A conversation with Adrian Monck, Editor of 7 Things and former Managing Director and Managing Board Member at the World Economic Forum 

The crisis in today’s information environment goes beyond misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly shape visibility, interpretation, and public discourse, the deeper challenge may lie in the erosion of shared reality itself. 

Questions surrounding trust, legitimacy, institutional authority, and the boundaries of public consensus are becoming more central as synthetic content, algorithmic amplification, and AI-mediated systems reshape how societies process information and construct meaning.

At the same time, traditional mechanisms that once mediated public understanding, such as legacy journalism, editorial gatekeeping, academic expertise, and institutional authority, are increasingly under strain. In their place has emerged a far more fragmented and accelerated information ecosystem, where influence is shaped not only by states and media organisations, but also by platforms, recommendation systems, private technology firms, and increasingly autonomous AI-driven processes.

Adrian Monck has worked across journalism, academia, institutional communications, and geopolitical analysis. From reporting on conflict and global events to helping shape public engagement and communications at the World Economic Forum, and now through his newsletter 7 Things, Monck has witnessed the evolution of information from the broadcast era to increasingly AI-mediated environments.

In this interview with EurAsia Review, Monck discusses the collapse of traditional gatekeeping, synthetic consensus, AI-driven influence systems, institutional legitimacy, cognitive security, and the growing contest over who — or what — shapes public understanding today.

Q1. You have worked across several very different versions of the information ecosystem — broadcast journalism, conflict reporting, journalism education, global institutional communications, and now 7 Things. Looking back across that arc, what has changed most in the way societies understand world events?

A: Edward Watts’ The Final Pagan Generation tells the story of Rome’s liberal patrician elite as their world collapsed. They faced a movement of intolerant, populist upstarts disrupting their traditional polytheism and its rites. 

By the end, Rome’s gods and temples and rituals had all been swept away. Christianity prevailed. The empire’s relaxed approach to worship gave way to heresy and schism and holy war. Christianity became the prism through which centuries of Western thought were made to pass. Villages and towns still paraded their idols, but now they were saints. There was some subsumed continuity, but no one today worships Jupiter or Mithras. These gods are dead.

The elites themselves adapted. Elites do. Their younger sons became bishops, popes and saints. Emperors became holy and Roman. 

I feel as if the same thing is happening to the old establishment of the West. A mass erasure of an enlightenment liberalism that lasted centuries – a quiet intellectual faith in progress and human improvement that linked hands with political complacency and refused to overturn or abandon the status quo.

The people who embodied that for me were my fellow journalists in the old Western media elite. The best of them were sympathetic, smart and well-intentioned. But their abiding faith was the power of information to deliver a kind of moral transformation. That faith led them to extraordinary, award-winning reporting. But it was like pouring water onto stone. Nothing could grow from it.  

Reporting from Bosnia in the early nineties, I thought I was serving a single national audience that would absorb the reporting and draw broadly the same conclusions I drew. 

What actually happened was that coverage of Srebrenica, the siege of Sarajevo and the camps did not produce, among some young British Muslims, a desire to lobby peacefully for intervention. 

Instead, it convinced them that Europe was apathetic in the face of their co-religionists being massacred. It didn’t matter that Bosnia’s Muslims were European converts, with a fondness for beer and a relaxed – almost Anglican attitude to religious practice. Same footage, different audiences, different lessons. I thought we were stirring a national conversation.

I had been raised to believe my society’s division was class, that its common history might be an instrument for a shared re-imagining of the future by shaping how we told the present (yes, the curse of radical journalism). 

The myths of national identity and popular history we relied on to tell stories had already collapsed – and we hadn’t noticed we were trapped inside them. 

Britain didn’t dwell on the cruelties of empire, the humiliations of post-colonialism, or the brutality of its own industrial and rural past. 

We were producing the news from our privileged pulpit and watching it travel into communities that advertisers did not care about. We gave ourselves plaudits for the results.

In the meantime, we missed what executives at multinational companies could see. That anyone who travelled and observed could pick up on. The hollowing out of the Western worldview. If you look at successful popular histories like Peter Frankopan’s and William Dalrymple’s, they re-centre the world east. Europe – the West – is once more a patchwork archipelago on the far tip of Asia.

The interpreters of global events I am most interested in now are those connected to those other emergent places.

Q2. 7 Things is built around separating signal from noise. In an age where not only content but also engagement, consensus, and public reaction can be generated or distorted, what do you now regard as a reliable signal?

A: The discipline I try to apply at 7 Things is to privilege the signals of open source intelligence (OSINT). The things that survive scepticism: customs data, ship movements, satellite imagery, regulatory filings, court documents, central bank balance sheets, money in motion. 

And to interpret it, I try to bring both an understanding of how organisations form views and cultures, and how things in the real world work. That cover-ups incriminate more often than crimes. That conspiracies do occur, but more often cock-ups. That silence is easier to buy than truth is to bend. That the most awful things happen for the most banal of reasons.

Behavioural data over declarative data. Which is a fancy way of saying, the gap between what you say and what you do.

Q3. You have written and spoken for many years about trust in media and public understanding. Do you think the central problem today is misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) itself, or something deeper – a loss of shared interpretation and trust in authority?

A: The ‘crisis of trust’ framing has always been partly a confidence trick. What surveys actually show, when you look at them honestly, is that people will tell pollsters they don’t trust the media and then spend the rest of the day consuming exactly what they claim to despise. 

The behavioural evidence and the declarative evidence point in opposite directions. As Onora O’Neill argued many years ago, we may not have a crisis of trust so much as a culture of suspicion – and the two are very different things.

So MDM is a symptom, not the disease. The deeper thing is structural. We built an information economy where the producers – once newspapers and broadcasters, now platforms – are paid for attention, not accuracy. 

In Can You Trust the Media? I argued that editors and proprietors want your time, attention and money. Like medieval preachers deploying scripture, editors treat ‘the truth’ as a fabric to be woven, stretched and dyed to fit the day.

Platforms took Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing, the Daily Mail’s ‘daily hate’ emotional logic, removed the editorial friction that occasionally slowed it down, and the professional gatekeeping that occasionally kept it honest. What’s changed since I wrote the book is the scale, speed, and the near-total absence of liability.

The mainstream press has spent years complaining about misinformation as if the problem were external to journalism – bad actors, foreign agents, conspiracy theorists. 

But the public correctly noticed that legacy institutions lied too, repeatedly, and rarely faced consequences. And that they protected their own. The Wall Street Journal is a brilliant newspaper, but its reporters will never investigate their owners. 

Britain’s Hutton inquiry, America’s Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) coverage, the early COVID........

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