Lessons for Present-Day Journalism from the 1930s Work of Gareth Jones

The second day at Future of Journalism 2023 conference in Cardiff begins with a pre-recorded keynote by my former QUT colleague John Hartley, and John is also standing by for the Q&A later. He begins with the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia in 1935 – after whom a memorial travelling scholarship at the University of Wales is named.

Is Jones the ideal type of the fearless truth warrior in journalism, though, or a pawn in the Great Game of imperialist powers? The existence of a scholarship and the rhetoric around it suggests the former; he was seen as a passionate seeker of the truth in foreign lands, who took risks under difficult circumstances to uncover atrocities, and there are various books, films, and TV series about his exploits. His father was a headmaster in Barry, Wales, while his mother spent time in the late 1800s as a tutor in Hughesovka or Yuzovka, now part of Donetsk, Ukraine.

Indeed his mother Ann Jones wrote an illuminating journal about her experience in the borderlands between Poland and Russia, including the hatred between Russians and Poles, the deep class divides between the rich and poor, and the persecution of Jews by Russian authorities. Gareth followed in his mother’s footsteps, writing about the deteriorating conditions in Donetsk during the holodomor in the 1930s and collecting Soviet propaganda posters presenting a completely different picture instead.

Jones also became an advisor to UK Prime Minister Lloyd George, thanks in part to his language abilities; he wrote for The Times and reported about conditions in the Soviet Union and the close links between the British aristocracy and Nazi Germany, even travelling on a plane with Hitler during his 1933 election campaign. The juxtaposition between Soviet mismanagement and Nazi determination was picked up also by US newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who exploited it to support the latter over the former. Hearst later also reacted to Jones’s death by calling for a further Japanese invasion of China.

Jones’s preference for Germany over the Soviet Union was thus captured and exploited in support of the Great Game of imperialist nations; not much has changed, John says, as the tabloids and far-right news sites of today continue their rhetoric.

But there is a contrasting model of the future of journalism: lifestyle journalism, which has emerged into full view in the era of digital social media. Jones also reported about the annual Goodwill Message broadcast from Wales, in fact, which had a global audience through the radio in the 1930s and is now being distributed online.

In the present era, the future of journalism doesn’t lie in the hands of individual journalists, and the capture of journalism by powerful news barons is nothing new – so journalistic truth is a product of war, is adversarial, partisan, gendered, captured for power; we might instead aim for truthfulness: lying forgotten yet activated at the societal level by popular connectivity and curiosity. The future of journalism depends on how successfully it can teach the values of lifestyle, and disseminate them via social media. But this represents the agenda of Jones’s mother Ann, and of the early Gareth before he was exploited by Hearst and other press barons.