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This fall, as publicly funded media was hollowed out by budget cuts, billionaire owners bowed to political pressure, and many reporters disappeared from the Pentagon, Guardian US announced an expansion of its newsroom and launched its first-ever major US marketing campaign. Titled “The Whole Picture,” the campaign highlights The Guardian’s independence and global perspective in contrast to the declining capacity of the US press.

Guardian US editor in chief Betsy Reed, who previously led The Nation and The Intercept, told me the American outpost of the storied British newspaper is uniquely positioned to cover this extraordinary period in US history, when politics has come detached from social norms and too many media outlets have become bystanders to the erosion of democracy. 

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

ILN: In a recent fundraising appeal, you wrote that The Guardian “declines to participate in the normalization of extremism.” What do you mean by that?

BR: That is a commitment that we’ve made a long time ago: even when an idea becomes mainstream, if we regard it, for good reason, as being extreme and out of line with basic humane values, we won’t treat it as part of the normal discourse in America. We make it clear to readers that it’s a radical departure from decades of moral consensus and even, in some cases, legal precedent.

Can you give me concrete examples?

Civil rights, marriage equality, things like that. In the Trump era, we’re actually seeing an attack not only on the DEI programs that largely cropped up in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, but an attempt to attack the Voting Rights Act and a lot of the victories of the civil rights movement. Or consider the privileging of white South Africans in the refugee process and the complete shutdown of the previous refugee process, which is also fundamental to the formation of this country and its democracy. We don’t consider these normal, and we’re not going to report it that way.

Would you say that the rest of the media has been complicit in the decline of democracy and political discourse in the country?

Well, I would say that the tone of the rest of the mainstream media is deliberately impartial, above the fray, sober, and neutral. I think our tone is different and it reflects the clear values and perspective that we bring to our coverage of the news.

You mention impartiality and neutrality. How do you look at these concepts? How do you balance them with your moral stance?

It’s a great question. It’s one that we think about every day. We always place a huge emphasis on getting the facts right. But then, at the same time, we are committed to putting those facts in context so that people can understand them, and we are transparent about having a perspective. 

I actually believe everyone has a perspective. I believe there is a common set of facts that we should all be working with, but I also think everyone has a perspective on those facts, and that affects how you report them and what you emphasize.

So what is The Guardian’s perspective?

We are dedicated to reporting the news accurately and quickly, but also giving readers the whole picture, looking at it from a global perspective and providing the context that we as editors believe is the most relevant to help people understand what’s going on.

And how is that different from, say, the New York Times, or any major outlet with an international reach?

I think that we are clear about having liberal and progressive values, and that drives our decision-making about what is the most important news story of the day. 

Let me give you one example. On the morning of the most recent No Kings protests, the New York Times was leading their website with a story about George Santos having received a pardon. We led the whole day with reporting on the biggest protests in American history in decades. Sure, we covered the George Santos thing, which was a juicy news story that a lot of media and political elites were obsessed with. But we are trying to give people a bigger picture of what’s happening in this country, so that guided our decision-making on that day.

What’s been your strategy to combat the administration’s “flood the zone” approach and find stories that actually build a sense of power, rather than apathy, among readers?

Look, I can’t pretend that we have figured it out. Take a look at Trump’s retribution agenda, for example. Flooding the zone works because all of the cases he’s filing against various people who have challenged him in the past are major news stories, and we have to cover them as such. We always try to do that with appropriate context about the reasons behind it and the kind of hypocrisy often involved. 

But I think the key is not to lose sight of the other big stories. And we have really stayed on the Epstein beat despite the various distractions that have come along the way. We’re also relentlessly covering the climate day after day, in a way that shows our global perspective. 

At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, The Guardian remains committed to being primarily audience-funded. Last year, you had almost two hundred and seventy thousand recurring supporters in the US. How many do you have now, and how much money do you expect to bring in during 2025—are you experiencing a second-term Trump bump?

Our audiences remained very strong. We had forty-seven million unique visitors in September. We broke all of our records with last year’s fundraising, and we’re going to break that record this year. Last year, we brought in forty-three million dollars; this year is projected to be above fifty million. And we are at over four hundred thousand recurring supporters in the US now, so that’s a big jump just from that two hundred seventy thousand.

Both the publicly funded model and the billionaire-ownership model are failing to hold up to political pressure in the US. What is the future of funding the US media?

We are unique in that we have the Scott Trust, an endowment that can absorb a certain amount of loss each year and also can support us in investing in areas of growth. It’s not a model that is available to everyone. The thing is, I don’t think that there’s a single model that is the silver bullet, or else everybody would be using it. The New York Times has done extraordinarily well with its paywall model and offering things like sports and games and cooking so that it’s a whole experience to be a New York Times subscriber. 

But I think what’s special about The Guardian is just the open access and asking people to donate. It only works if you have a certain scale and mission that appeals to people—and yes, the Scott Trust is an important part of that. We’ve actually consulted with a lot of other publications who have looked at the way we approach our messaging around supporting us, and they’ve borrowed from that. They freely admit that, and we are happy to have them do that, you know?

Many would say that the future of news lies in Substack-type platforms, individual creators with newsletters. Where do you see The Guardian’s future audiences coming from?

I do think Substack and newsletters play a really important and growing role, but I also think a lot of people are still going to websites for their news, so it’s just going to be a mixture. And we are responding to that. We just hired our first-ever full-time newsletters editor, Ruthie Baron from ProPublica. And we plan to expand our newsletters because we want to develop a direct relationship with our audience so that we’re not dependent on a third-party platform. Similarly, we’re going to launch our first US-based regular news podcast in the new year.

You announced the first US investigations team a couple of years ago. How do you feel about the performance of that team, and how do you see The Guardian fitting into the larger landscape where you have outlets like ProPublica or the Times, which are very established players?

I think we’ve done some great stories. Our teams are still much smaller than what ProPublica or the Times has. But as a result, we’ve focused very clearly on certain targets. We are doing a series about the price-gouging of consumers by retailers right now. We did a big investigation into UnitedHealthcare, which is a subject of a lawsuit, but we stand by our reporting. We did a major investigation into the magician David Copperfield and allegations of his sexual misconduct. 

One of the best stories I feel like we’ve done this year was about Microsoft and their relationship with the IDF in Israel. Our story revealed that the IDF had been using Microsoft’s servers to host all of the data that was being used for their operations in the West Bank and Gaza. When we first published the story, we went to them for comment, and they said, “Well, as far as we know, this is not happening, this is not true.” Then they launched an internal investigation and they announced that we were, in fact, right, and they were ending the program. That’s an impact that we were very proud of.

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