Thank you to the International Centre for Journalists and the Knight Foundation for inviting me to speak here tonight.

I am delighted to be back here in New York to celebrate great journalism and one great journalist, Michael Elliott, my friend and colleague for more than 30 years. Mike was such an astute observer of American politics. What would he have made of the Trump presidency? And how would he have judged the media’s record in covering the Trump administration at a time when there are no accepted facts and where facts have become secondary to opinion.

If we do indeed live in the post-truth era — seriously, can someone please delete post-truth from the house stylebook? — my task is hopeless. Whatever I say about the Trump presidency, I will doubtless be denounced on social media as an enemy of the people — or, if I offer a little nuance, as a patsy among my peers.

So tonight I intend to avoid examining policy in detail. Rather, after a brief tour d’horizon, I will explore what Mr Trump means in terms of political culture and the broader challenge facing journalists.

But first, let me take you back in time, to a Friday afternoon in late March when I found myself sitting opposite the 45th president of the United States. Donald J Trump was sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office where Harry Truman had a little sign saying, “The Buck Stops Here.” I began by thanking the president for making time to see me. And for subscribing to the FT.

“That’s OK,” he replied, “You lost, I won.”

The Trump presidency is not quite the Sopranos on the Potoma, but language, the role of family and brand Trump are an integral part of the script. As Tom Wolfe might have said, Mr Trump is a man in full. He’s tall, often charming and a little intimidating.

Europeans are coming to appreciate Mr Trump’s negotiating style, first explained to me by a Wall Street friend who has known him for 30 years.

“Donald will start by asking for 100 per cent and immediately start retreating. Then he’ll wait to see where his opponent settles. It’s a form of price discovery.”

The Chinese leadership gets Mr Trump and his transactional approach to foreign policy. They may even like him, now that he’s agreed that the status of Taiwan is not negotiable and that Beijing is not a currency manipulator. The Europeans are far more wary of a world divided between selective partners rather than allies, between winners and losers.

The good news is that Mr Trump has revised, for now, his views. He no longer thinks that the EU is a museum in terminal decline. He’s stopped predicting that other member states will follow Britain out of the Brexit door. The bad news is that Mr Trump’s boorishness is overwhelming legitimate gripes about the state of the transatlantic alliance.

The president is hardly the first to complain about Nato allies failing to pay their fair share: Bob Gates made the same point forcefully in his farewell trip to Brussels five years ago. Nor are administration officials officials like Pete Navarro and Wilbur Ross the first to complain about Germany’s current account surplus. Many Eurozone governments feel the same way.

But tone and style matter. Barging aside the prime minister of Montenegro in a photoshoot is one sorry definition of “America First.” European leaders tittering during Mr Trump’s speech at Nato HQ was just as bad.

Facts matter too. When Chancellor Merkel first visited the White House, Mr Trump kept asking why the US could not do a bilateral trade deal with Germany. Mrs Merkel had to explain that only the European Commission can negotiate trade deals with other countries.

The same dialogue of the deaf happened on the euro. Washington insists Germany has been keeping the euro weak. The chancellor had to explain that the European Central Bank controls monetary policy in the eurozone, not Berlin.

Let’s lend some perspective here. It may well be that Mr Trump has galvanised the Europeans. He’s been more antidote than virus, if you like. For example, Mrs Merkel declared this weekend that Europe can no longer rely on the US in the way it has done since 1945: “We Europeans really must take our own destiny in our own hands….we must fight for our own future.”

A string of elections in Austria, the Netherlands and most notably France suggests the centre is holding. That will be doubly true if Chancellor Merkel’s centre-right CDU party wins the September general election.

Emmanuel Macron’s presidential election win is a victory for the EU and liberal democracy against pinched nationalism and populist xenophobia. Further, M Macron’s win is a mirror image of America: a 30-something ex-banker and centrist comes from nowhere to stage the biggest political upset since the founding of the Fifth Republic. In the US, a 70-year-old property tycoon with inherited wealth and no party loyalty becomes the first American to enter the White House with no previous government or military experience. This the topsy-turvy world we have come to know but whose consequences we have yet to fully grasp.

As journalists we face a special challenge. This is a world where there are no accepted facts. A world where facts are secondary to opinion. A world where the media landscape has fragmented. A world which has become intensely polarised.

Consider the following three trends which are profoundly changing the political culture in America and other advanced democracies.

The first is the advancement of alternative facts. Let’s ignore the birther movement and focus on something tangible. After the president’s inauguration, a White House spokesman described the crowd size as the largest ever, both in person and around the world. This assertion appeared to contradict all available evidence: eyewitness testimony, photographs of the event, independent crowd-counts and TV ratings.

Or take the statistics related to the homicide rate in the US. After announcing the travel ban on visitors from predominantly Muslim countries, Mr Trump claimed the murder rate was the highest for 45-47 years. Statistics do show a slight uptick in the past two years, but the rate is in fact much lower than at any point in the seventies, eighties, or nineties. The most recent data shows the murder rate at half the level it was in 1980.

Now, truth has always been contested. And politicians have never been shy of playing fast and loose with the facts. Ronald Reagan never admitted to raising taxes. He always talked about increasing user fees. And we are all too familiar with Bill Clinton’s contortions over marijuana and Monica Lewinsky.

What feels new is the parallel universe of alternative facts best summed up by Scottie Nell Hughes, a Trump supporter and CNN commentator during last year’s presidential campaign:

“So one thing that’s been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts — they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way — it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts.”

Technology — via the smartphone — has powered this parallel universe. More than 2 billion people own these pocket-sized supercomputers. They now have a voice and the ability to transmit in data, images and text in real time around the world. Add this to the growing power of search engines and social media platforms which can use algorithms to tailor news to people’s views.

In the UK, almost 30 per cent of people use Facebook as a news source, according to the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report.That figure is growing and is heading towards the 40 per cent of US adults who use Facebook as a news source, according to a 2016 Pew Research Report. These raw stats only begin to touch the surface of the disruption, fragmentation and polarisation which has upended the media landscape.

The second trend is the rise of personality-driven politics at the expense of informed debate.

Outsized personalities have, of course, always been part of American political culture. With the exception of William Henry Harrison and several lacklustre successors, most White House occupants have connected with the public. Franklin Roosevelt used the radio fireside chat; John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were masters of the TV medium; Barack Obama pioneered the use of data via social media.

But Donald Trump, who spent more than a decade in the people’s living rooms as host of the Apprentice, has taken the art to a new level: he was such a ratings hit that he barely spent a dime on advertising in the first phase of the campaign. As studio boss Les Moonves said but later regretted: “It may not be good for America but it’s damned good for CBS.”

The rise of personality politics contrasts starkly with the decline of the political platform. Once a blueprint for government and a vehicle for serious debate — think of Nelson Rockefeller’s battle with the Goldwater faction or the infighting among the Democrats a generation ago — the party platform is now a perfunctory item. These days, it’s all about stage management and style: the colour of the Oval Office curtains, the length of the presidential tie,and the hourly eruptions of the presidential Twitter feed.

This leads me to my third and final trend: the rise of real time communication where politicians, journalists and the public — yes, all of us — have become prisoners of the present.

Here are three recent examples, drawn from personal experience:

The senior Democratic Senator who checks his Blackberry three times during an FT interview, before signing off on a trivial press release.

The senior British reporter who breaks a world exclusive on his own Twitter feed rather than waiting to publish the story on his own news organisation’s website.

And the American president who claims he would never have made it to the White House without tweeting. Who now measures his success by the number of followers on social media (over 101 million and counting).

Ladies and gentlemen, all these trends present a challenge to the business of serious journalism.

In a world where the sources of information are varied and multiple, journalism must do more than provide the first intimation of significant events, the first analysis of those events, the first commentary on their meaning.

Journalism must fulfil with renewed vigour an old task: that of aggregating and verifying sources. It must endeavour to put the imprimatur on those sources, assessing them for reliability, quality and context before passing them on to readers.

At the FT, we have a cast-iron rule: better to be right than first with the news.

This is even more important now that opinion too often trumps facts. We need to separate the two. That’s hard but imperative.

Finally, journalists remind themselves daily that healthy democracies depend not just on a free press but also on institutions. Journalists have a duty to hold these institutions to account, just as they do elected politicians. But in times of trouble — and these are troubling times — they should take care to defend and respect those institutions.

The alternative facts are too awful to contemplate.

Thank you.