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Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media | 
 enlarge | Author: Nick Davies
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £6.74
You Save: £2.25 (25%)
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 178384
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0099512688
EAN: 9780099512684
ASIN: 0099512688
Publication Date: January 1, 2009 (In 80 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Not yet published
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Potentially important book, but fatally flawed September 11, 2008
Timothy G. Rowe (London, England)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
The cover of this book is splattered with quotes saying how important this book is, and they're sort of right. Davies looks with a piercing insiders eye at why the news reported to us -- even from "heavyweight" sources -- is even less dependable than even cynics think. The book clearly shows how commercial factors have all but eliminated any checking of stories, so the media are almost completely at the mercy of PR generated by vested interests.
The problem -- and it's a big one -- is that the book risks being tarred with the same brush (because of carelessness, I hope, and not because Davies sources really are poor). Davies repeatedly quotes the figure of only 12% original input from newsrooms, but only once mentions that there's another 8% that's uncertain so the actual figure is somewhere betweeen 12% and 20%. Responsible reporting would say 16% +/- 4%, or just 16%; by choosing the worst extreme of the range Davies is sensationalising the data. Even worse, the figure of 12% comes from a single study, and no reference is given for the study, so readers cannot check the data. What was the methodology? Was the study ever peer reviewed? In fact, no references are given for anything at all; we have to take Davies' word for everything he says. That's the very thing he complains about journalists doing, the very thing that leads to flat-earth journalism, the very problem he is trying to highlight. Sure, some of his sources would want to remain anonymous, but the total lack of any references at all in a book of this type is completely unforgiveable. And does he have a vested interest? Well, he's a journalist, complaining about massive cuts in employment of journalism, massive cuts in journalists' pay, and massive deterioration in journalists' working conditions: it looks like a vested interest to me (and he admits in part to this at the outset).
If we take the message of this book at all seriously then we can't trust this book at all. That's a real pity, because I think it deals with crucially important issues and Davies may well actually be correct in his allegations. It may just have been a foolish decision -- not to reference anything -- that holed this book beneath the waterline. But with that flaw, the book is sunk.
 Establishment journalist turns tables and burns bridges September 7, 2008
Mr. Tristan Martin (Cambridge, UK)
Nick Davies used to be a professional journalist. Flat Earth News has to stand as one of the most intensive episodes of bridge-burning in recent writing. Davies turned his focus on his own industry and has produced a highly readable account of how, in his own words, he worked in a, "...corrupted profession."
This isn't a fish-shooting exercise in why tabloid journalism isn't to be trusted; after all, surely nobody reads the gutter press expecting to actually learn something about the world. The red-tops are all about sex, celebrity, sport, trivia - a companion to the fool's lantern. Flat Earth News goes hunting for bigger beasts: the so-called quality press. Neither is this book about which is better, left or right-wing journalism. Davies has both targets in his sites.
Flat Earth News starts with an examination of the Millennium Bug story (remember that?): how certain portions of the world were whipped up into a fear that as the year 1999 rolled over into the year 2000, planes would fall out the sky, prison doors would swing open and all sorts of calamities would happen because most computers weren't equipped to recognise that the date "00" was "2000" and not "1900." As we all know now, none of these predictions of apocalypse came to pass. Davies analyses how one very cautious prediction was picked up and manufactured into something that the original story's author and subject wouldn't have recognised.
Davies then goes further and re-investigates other stories, going back to the people who were meant to have given the quotes and finding that either the stories were misquoting the source, the journalists hadn't even spoken directly to the people involved or that the stories were simply recycling Public Relations hand-outs, designed to promote a person, product or policy. This pattern turned out to be consistent across the board, from The Observer newspaper to The Daily Mail.
Nick Davies' book discusses why journalists are content to take PR propaganda, whether corporate or governmental, and pass it off as their own work - they have so much space to fill and such limited time to research and write, that rules of production demand that they simply churn out a steady stream of articles, using 'safe' sources that are 'official' and 'reliable' rather than using dissident sources that are, by dogmatic definition, 'unreliable' and therefore more time consuming to research.
Other parts of the book discuss media hypocrisy: journalists mouthing off about "law and order" but paying corrupt police and civil servants to illegally source information. Another section provides a case study as to how a left-of-center newspaper (The Observer) became a willing conduit for an illegal pro-war message. Another piece looks at how The Times Insight team, one of Fleet Street's finest, were reduced to inconsequential fluff. Other case studies and content analysis further substantiate Nick Davies contention that the mainstream print media in the U.K. has simply lost its' credibility, despite the best efforts of a handful of dedicated journalists, swimming against the tide.
At best, most journalists are neutral and not objective: two people go off to a field and then return, one claims that they cut all the grass and the other claims that they didn't touch a single blade. Clearly, they both can't be telling the truth, one of them has to be lying. If the journalist reports both positions with equal weight, this is neutrality, not objectivity. It has nothing whatsoever to do with truth but merely the appearance of impartiality. And this - neutrality - is the best we can hope for, a few honourable exceptions aside.
This book should be required reading not only for practicing and trainee journalists but for anybody who still consumes the secular priesthood that is the so-called 'quality press.' Whether your own personal political bias tilts to the right or the left, this book should provide the evidence that the news factory is not only selling consumers to advertisers but that it is selling Public Relations propaganda under the guise of independent research.
 . July 30, 2008
J. Wilson (North England)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I'd always had a feeling that I was being misled by the mainstream media, but never really knew how it came about. This book went a long way to answering that question, and I now understand how the media is manipulated by a variety of sources so that what gets presented is very rarely the news as it happened.
My only criticism of the book is its coverage of the propaganda war in Iraq. It's undoubtedly all true, and relevant to the book, but I found that the middle of the book onwards was almost totally devoted to it, and it just turned me off a bit. It felt at times like the real message of the book was a criticism of Blair and Bush and that the stuff about the press was merely to illustrate that point, rather than the other way round.
 The rise and rise of 'churnalism' July 8, 2008
N. de Cort (Suffolk)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Today newspapers are run purely for profit. This means that numbers of reporters are being cut. This means that they can't get out into the world and build contacts that will help them unearth stories. This means that, by and large, they have time to just sit at a desk and recycle (sometimes just plain re-use) stories from:
1. News agencies, who feel it's not their job to interpret anything, merely report it, so no fact checking. This stuff goes straight into papers and broadcast media without being checked.
2. PR. PR agencies who work for organisations send out press releases, which by definition will not be fair or balanced. And that goes straight into the news too. Interestingly, there's also the issue of 'Astroturf' groups: supposedly 'grass-roots' movements and organisations that produce 'independent' reports, except they're no such thing; they're just a front for big business to put out press releases from an apparently independent source. And it's not just global warming or the millennium bug where we're being misled; there are apparently Astroturf organisations sending us reports, towing the government line, from Iraq! SO next time you hear about the publication of a report from some think tank, ask yourself who's paying for that report?
3. Each other. If one paper has picked up on a story, rather than (a) check it or (b) get left behind, they recycle the same stuff. It seems that each paper goes through every other paper checking for stories.
Anyone who reads a paper or listens to the news in any way shape or form should read this book.
Who stole our journalism? June 2, 2008
Mr Me (London UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The answer to that question and many others you didn't think you needed to know are all in this fantastic book. It is both illumintaing and at the same time depressing to realise that even the most trusted brands of journalism have become victim, like so much of our media, to the forces of money-making, fast-turnaround and nonsense PR. This book is an startling education for anyone who reads or watches 'news', not just those connected to the industry.
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