Media: Flat Earth News By Nick Davies Chatto & Windus, 408pp. £17.99Nick Davies is a long-time journalist with the Guardian, and has now turned his investigative talents on his own profession. In Flat Earth Newshe breaks one of the "rules" of journalism, that "dog does not eat dog". The tale he tells is a depressing one of journalists working in "news factories" that turn out an increasing amount of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.
The "flat earth news" of the title refers to those stories that get repeated and repeated in the press but are not true. Davies's big example is the millennium bug, a story reported and developed for years before the year 2000, which predicted a world of chaos, as computers and computer controlled technologies would crash and burn as the world moved from one millennium to another. It did not happen. Of course, more recently, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was another flat earth story, it also was not true.
The millennium bug story led to this investigation of the press. It is a remarkable book that relentlessly gives example after example of lies, distortion, of propaganda posing as news, of important stories simply not covered, of pseudo events dreamt up by PR people.
Much of this book is based on research undertaken for Davies by the Department of Journalism Studies at Cardiff University. There is also a website, www.flatearthnews.net, and the book was produced in co-operation with the media watchdog the MediaWise Trust and the Guardiannewspaper. The academic research can be found at the Cardiff University website.
Already the book has caused controversy in the UK. Private Eyeran a story saying no newspaper would serialise it. It ran two pages from the book. British journalism is divided into those who believe Davies has exaggerated and those who believe this is a wonderful and timely analysis.
DAVIES SAYS THAT over the last 20 years newspaper profits have doubled and pagination has trebled, across the industry, while the number of jobs is about the same and productivity, in terms of the number of stories produced by journalists, has trebled.
Journalists are desk-bound, feeding a 24-hour news cycle, with little or no time to leave the office, find real stories, or check. Few stories are properly or independently verified, one in five, according to the research. A few news agencies, one in the UK and (to a lesser extent) Ireland, the Press Association, and mainly two worldwide, Reuters and Associated Press (AP), control a huge amount of the news agenda, but the real power over the news agenda is the public relations industry.
Journalists, he says, simply balance one statement against another, without any attempt to see if what is being said is true. The result might be called objective, or at least balanced. The statement must be made by an authoritative source. This means, of course, that establishment and powerful figures have greater access to the media. In the relentless pursuit of scoops, reporters use the so called "dark arts", the use of illegal means and subterfuge to get private information on people, whether by hiring private investigators to hack into computers to access private data or by simply paying people who go through the garbage outside celebrities' homes, now common in what was Fleet Street.
But it is the public relations industry that causes most concern about the integrity of journalism: "Journalists who no longer have the time to go out and find their own stories and to check the material which they are handling are consistently vulnerable to ingesting and reproducing the packages of information which are provided for them by the PR industry. At the very least, this involves their being directed into accepting stories and angles which have been chosen for them in order to satisfy somebody else's commercial or political interest. At worst, this embroils them in the dissemination of serious distortion and falsehood." In other words, journalists, who are meant to be acting in the public interest, have given way to those in PR acting in the private interest of those who pay their fees because the conglomerates that own the media want to make greater and greater profits.
BUT DOES THIS have relevance to this country? Yes it does. A similar malaise affects our media. Much of the editorial production work at Independent News and Media has been farmed out, for instance. Job numbers are down in individual newspapers. Fewer journalists are producing more supplements, special features and more pages, all at the behest of the advertising industry, while the PR industry feeds packaged news into the news factories. The provincial newspapers, often owned by the same families for decades, with a commitment to their communities, have sold up to major media conglomerates, which see those same newspapers and radio stations simply as vehicles for advertisements and profits.
Of course, we also have much of the same media as Britain. We receive the same television stations, the same programmes and have thinly disguised Irish editions of the same newspapers. Davies takes on three newspapers as case studies: the Sunday Times, the Observerand the Daily Mail. With the Sunday Timeshe traces the decline of the once great Insight Team. At the Observerhe traces how a great liberal, left-of-centre newspaper ended up supporting the invasion of Iraq, being a mouthpiece for the Blair government and distorting its coverage. And he looks at the Daily Mail, an aggressive, powerful and hugely successful newspaper. According to Davies's research the Daily Mailhas had three times as many complaints upheld for unethical behaviour by the Press Complaints Commission as any other national newspaper.
Flat Earth Newsmakes depressing reading for any journalist who cares for his or her profession and still believes it can be a force for good. Davies holds that there are about 12 per cent of stories that are still the result of independent investigation and verification, but the main picture that is drawn is of under-paid journalists, with little job security, churning out rewritten press releases, produced by a PR industry paid handsomely by private interests.
Despite that 12 per cent, Davies is not optimistic. Flat Earth Newsis a snapshot of a cancer, which, he fears, is terminal. However, he does suggest that journalists themselves are victims of the commercial realities and that there are pockets of good journalism, elements of the BBC, for instance. Maybe, if read by enough journalists, Flat Earth Newsmight act as a wake-up call, rather than a diagnosis of terminal illness
Michael Foley is director of the MA in international journalism at DIT and a former media correspondent of The Irish Times