The year is 2026. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Silicon Valley technology companies are enabling AI-led ops against enemies in Venezuela, Minnesota and Iran, and here in Britain it’s like the 90s never ended. Google is a whizzy new startup and one of its ex-middle managers is the great white hero who’ll save us all.
Meet Matt Brittin: ex-Googler and, if reports are to be believed, the BBC’s next director general. An executive search yielded an apparent shortlist of four women – who between them had decades of experience in broadcasting, news, and public service journalism – and one man, who didn’t. Matt Brittin has never commissioned a programme, worked in the public sector or come into contact with the news other than the time he appeared before a select committee and was unable to recall his own salary.
It’s not just that lack of experience in a man is coded as “outsider energy” (while women’s expertise is simply irrelevant); it’s that at this moment of crisis for one of Britain’s most vital institutions, the BBC’s board has fallen for one of the most dangerous myths of our time: that tech will save us.
And not just the board. Fawning media coverage – including the BBC’s – quote “sources close to Brittin” and “former colleagues at Google” who have briefed journalists with data points more suited to a Hinge profile. All mention his height – 6’4” – his career as a former Olympic rower and, above all, his “leadership” at Google.
In fact, Brittin was Google’s “president of EMEA business and operations”. That title belies the fact he was never part of the company’s “C-suite”, the men in Silicon Valley who call the shots. He was a glorified marketeer. His job was to gladhand officials and potential partners across the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), and – I’m using Gemini’s own words here – to ”drive the use of generative AI products, like Gemini”. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of job a privately educated 6’4” former rower with an MBA would land.
At this moment of crisis, the BBC’s board has fallen for one of the most dangerous myths of our time: that tech will save us.
It’s not just that Brittin has never made a TV programme or dealt with editorial conflict; he’s also never led an organisation. Brittin was a tech suit – smart-casual, no tie – a middle manager who followed orders, the orders being to stop Google being regulated and to enable the business to grow like late-stage cancer. His career as a yes man running interference for a predatory, extractive monopoly that preyed on news journalism in order to destroy it is precisely why he should be nowhere near the shortlist, let alone the winning candidate.
A short and very partial list of the many lawsuits Google is currently facing include US publishers suing the company for “deceptive and manipulative” adtech practices, the EU investigating the theft of publisher’s work to produce AI summaries and a class action led by multiple US publishers who claim Google’s Gemini stole their underlying intellectual property. The company has already been found to have abused its monopoly power by the US Department of Justice.
Carole Cadwalladr
Brittin has now left Google, presumably with millions in the bank and an NDA. He’s still in thrall to his former masters, media appearances reveal, a company man who drank the corporate Kool-Aid. And it’s why he represents a real and present danger to the future of the BBC. The broadcaster’s board were blinded by Brittin’s CV, the gloss of the Google brand rather than the reality of its rapacious AI. And – the winning data point that convinced them, perhaps – Brittin is a non-executive director on the Guardian’s board.
Brittin took up that seat a year ago, while still employed by Google, and it’s his history there that should alarm every BBC journalist who cares about the future of the news, journalism and the organisation itself. At the time, Anna Bateson, the Guardian’s CEO, welcomed him in an effusive LinkedIn post.
Bateson is also Brittin’s friend and former colleague. A marketeer by training, she also spent time at Google, “driving customer demand” at YouTube. CEOs are not usually involved in the appointment of board members who are meant to hold them to account but this was an eyebrow-raiser in a more important way: Google’s AI summaries – the new AI-derived answers at the top of Google search results – pose an existential threat to the Guardian and every other news organisation. Since they were introduced, traffic to news and other sites has tanked by up to 80%.
But Bateson’s LinkedIn post said Brittin’s appointment was specifically to help the Guardian manage these challenges: “We are witnessing a period of vast technological shift touching all aspects of business and society. His appointment could not be more timely, and we are lucky to have his counsel and experience as we navigate the change,” she said.
That’s because news organisations – like the Guardian and BBC – are at a critical juncture in how they choose to respond to the overwhelming threat of AI. Do they see AI companies as rapacious, illegal, monopolistic enterprises in active collaboration with President Trump, as an existential threat not just to their organisations but their democracies? Or as a helpful source of cash?
News organisations and the companies they report on should never be ‘partners’
All news orgs are having to decide whether to sue AI companies over the illegal scraping of their content – as the New York Times is doing in the US against OpenAI – or to take the money and run.
Before leaving Google, Brittin made his position on AI and journalism clear in a round of exit interviews designed to promote his personal brand and position him for his next role. On Channel 4 News, he conceded that AI might kill some jobs but “there will be whole new industries”. What about specific professions, he was asked, such as, say, journalism?
“It’s really important that we start using these tools now and learning … Yes, there are concerns about mistakes and misinformation. But the biggest risk is missing out.”
This is AI mythology #101. And for the Guardian, it’s a myth that’s led to disaster. A month after Brittin joined the board, the organisation entered into “a strategic partnership with OpenAI”.
The Guardian has refused to disclose what this “strategic partnership” entails, how much money it’s worth, whether it includes a settlement for illegal past behaviour, how long it’s locked in for, or what access, if any, OpenAI has to proprietary or personal data.
News organisations and the companies they report on should never be “partners” and certainly not with a company as powerful and dangerous as OpenAI. Not now. Not when we now know what these companies are and the threat they represent.
There’s a long, long track record showing where this leads. Not just in abundant evidence that news coverage of tech companies remains uncritical and feeds an AI hype cycle seeded by AI companies. But Google specifically has sprayed millions of dollars at news organisations around the world in a desperate and largely successful bid to avoid being regulated.
After the EU voted to change its copyright directive in 2019, Google committed a further $1bn to “Google Showcase”, a set of “partnership” agreements with news organisations that included secrecy clauses. In Canada, as its parliament debated whether and how to force tech companies to compensate news publishers, Google launched Showcase and opened the money hose. You’ll be shocked to learn that when Canada passed its Online News Act in 2023, Google swiftly turned it off.
These are not “partnerships” in any sense. It’s lobbying. And for the only independent, progressive news org in Britain to take this cash, in secrecy, is a testament to an organisation whose leadership literally doesn’t understand or even read the journalism it publishes. The Guardian’s partner OpenAI is now a partner with Trump’s Department of War. What a world.
What the BBC needs now, more than at any time in its history, is a renewed compact of trust between the institution and its users. It needs to take an axe to its board, stuffed with partisan politickers who think due impartiality is balancing one extremist view against another. It needs a moral clarity and a voice that can stand up to government, synthetic AI content, Silicon Valley lobbyists, Trump, the war on truth and rising authoritarian leaders around the world. That leader needs to speak a language British people can not only understand, but believe.
That this job has gone to Google’s yes-man, a credulous AI hype-believer, with the blessing of the BBC’s board and a supine tech-naive press at a moment of such existential danger, is also the story, in microcosm, of why we are where we are. As ever, I desperately hope that I’m wrong.
Carole Cadwalladr is an award-winning investigative journalist and co-founder of the Nerve