After a spell of work experience on a newspaper, my nephew has decided that journalism is the job for him. Will he carry on thinking that, I wonder, if he reads Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, in which the investigative reporter, who writes mainly for The Guardian, “exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.”
Media academics like to tell us that the media give us a distorted view of the world because they are leaned on by proprietors or anxious to please advertisers, or both. Davies says the truth is simpler, if more worrying. Journalists write stories as false as the notion that the earth is flat — stories on everything from the millennium bug to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — because they really think they might be true.
Why? Mainly, he says, because they no longer have time to check for themselves. New, corporate managements have cut staffing and costs, leaving fewer and fewer reporters to file more and more copy; copy that is now being demanded for the web as well as for print. The result is that we are no longer engaged in journalism but in “churnalism”, filling space with stories whose accuracy and truth we haven’t had time to check; stories fed to us by local and national government, by pressure groups and by a growing public relations industry, whose success in placing puffs and influencing coverage shows that you don’t need to own a newspaper to manipulate news.
It’s a bleak, depressing book, but one my nephew ought to read: he needs to know what he might be getting into. Older hands should find that it resharpens their scepticism: it has mine, to the extent that I’ve found myself binning moderately interesting surveys and reports on the basis that they’ve only been compiled to sell something.
Davies is a thorough reporter, and he is convincing about the extent to which reporting is giving way to recycling. He had a team from Cardiff University analyse all the domestic stories run on two random weeks by four quality newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, plus The Daily Mail (but none of the red-tops, which he loftily dismisses). They found that 80 per cent of those stories were wholly or partly second-hand. That won’t surprise many reporters, who find it increasingly hard to persuade their bosses to let them stray from the desk and the diary.
Davies is less convincing, and less than realistic, in his arguments about the 10 “rules of production” that have led to “churnalism”, among which he includes: “Give them what they want” and “Always give both sides of the story”. The first rule is hardly, as he suggests, recently made. Serious papers as well as sensational have always, to some degree, set out to please the readers; if they don’t, they lose them.
On the second rule, I would counsel my nephew against citing Davies in his defence when he files a story and the news editor tells him to “give us the other side of it”. Journalists have had balance so dinned into them in their training and practice that it hinders them from telling the truth, Davies says. Take the issue of global warming: “Scientists spent two decades warning [us] that the planet was heating up while journalists simply balanced what they were saying with denials from experts and oil companies.” But what if journalists had reported the scientists without a word from the opposition, and the scientists had turned out to be as wrong about global warming as the technology consultants were about the millennium bug?