Truth and trust are in trouble. It's time for a truly independent BBC

When facts and impartiality are under siege, the future of the world's leading public broadcaster cannot be dictated by politicians

- James Harding, The Observer's editor-in-chief

When my grandmother died, she left me her typewriter. It’s an old Erika made by Seidel & Naumann in Dresden. And it sits on a shelf by my desk at home.

My family were German Jews living in Berlin, and my grandmother, a strong-willed woman, had wanted to be a journalist. Just as she was getting started, the Nazis took power and, almost as soon as they did, they barred Jews from working in the press. So the typewriter feels like quite an inheritance, and a question in itself: if you have access to the ink, what are you going to do with it?

The typewriter has since come to represent something else: a symbol of the fear I have for the age we're in, that politics and technology are doing untold damage to trust in the world.

A shared understanding of what's true is disappearing before our eyes. We're more divided than we were, more certain we're right, more suspicious of the motives of others. Large numbers of people are giving up on the idea of facts, going with their gut on science and medicine, denying the climate crisis. Some are getting the measles. More people are paranoid, prone to conspiracy theories, convinced that the ends justify the means.

A grimly familiar past feels dangerously close. An unrecognisable future is coming at us frighteningly fast. But the media are not bystanders. We have the power to help mend much of what's broken. There are many things to be done, and I want to focus on one.