Flat Earth News

By: Nick Davies

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.

Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious "Sunday" newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives.

Davies names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the effect of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief.

With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.

©2008 Nick Davies (P)2009 WF Howes Ltd

Two books in one - half only about UK newspapers

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the inner workings of the press, and sound explanations for the increasing amount of "churnalism" over originally researched and fact-tested stories. The book divulges very interesting mechanisms behind the sway of PR-people over the media, the economy of fast and readable headlines, and unscrupulous wartime coverage in favor of Irak 1 and 2 despite the press having solid sources saying that Hussein had no WMDs.

Any additional comments?

Unfortunately, that is only half the book. The other half concerns frontal attacks on particular British Fleet Street Newspapers. The author has his own bones to pick combined with solid resarch based on personal experience and many professional contacts. This sometimes feels a bit personal, but the big problem is that those parts are largely irrelevant to readers outside the UK, even if meticulously researched and easy to read. In conclusion, this could have been a five-star listen for me if an "international edition" of maybe 9 hours was available,. If you aren't in Britain, you might get bored with Fleet Street name games.

Informative

There are good points in this book. The history of the press and how it evolved into it's current form is interesting, as is the effect of corporate ownership on the press. Other points relating to staffing shortages and underchecking of sources is also relavant and interesting. There are also bad points. The author gets very close at times to allowing his work to become a diatribe against the conservative press. If you are liberal minded, this book will merely confirm your belief that all evils in the press are of a conservative bent. If you are conservative, you will probably put this book down after the umpteenth example of curruption in the conservative press, people and organizations and few to no examples of corrupt liberals. If you are a moderate, as I am, you will feel as though you are only hearing one side of the story.

Well rounded, authoritative and insightful

This is an excellent historical perspective and analysis of the decline of print journalism. I've heard glowing recommendations from TV shows that analyse the media, as well as lawyers. It paints a very bleak and not unexpected picture of the state of journalism. While there are some stories from the US and Australia, it is focused on the UK, but it's just as relevant everywhere in the western world. The book is well researched and authoritative.

A scathing critique of the news media

A thorough, detailed and devastating dissection of the shallowness that describes our news organizations. British newspapers, which the author is most familiar with, are only the tip of the iceberg for this machine that creates the information equivalent of junk food, although Soylent Green may be a better metaphor.

probably better in print

informative but very dull at points. But I only had a passing interests in the news

Point made... and made... and made

How about you say the same thing over and over and over and over... energizer bunny has nothing on this guy

Should have been 12 hours shorter

This book is too long for itself, the classic example of a should-have-been-a-blogpost book.

Don’t read it, it’s not worth it. Why? Because the whole thing could be summarized in one line, and here it is: “You can never trust any news organization because everything they say is biased”. Just as much as you can’t trust my review because it’s biased.
But look, you don’t need an endless stream of examples to understand that. It is obvious, isn’t it?

Plus, most of the times I felt like it was trying to hit a word count.

I don’t mean to be pedantic but I have to be honest: you will like this if you are still enamored with the concept that news organizations are truthful; if you are not, you won’t like it. And if you have, there’s nothing in here for you other than useless examples and lots of “gotcha’s”, “turns-out’s”, and the like.

If you want to read it really bad, do this: read the prologue and the epilogue, and you’ll get all the value this book has. This structure is classic for book-length blogposts: all the sauce is at the beginning and the end, the middle is just padding.