Excerpt, with approximate <time code> in angle brackets
<37:17> We have a settled model, a kind of classical model, so to speak, of how the facts, the news, and the demos interact with one another. And I think that settled model is now very antiquated, and I’m not sure we have a new model that adequately conveys the kind of chaos and instability in the relationship between those three elements. And so I think journalism feels more urgent to many people than it ever has before, in terms of, you’ve got it on your phone, you’ve got it on social media, people are talking about it all the time, people are talking about the news. And yet, that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened, in the way that an earlier iteration, journalists had a kind of functional monopoly on describing the world to their audience. […] <38:47> You had kind of a consensus about a stable way of representing the world, and I don’t think it exists anymore. And I think it's a real challenge, because I think this constant skepticism, or doubts, or even cynicism, about the extent to which we can produce a representation of what's happening out there in the world. And I think what you see, particularly when you look at questions of race in America, for instance, you get into another for of thinking about representation, which is, who are the journalists who are telling this story.
And here's Helen, following up at <39:32>
I think that the - what's happening in America at the moment - does run into the limits of the analytical mode [of opinion writing]. Sometimes I think that's been true about Trump since the beginning. There's something about his presidency, where the analytical mode just seems inadequate to try to get to grips in any moral sense with what has been happening, and that is particularly true now. I think in terms of what's been going on for over the last week, and partly the analytical mode is sort-of near exhausted, because there's something almost I think religious about what is happening and that that means that trying to sort-of use conventional political language to try to say something about it doesn't really work. It can risk coming over as simple indifference, and that's simply not what's required in this situation.
