through, the new owners would make cuts to the paper’s arts coverage.
In his letter – available to read in full below – Hood wrote: “The idea that our views and opinions as citizens are increasingly being shaped by for-profit media and sound bites on TikTok and X, rather than by dedicated independent investigative reporters not beholden to shareholder interests, is deeply unsettling in a democracy.”
Tortoise, run by former BBC news head and former editor of The Times James Harding, revealed in September it was seeking to buy The Observer.
Gavin Hood’s letter
In 2018 I made a film called Official Secrets. It told the 2003 story of GCHQ whistleblower, Katherine Gun, who was charged with a breach of the Official Secrets Act for leaking a top-secret NSA memo.
The leak was investigated by three dedicated investigative reporters at The Observer – Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy. It exposed an illegal attempt by the NSA in the US to elicit the help of Britain’s GCHQ to fix a UN Security Council vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq. The lie that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction was also exposed through the course of the year it took for the case against Gun to be unceremoniously dropped.
Exposing these kinds of stories is vital to the public interest – and very time-consuming. It requires the support of independent funding such as that made possible by the Scott Trust, which protects the editorial independence of both The Guardian and The Observer.
The idea that our views and opinions as citizens are increasingly being shaped by for-profit media and sound bites on TikTok and X, rather than by dedicated independent investigative reporters not beholden to shareholder interests, is deeply unsettling in a democracy. If the sale of The Observer to a for-profit startup risks the loss to the citizenry of a two-centuries-old trusted source of rigorously researched news, then it should be vigorously resisted.
Gavin Hood, director, Official Secrets
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