Krishnan Guru-Murthy is in the ITN basement in central London – one of the two sites where Channel 4 News is produced – in front of a huge plate of biscuits that he has no problem not eating. He has gone sugar-free and lost 11kg (1st 10lb), he says with pride.
It’s a snapshot of the peculiar challenges of a TV anchor. You have to worry about whether or not the video footage pouring in from the Turkish earthquake is real while you worry about whether or not you are looking a bit jowly; you have to be trenchant but not opinionated, which is the tightrope newscasters talk about most often, but the one on which Guru-Murthy seems most relaxed; and, if you want the career he has had – a quarter of a century on the same show – you need people to like you without ever making popularity your aim.
That is the part that often reflects underlying, ambient social prejudice – that qualities such as plausibility, authority and amiability are more instinctively perceived (to put it mildly) in posh, white men than in people of colour with regional accents.
Guru-Murthy, 53, has always bucked that trend – and not just as a child of immigrants, he says: “When people now treat me as some kind of posh boy, I get really annoyed.” The reason he has always been driven, and had a pressing sense that “you have to grasp every possible opportunity”, is that his father “was an orphan who went hungry as a child. He didn’t have a pair of shoes until he went to medical school – and they were hand-me-downs. He made it to Britain and became a doctor and gave us an amazing childhood. That kind of quantum leap makes you think: ‘I can never match what my dad achieved.’”
His father was orphaned while walking from Burma (now Myanmar) to India when Japan invaded in 1941. The journey from there to being a consultant radiologist in Lancashire and raising three high-achieving children (Geeta is also a newsreader; Ravi is the chief executive of the social-innovation charity Nesta) was such a feat that it did, indeed, have the perverse effect of making Guru-Murthy’s success look effortless. Educated at a private (now free) school, he studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, which sounds conventional – until you learn that, by the time he took his place, he already had a job presenting the Asian current affairs programmes East and Network East on BBC Two.
Loath to flatter him, nevertheless I admit surprise: in those days – 1989 – a lot of universities had rules against students getting even a part-time job in a bar. Guru-Murthy worked two days a week for the BBC and did random stuff through the holidays, including a fashion series for ITV. “It certainly enabled me to escape the bits of academia I didn’t like,” he says. “I could persuade myself that what I was doing was much more important to concentrate on. The first half of my university life was really weird, because you’re struggling to fit in anyway. You doubly struggle to fit in if you’re also on TV, this hateful character.”
Hateful is a strong word, but I can appreciate this might have irritated his peers. By his third year, “I was covering British politics and I was going out to cover the Pakistani general election, interviewing Benazir Bhutto for the BBC. In some ways, it was brilliant. I could write stuff in my essays that I’d actually found out myself. It was my first bit of journalism.” The Easter before his finals, he went out to cover the Yugoslav war and ended up getting a “not very good 2:2”. But in broadcasting terms, he was a prodigy.
Given all this, you wouldn’t have thought that, prior to writing to the BBC to ask for work experience in 1988, he had been offered a place at medical school. Throughout his degree, and for the first 10 years of his career, his parents still hoped he would see sense and become a doctor. “They were both really disappointed. Every time I’d come home from the BBC and something bad had happened, some argument, my dad would say: ‘This is a stupid industry, go to medical school.’” It was family lore that, if you got a chance to be a doctor, you shouldn’t sniff at it: “My mum [who is also from India] went to medical school aged 16, but got married partway through, moved to Britain and never completed her studies,” he says. “She raised the family and was in charge of everything everyone did. And still largely is.”
When Guru-Murthy got his Channel 4 job in 1998, you could hardly have called it his big break – he had been at the BBC for a decade, moving from the children’s news show Newsround to Newsnight before becoming a launch presenter at BBC News 24 – nor a particularly risky choice for the broadcaster. He had already built a reputation as a tenacious, forensic and unyielding interviewer who could go after anyone without ruffling his calm exterior. Often, you wonder whether his interviewees realise they have been savaged until some time afterwards, when they see social media telling them so.
Channel 4 was not trying to create solid, establishment news. Indeed, it has always done things differently. Guru-Murthy describes a fair amount of his job as “talking to ordinary people about how they feel” and stresses his interest in the voices that don’t commonly get heard. The real difference about Channel 4 News, to my eyes, is that it tends not to swallow government press releases whole, or take its talking points from the front pages of the tabloid press. Unlike the BBC, you won’t find it regurgitating a hunch that the Rwanda policy is “worth a try” as an answer to the “intractable problem” of small boats – not necessarily because the team would take an explicit moral stance on sending refugees to Rwanda, but rather because they wouldn’t unquestioningly accept “small boats problem” as a burning priority or even a phrase, just because Suella Braverman said it and the Daily Mail cheered it.
Guru-Murthy is too tactful to launch himself at the BBC’s editorial stance, but he does go big on trust ratings. “In the last couple of years, the BBC would score maybe 1% higher than us on ‘trusted’,” he says, referring to the annual Reuters Institute report, which is considered authoritative. “But our distrust numbers are much, much lower than the people who think you can’t trust the BBC. So I think we’ll take that as a win.” This comparison is fascinating, not only because it’s true – according to the 2023 report, Channel 4 was distrusted by 15% of respondents, the BBC by 21% – but also because the BBC’s decline has been so steep. Five years ago, only 11% didn’t trust it.
Guru-Murthy’s interest in voices you don’t commonly hear extended to Jeremy Corbyn’s during his Labour leadership campaign in 2015. Most broadcasters didn’t engage with him; Guru-Murthy did one of the only searching interviews of the period: “It ended up being nominated for interview of the year [by the Royal Television Society] – people still hark back to it now.
“People accuse us of being on the left, people accuse us of being establishment or mainstream; you do have criticism from both sides and I don’t write them off,” he says. “I don’t think they necessarily balance each other out, either – I think the BBC are wrong to say that. Being in the centre is a position. It is a bias.”
This is the real distinction of Channel 4 News: not that it’s more leftwing than other broadcasters, but that it won’t roll over to the proposition that there is a middle ground that all sensible people are happy to occupy. Attempting to position yourself as equidistant between the right and the left does not equate to taking a neutral, balanced view. This makes Channel 4 News generally resistant to groupthink.
In resisting the conflation of centrism and impartiality, Guru-Murthy believes he and his colleagues have avoided the bear traps that have caught other media. “When you get distance from anything, whether it’s the Iraq war or 1997, you have a different perspective, certainly. But the idea that we were all taken madly by surprise by the growth of populist politics is not true.” Regarding the Brexit result and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, he says: “I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t in a state of shock. I feel this has been totally overwritten, that we woke up going: ‘What the hell just happened,’ that we were this idiot media who didn’t understand the people and didn’t know what was coming.”
Personally, I think this narrative of media naivety pre-Brexit was deliberately wrong, a strategic mischaracterisation by Brexit-supporting politicians who used it to write off journalistic interrogation as the elitist bleating of people who didn’t and couldn’t understand the authentic feelings of the “red wall”. Other broadcasters took that and used it to self-flagellate.
That must be very frustrating for someone whose job it is to interrogate arguments. It might lead someone ordinarily self-possessed to call a minister a swearword, I say. “I was wondering where this was all building to,” he says, laughing. “Was there a question?” Yes, the question is: do you, after spending decades building a reputation for speaking truth to power in a fair and balanced way, regret calling the Tory MP Steve Baker “a cunt” last year? “In terms of people guessing my politics, people can guess away. They will never actually understand.”
We have a long discussion about how news has changed in the past 25 years – from analogue to digital, from handed-down-from-on-high to co-created with citizens, from being broadly reliable to constantly vulnerable to fake content and doctored images. The starkest change he observes concerns accuracy. “Politicians have always avoided the question and always come with their own agenda that they want to get across to viewers,” he says. “What’s different now, what is perhaps a post-2015 thing, is people saying things that are baldly untrue: barefaced, to your face, they will tell you stuff that isn’t true. And they will say it in a very convinced way. It’s my job, more than anything now, to be a live factchecker.”
Guru-Murthy was one of few reassuring voices in that debased period of post-referendum wrestling, because his raw frustration, his refusal to let go of the reality of his experience in the face of lies and misdirection, was audible – and tended to go viral.
His recently retired colleague Jon Snow – the only anchor to have served longer at Channel 4 News than Guru-Murthy – was always thought to be a closeted hard-remainer. His fellow anchor Cathy Newman has a gift for playing interviews incredibly straight; people tend not to speculate about her own views unless she is discussing feminism (and she is allowed to be one of those). Guru-Murthy evinces his impartiality with his unpredictability, the fact that he might just as well go after Nigel Farage from the right as the left.
He swore off politics when he got his first broadcasting job at 18. That vow is so embedded in his life as to be almost monastic. Over time, he has become less attracted to party politics: “It’s very hard for me to think of being in a tribe, because I’ve seen them all at it. I’ve seen every government of every complexion and I’ve been wooed and avoided by all of them as well.”
Socially, the world of Westminster has never appealed to him. “I’m not friends with politicians,” he says. “I don’t wine and dine them.” He might have a cup of coffee, but even that started only recently and by necessity. “Quite often now, you’re getting people who’ve been appointed to jobs almost from nowhere, so you literally have to go and say: ‘Hello, this is me.’ But no, it’s very hard to be friends, or even friendly, with politicians. How can you really put aside your friendships when you’re giving them a hard time? I only have one friend.” That is John Nicolson, an SNP MP whose job Guru-Murthy inherited when he worked on Newsnight. (He does have other friends, he says later, but they are mainly people he knew when he was 10.)
When Guru-Murthy started out, his dream, besides conducting big political interviews, was to be a foreign correspondent. His first war was Kashmir, when he was 19. Working in Sarajevo, Bosnia, for the BBC, was “a really formative experience”, partly because he looked around at his colleagues and saw that they were all on their fifth marriages or very lonely. “I thought: ‘I don’t want to end up like that,’” he says. And he didn’t – he met his wife, Lisa, when a mutual friend set them up on a blind date; they married in 2005 and have two teenage children.
But he didn’t give up reporting abroad. “That’s why I’ve stayed at Channel 4 for so long – it’s the only place where you actually get sent out, still, to do proper journalism. Lots of presenters on lots of channels will go and stand in front of a camera, but you may as well be in the studio. Channel 4 has always had this tradition of sending the anchors out to do journalism.” Yemen is the place he always thinks about; the second time he covered the Saudi campaign against the rebels, he saw a baby die from starvation on the day he arrived. “That kind of experience stays with you for ever. And also gives you the sense that this is worth doing.”
Guru-Murthy is fluent and comfortable describing the changes in news production, in the discourse, over the past 25 years, but I wonder what he thinks of the state of the country. Has it ever felt this precarious? “Living through the late 80s and 90s, things were pretty bad. So I don’t know if this is the worst it’s been economically. What I actually think is the scandal is that we’ve never been very good at revealing the extent of poverty and desperation in this country. That is the real challenge for television – reporting the reality of Britain in a way that doesn’t make people look away.”
