Flat Earth News
Nick Davies
Chatto and Winduss, 408pp, £17.99
Nick Davies is a well-regarded investigative journalist who, in Flat Earth News, has turned his attention to journalism itself. Except that most modern journalism is what Davies terms ‘churnalism’: ‘the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it.’
This central case is compellingly backed up by research from Cardiff University’s journalism department, that 60 per cent of stories in Britain’s best papers – the Times, the Guardian, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph – plus the mid-market leader, the Daily Mail, were ‘wholly or mainly’ based on wire copy or PR material. A further 20 per cent contained ‘clear elements’ of the same. Over the past 20 years, commercial imperatives have meant that journalists are being asked to fill more space and file more stories. Fact checking and the trade’s raison d’etre, ‘truth-telling’, suffer.
As with much else in British public life, the roots of all this lie in the Thatcherite 1980s. Rupert Murdoch’s breaking of the print unions at Wapping in 1986 was a defining moment; the new breed of commercial owner was more interested in profits than the absolute editorial control exercised by the likes of Lord Northcliffe earlier in the century. But Davies is careful not to naively hark back to some kind of ‘golden age’ of British journalism, though there is a particularly dewy-eyed reference to the winding-up of the investigative News Chronicle, in 1960, as some kind of watershed.
Much of the book, then, consists of some excoriating examples of journalistic failure to back up the central argument. So, we have the millennium bug, Iraq’s WMD or the building up of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as one of the world’s leading terrorists. All were fed to an unquestioning international media by increasingly sophisticated official and PR sources.
The link to ‘churnalism’ is sometimes not always clear. Blame for the decreasing coverage of parliament, for example, surely has any number of complicated sociological and political causes. But it’s difficult to find much else wrong with this convincing and worrying book.