The thing that fascinates me about modern journalism is that people started turning away from it before the rise of the internet. Or, at least, in my experience that’s what happened. Which has made me a bit distrustful of all that “blame the internet” rhetoric about the death of newspapers. I think there was a much deeper reason. It’s that journalists began to find the changes that were happening in the world very difficult to describe in ways that grabbed their readers’ imagination. It’s intimately related to what has happened to politics, because journalism and politics are so inextricably linked. I describe in the film how, as politicians were faced with growing chaos and complexity from the 1980s onwards, they handed power to other institutions. Above all to finance, but also to computer and managerial systems. But the politicians still wanted to change the world – and retain their status. So in response they reinvented other parts of the world they thought they could control into incredibly simplistic fables of good versus evil. I think Tony Blair is the clearest example of this – a man who handed power in domestic policy making over to focus groups, and then decided to go and invade Iraq. And I think this process led journalism to face the same problem. They discovered that the new motors of power – finance and the technical systems that run it, algorithms that try and read the past to manage the future, managerial systems based on risk and “measured outcomes” – are not just obscure and boring. They are almost impossible to turn into gripping narratives. I mean, I find them a nightmare to make films about, because there is nothing visual, just people in modern offices doing keystrokes on computers.

Jon Ronson in Conversation with Adam Curtis | VICE | United Kingdom

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