Media Masters - Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett is an award-winning journalist, and chair of the Financial Times’ US editorial board. As editor-at-large, she writes weekly columns covering a range of economic issues, and in 2019 co-founded ‘FT Moral Money,’ a twice-weekly newsletter which has since become one of their most widely-read and impactful initiatives. In 2019, she won ‘Journalist of the Year’ at the British Press Awards for her prison interview with fraudster Bernie Madoff. An acclaimed author, she covered the global crash of 2008; and her latest book ‘Anthro-Vision’ utilises her extensive education in anthropology to “assess the post-covid age, and make sense of a world undergoing severe disruption.” In this in-depth interview, Gillian reflects on her time reporting during Trump’s presidency - how “constant de-stabilisation and confrontation” made it difficult to spot what she calls “social silences;” reflects on four decades in journalism, and the positive impact she’s witnessed as the industry becomes less male-dominated; and argues the current focus on ‘big data’ ignores an understanding of anthropology, which would “give the full picture” - why corporate projects fail, bank traders miscalculate losses, and pandemic policies succeed or fail.