Future News
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Every episode begins in a year that hasn't happened yet. Sir Trevor Phillips puts a single plausible future to the person best placed to argue with it — then works backwards to what we'd have to do now.
Not a news review. Each episode opens on a described future — specific, dated, defensible — and tests it against someone with the standing to dismantle it. The scenarios are researched, not imagined. The disagreement is the point.
Trust in institutional media keeps falling while the tools to fabricate it get cheaper. We put a working newsroom five years out and ask what survives — and who decides what counts as evidence.
When tax, health and policing data sit on one private platform, the question stops being privacy and becomes sovereignty. A scenario about what a government can no longer choose to do.
If the record of the 2020s is contested, edited and machine-generated, what does a historian in 2049 actually have to work with? On evidence, memory, and who gets to write it down.
Sir Trevor Phillips is senior global affairs correspondent for CBS News, and one of Britain's most experienced broadcasters and journalists. He previously presented Sky News' flagship Sunday political programme, and writes for The Times and Sunday Times.
He built a career on interviews that don't let the interesting answer off lightly. Future News points that at the one subject where nobody holds the authority: what happens next.
Hear when we launchLeave an address and we'll tell you once — when the first episode is live. Nothing else, and nothing in between.
We'll only use this to announce the launch.