Flat Earth news
'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.' 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 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 impact 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. He presents a new model for understanding news.
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What Hacker News says
- I totally get that, and agree to a degree. For me personally though, the news industry has become entertainment - TV news is hyperbolic, 24 hour breaking news for every story, newspapers (at least here in the UK) are little more than a propaganda outlet for the views of the billionaire owner where every story is designed to make people angry and point the blame at someone, usually immigrants. For years I listened to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme every single morning, until I realised that none of what they were telling me was actually news. You'd be amazed at how many stories started with the words "Ministers are today expected to announce..." - this isn't news, it hasn't happened yet. This is government PR. If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0] - it's incredibly eye opening. Reading it now, 11 years later, is even more eye opening - everything he writes about in there is now magnified ten fold.
Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_%28book%29
- Newspapers are well and truly dead in the UK I'm afraid. Every now and then I re-read Nick Davies' Flat Earth News which chronicles the beginning of the death spiral, it's fascinating to read with hindsight.
- A modern extension of "Churnalism", coined by Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (that has its own issues but it's still a good read) whereby news rooms are overly keen (or forced into) using external PR fluff.
Link to WikiP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_(book)
- That's entirely the intention of press releases.
For a better critique of modern journalism and uncritical regurgitation of press releases and where it leads then Flat Earth News by Nick Davies is great reading.
- The Guardian is ok but it doesn’t have the staff for real investigative journalism or long form. There’s a reason why the big breaks journalists got in the last decade or so were whistleblowers delivering them data dumps, not journalists following up a story - Flat Earth News talks about this - newspaper staff has been gutted to the point where that sort of thing doesn’t exist anymore.
And without that staff, The Guardian can’t do proper investigations on london real estate’s connection with major money laundering for instance.
Indepedent like someone else pointed out is owned by a Russian oligarch. BBC doesn’t have the mandate to do investigative deep journalism, they can only do reports or documentaries - but that BBC can’t break a major story or investigate anything of political importance because that would jeopardise their “apolitical” position.
This leaves the right wing media, which is the majority in the UK (opposite to the US, in the UK the right wing dominate the media) and they manufacture and manipulate the stories into seemingly-real controversies that are actually just a cover for them to get some law or change passed in Westminster. Read the book “Fake Law” - the way the Mail/Times/Telegraph have distorted even simple judicial cases into something they could use to get popular support for whatever their owners wanted is profoundly disturbing.
- Flat Earth News is a good book that digs into why news outlets pushing PR statements verbatim (alongside other problems) became a thing.
Basically fewer journalists with more column inches to fill using syndicated pieces and barely editing them mean the same company release can appear across all the platforms with minimal contextualisation.
