Nick Davies: How “flat earth” news is killing journalism
Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Nick Davies is an award-winning investigative reporter who writes regularly for the Guardian.
I’m not an expert on Iran or Iraq. I think I’m here partly because I’ve been a hack, a reporter, not just a journalist but a guy running around with a notebook and a pen, for an extraordinarily, ridiculously long time, but also because in the last couple of years I’ve decided to do something rather weird which is to interrogate my colleagues, which has turned into a book to be published next year called Flat Earth News.
The reason it has that title is that for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat. Indeed it was a heresy to challenge that statement. Eventually someone, Galileo or Copernicus, bothered to check and discovered they were wrong. But if you look at the way the mass media functions today you’ll see we are riddled with “flat earth” statements.
The most notorious, deadly one of those, or collection of those, was everything we were told in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It was that in particular which made me want to do this. What I want to try to convey is that we can’t understand what went wrong with the media in the build-up to Iraq unless we understand that what went wrong is part of a much bigger picture in which the media now routinely, consistently convey falsehood, distortion and propaganda. Although this has always happened to some extent, I want to argue that this is now happening on a far greater and destructive scale than it has done previously. Speakers in an earlier session talked about systemic weakness, and that’s what I want to try to explain to you – why we are delivering so much flat earth news.
Remember the Millennium bug story? That’s a classic piece of flat earth news. The global media just consuming falsehood and distortion, pumping out this stuff. It’s wonderful, to look back on the cuttings – utterly unreliable. Most of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton was, to use the technical term, bollocks. Just pushed out on this huge scale.
And there’s flat earth policy. I’ve done loads of work over the years on criminal justice, drugs policy, education, digging deep down into government policy, looking at the factual foundations on which this policy is built, the evidence. And what do you find? Nothing. Just a black hole of populist misconception and self-serving politics. It’s terrifying. Routine, small stories flowing through the media. The scale of it is huge.
If you say that to people outside the media on the whole they’ll rapidly they’ll sign up to the idea that you can’t believe everything you read, but what worries me is that if you ask them why you tend to get flat earth stories back about the media itself. So for example there’s been quite a bit of talk today about proprietor interference. The likes of Rupert Murdoch do interfere, it’s part of the picture, it’s disgusting and immoral that they do, perhaps even more disgusting and immoral that it’s so easy for them to do so. You’ll hear people talking about corporate advertising influencing the content of the media. Maybe it happens. I’ve really tried to find evidence of them doing that successfully. You find it in local papers, you find it in specialist magazines like fashion mags, but in the national media that ain’t where it is.
Sami Ramadani was really interesting about ideology earlier today. But if you take proprietor influence, advertising and ideology and say those are factors that perniciously influence the media and then ask how much of the total picture are they responsible for I want to argue that it’s 5 or 10 per cent. That isn’t where the problem is. There’s a much, much bigger problem at work here.
Let me try to explain. I raised a lot of money from the Rowntree Foundation and gave it to some academics at Cardiff University. One of the things I got them to do was to go back through the annual reports of every Fleet Street company going back to 1985. 1985 is an important year because in January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers into Wapping and broke the print unions. He broke the resistance, such resistance as there was in Fleet Street, to the logic of commercialism, to what those big corporations which had taken all those newspapers over wanted to do.
The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job. That’s terribly important.
If you take time away from some processes, like if you’re manufacturing cars and you take time out so you do it quicker you can argue that this improves the process, it makes it cheaper so you can sell more and put more money back into production. But if you take time away from reporters you take away our most important working asset. We cannot do our jobs properly if they won’t give us the time to do it. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been caught in this pincer movement where our staffing levels have been cut, our output has been increased – all the newspapers have extra supplements, you have 24-hour broadcasting – the whole nature of being a reporter and the back-up journalists involved has changed: instead of being active news gatherers we’ve become passive processors. Most reporters nowadays don’t have contacts, we don’t go out and find stories, we don’t check facts.
We did a huge analysis with these Cardiff researchers of the extent to which you can look at factual statements in Fleet Street stories and find evidence of whether or not they’ve been checked. The answer was that there is evidence in 12 per cent of those statements. 12 per cent. It’s pathetic. But that’s the reality. It’s not because the journalists are dishonest. It’s not because they’re being told to do so by advertisers or Rupert Murdoch. It’s because we’re not allowed to do our job. I call this “churnalism”. That’s the first part of the picture.
Nevertheless we’ve got to fill all these supplements, all these 24 hours of broadcasting. Where are we going to get our material from? While we’ve been losing our jobs, somebody else has been getting more and more jobs. Which is the PR industry. There was an invisible moment at some point in the last decade when the number of PR people in this country finally exceeded the number of journalists.
When we’re talking about PR, first it’s the whole magical world of Alastair Campbell in central government, which has flowed down into every local authority in the country, and the police and the health service, every limb of the state now has press officers working for it. Even when I started, 30-odd years ago, it wasn’t like that. When I started on local papers, if you wanted to write a story about a hospital you phoned the hospital you talked to the hospital manager or a doctor. Now you deal with a PR. Across the public sector – and across the private sector. All corporations now defend themselves. And charities and even terrorist groups! Everybody has PR people.
Whereas you should have a system where journalists, working honestly and independently, make what used to be called news judgments and say this story is important, this angle needs to be expressed, this research needs to be done, instead now we sit there passively and those decisions are made by Alastair Campbell and the whole magic world of PR and the public and private and the charity sector and the terrorist groups. They write the press releases and we bung ‘em in.
And it isn’t just about press releases. It’s about deeply manipulative behaviour. So for example, PR companies work very assiduously to set up front groups. These are phony grass-roots groups. There are so many phony grass-roots groups in the US that they have a nice little term for them, they call them Astroturf, because they’re not real grass.
A classic example of an Astroturf group is the Iraqi National Congress, the INC. The INC didn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it was invented and created by a man called John Rendon, a PR guy who used to work for the Democrats, he ran Jimmy Carter’s PR campaign. And since the American invasion of Panama in 1987 has been working on contract for American intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, running PR campaigns to change the way we think and feel about the world. And it’s very easy. Once you’ve reduced journalists to churnalism, all they have to do is feed us stories. So John Rendon says okay, we’re going to change the way the world looks at Iraq, I need a story, I’ve got a huge budget from the State Department, I’ll create the INC, I’ll hire Ahmed Chalabi and all these other guys, we’ll hold conferences in Vienna and London, we’ll invite the hacks, the hacks will write the story, we get them to put it across. It’s easy.
While PR has become so huge and so sophisticated and so successful in effectively writing our stories for us and doing our work for us, alongside that, almost unnoticed since September 11, 2001, there has been a significant increase in old-fashioned propaganda activities. PR on the whole doesn’t deal in fiction. Alastair Campbell and his ilk will lie to you if you put them in a corner, but they don’t really want to lie. Really what it’s about is making our judgments for us, picking which story, which angle, which quote, but often it’s in the realm of truth. Propaganda is about fiction.
There’s always been a threat of propaganda, for years and years going back to Elizabethan times, certainly it was active during the Cold War. That’s got much bigger and institutionalised. The problem with propaganda is that it doesn’t tell the truth about itself. The expression it uses is “strategic communication”, so you find that military, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, particularly in the United States but also in Britain, France and all the NATO countries, are grouped together in order to manipulate us vulnerable hacks into running stories that are fiction.
There are marvellous examples of it. You can see them running on Iran now. I love the Zarqawi story. Remember Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Huge chunks of the Zarqawi story were produced by this strategic communications machine. Absolute bollocks, to use that technical term again. Remember when he first surfaced Zarqawi only had one leg? Then later on when he was on video cutting people’s heads off miraculously he had sprouted a second one. They’d lost their own story line!
If you’re trying to understand what needs to be done to get the media to tell the truth, it’s not just about the traditional explanations about advertising, owners and ideology. They are there, I’m not denying that, and they are pernicious and wrong. But it’s to do with the structural weakness of our profession. Our jobs are being taken away, our output has been increased, we are now almost infinitely vulnerable to being manipulated – and so we are. And that’s why we are seeing the same thing happening about Iran as you earlier saw with Iraq.
In this book that I have written I did a chapter on the Observer. It’s fascinating and scary. It’ was a model of manipulation of a newspaper in the build-up to Iraq where all of this was at work. The PR people, particular from Downing Street, Alastair Campbell’s people working on Kamal Ahmed, the political editor. He resigned a few weeks ago because of the book, he doesn’t want to tell the truth about it. The intelligence agencies producing the anthrax story were working through David Rose. Very interesting. David Rose is actually a very good, experienced reporter, he was completely flipped over on his head, writing absolute crap because he was being manipulated by MI6 and the CIA. And I’ve traced it all. That’s the propaganda element. It’s just scary.
The impact of that was huge, because that’s the paper that’s read by backbench Labour MPs who had to vote in the House of Commons on the Blair resolution. It really mattered. It’s the sickening ease with which it now happens.
If you want to understand what’s going wrong it’s fascinatingly complex.
The internal procedural workings, the operational pressures that incline us towards more falsehood and distortion – it really is interesting how you look at it and find how rotten it is at its core.
The other thing that concerns this meeting is what we can do to improve it. I’m very pessimistic. I think we’ve lost it, I’m afraid we’ve lost the idea of the mass media are anything like a reliable source of information. In an imaginary world I’d like the media to be put through the same sort of regulation as foodstuffs, so that you have to label the content of a newspaper, so you would need some institution to be funded and set up to test the extent to which a particular media outlet produces falsehood and distortion. So the Guardian would have to run its running average – over say the preceding six months, for example, and say, 56 per cent of this newspaper’s output turned out to be not true.
The trouble is that this is an imaginary world. There is no way that I can see that there is anywhere in this country the political power to engineer that kind of change. The question is whether that’s politically possible. I think everyone who has been critical of the Press Complaints Commission is entirely right. I did a huge analysis of their last 10 years of operation and it’s embarrassing to be told as a professional that this organisation is responsible for holding you to standards. It does absolutely nothing. It is an outrage.
December 10th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Sweet irony
“for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat.”
The Ancient Greeks knew the earth was round and Eratosthenes estimated its circumference to within 16.5% in 240 BC. The widely held belief that it was widely believed that the earth was flat is itself a flat earth belief.
December 11th, 2007 at 2:45 am
Brilliant. Thanks. I very much look forward to the book.
One thing I missed was a discussion of the actual mechanics of generation of the spurious mediated ‘reality’ of the ‘old media’ through incestuous ‘networks’ of journalists themselves (Paxman at Edinburgh: ‘more and more hunting as a pack’) PR operatives, business and politics. Following Iraqgate, the bizarre McCann story seems like a pretty good object lesson.
..But maybe that’s addressed in the book itself?
February 4th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Reminds one of “The Servile Press”, Hilaire Belloc, 1912. Plus ca change.
February 9th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I listen to BBC Radio 4 and have, over the last couple of years, come to regard it as little more than a government propaganda machine.
A fascinating example was the recent “scandal” about the bugging of an MP. Very soon after the story broke, it was pushed out of the way by the “news” of what Gordon Brown thought about allowing phone-tap evidence in court. We have, in the space of a few years, moved from a situation where people were outraged at the thought of their phones being bugged to a placid acceptance that it is necessary in the “fight against terrorism”. This is used as a way of justifying virtually anything, including torture.
It’s strange … We accept 3000 deaths a year on our roads. We could probably at least halve that death toll by putting a huge foam bumper around each car and limiting its top speed to 60mph, not to mention outlawing motorcycles, but if any government tried to do that there would be an outcry. So why, if we would defend that - actually rather indefensible - right to have fun driving fast, nice looking vehicles, do we not care the same way about our more fundamental liberties?
We seem to accept that a person has a right to defend themselves against criminals invading their property - yet we are so frightened of terrorism that we are inviting the government into our homes to monitor our conversations or - if they wish - to carry us off into detention without charge. Of course, we don’t think this will happen to *us*. We don’t, apparently, see any contradiction in accepting arbitary detainment as the price for “liberty”.
Meanwhile, Radio 4 worries the “problem” of our Muslim population like a dog with a bone. I have a mosque just down the road from me, but I couldn’t even tell you which people I see in the street are Muslims and which aren’t - that’s how much of a problem they are. On the whole, they’re a lot less trouble than the local white population. Yet, my mind has been affected by this insidious poison and I find myself flinching mentally when I see a man in a robe, as though part of me suspects he’s another Abu Hamza. When the establishment offered Salman Rushdie a nighthood, they blew their cover as far as I was concerned. It became clear that there was an official agenda for provoking the Muslim population.
Incidentally, where is there a sober, credible account of what happened to the third tower on 9 11? Most of the people I mention this to weren’t even aware there *was* a third tower.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Except that before the war many people knew it was BULLSHIT. You only had to look at who was saying what and think logically about the presented information to know that.
Journalists these days “print press releases”. That phrase is not knew. I’ve seen it used many, many times. The REAL JOURNALISTS are the ones doing actual footwork and writing books revealing the bullshit. And even they sometimes miss out on something that simply sitting back and dropping your assumptions would help reveal.
The CURRENT ADMINISTRATION in the White House are criminals who deserve impeachment. Why are they not being impeached? Because of the press release printers. No one is looking at THE FACTS. Every editor has an agenda.
Also, it is a FACT that many journalists are members of groups like the CFR. That shows they are already biased. All this shit is well known. Very nice article with some nice research, but you are far from the only one who can see this. It’s quite obvious when you read news stories that aren’t carried by the news media, or read different opinions. Our mainstream news is almost essentially propaganda. A lot of journalists are too wrapped up in it to see it.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I worked at a Gannett newspaper in the U.S. for nearly 13 years in the Marketing dept. When I started in 1995, there were about 1200 employees. Now there are about half that. They’ve gutted the newsroom and therefore, content. I can remember when one of our reporters (nominated for a Pulitzer for a story about a wrongful incarceration) and I stopped into a newsstand to grab a snack. I remember him looking over at the newspaper rack and shaking his head in disgust. I asked, “what’s wrong.” He says, “Take a look at this…” Our neighboring “rival” city’s main newspaper had a big investigative front page story on the Haditha massacre in Iraq (this paper is independently owned…rare!). Then he referred me to the cover of our newspaper. On it, was a picture featuring a story that was part of Gannett’s “Real People Real News” initiative. In the picture was a lady cleaning out the cage of her pet guinea pig. Like I said, my reporter friend shook his head in disgust.
We are all doomed if we cannot revive serious investigative journalism.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
@Howard Davies
> When the establishment offered Salman Rushdie a nighthood [sic], they blew their cover as far as I was concerned. It became clear that there was an official agenda for provoking the Muslim population.
You don’t think the fact that he wrote Midnight’s Children, winner of the “Booker of Bookers”*, might have had something to do with it? Anyone that is provoked by Salman Rushdie getting a knighthood deserves to be provoked. I’m not too keen on Sir Terry Wogan having one, shall we strip him of his?
* = Which makes it (in some people’s estimation) the single best book written by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland between 1968 and 1993. No mean feat considering the competition.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
So would this apply to the Global Warming panic as well?
February 15th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I know it’s only an allegory but if you want truth you need accuracy.
It’s a popular myth that “…everyone knew the Earth was flat.”, please don’t perpetuate it.
It has been known that the earth was round for thousands of years just by the simple observation of a ships mast appearing before the hull. The diameter of the earth even calculated by Eratosthenes in about 200BC. Galileo and Copernicus had nothing to do with it, what they did was show that the earth moved round the sun, not vice versa.
Galileo’s predicament of knowing this fact and having on pain of excommunication to deny it fits your purpose better.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I agree with you. Although it won’t be able to apply to ALL news, I think there should be a news source that offers unadulterated truth via proof. Basically audio or video from the source giving said news. Don’t tell me anything unless you can back it up. People can still go to CNN, BBC, etc for news, but having an outlet that will only post news if it has proof directly from the source would be refreshing.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
“Incidentally, where is there a sober, credible account of what happened to the third tower on 9 11? Most of the people I mention this to weren’t even aware there *was* a third tower. ”
The third tower (WTC 7) collapsed after a flaming 110 story building fell on it. There was an electrical substation situation in the first 10 floors of the base of the building with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. There are many credible accounts that detail the mechanics, engineering, and physics behind its destruction.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
From what I understand, Nathaniel Hawthorne started the “flat earth” myth. People have known it’s round for at least 2500 years. Copernicus established that the solar system is heliocentric rather than geocentric where the church wanted earth to be the center of everything. Columbus was not trying to prove that the earth was round (as Hawthorne wrote) but that sailing west to get to the east Indies would be faster than traveling around Africa. Unfortunately, he ran into some big old land mass that proved him wrong.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Since the late 1990s, I have listened to Democracy Now, which is now available as a video streamed online or podcast. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales are true journalists. As a DN listener, I’ve found out about stories that are incredibly important, which then trickle into the mass media in America anywhere from 6 months to 2 years later.
Before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote a concerned letter to the UN. Now, at that point in life I was an artist in her early 20s. How could I have known that the information being presented was fabricated before, say, Hillary Clinton (who voted to invade Iraq)? Democracy Now actually delved into the reports and stories, and talked about the “drumbeat for war” on so many occasions. Truly, there are ‘good journalists’ and credible media out there. Media consumers have to be as rigorous and as careful as food consumers (especially in America; think the FDA, think Donald Rumsfeld helping to push Aspartame while profiting from its sales). Passively accepting media reports is not responsible. But there will be people who eat McDonald’s; there will be people who watch Fox and think that Iraq had something to do with the 9-11 attacks in America; there are always people who take the easy way. The easy way doesn’t always lead to the best destination.
Signed, a concerned American
February 15th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
“The widely held belief that it was widely believed that the earth was flat is itself a flat earth belief.”
You are correct sir. Also, hilarious.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I’m currently reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which, for a novel over 60 years old and starts out in the very late 19th century and deals with some of the first half of the 20th, seems more contemporary than much other fiction I’ve ever read.
Ellsworth Toohey sets up councils of architects, writers, artists and the like. They don’t do much of anything but when a major outrage occurs, their opinions suddenly make it into major papers, even when they’re not really saying much. A fictional precursor to Astrotruf groups. Yet now they’re so real…
February 15th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
“Remember the Millennium bug story? That’s a classic piece of flat earth news.”
I’m one of the countless techies who busted their arses trying to make sure nothing went wrong. The reason there was no crisis? The reason the earth didn’t fall? People spent millions fixing the issues. And issues there were aplenty. Sure, the media may have exaggerated it. But it was a huge huge real problem. I am looking forward to the book though. The Iraq debacle is enough to show the media have some issues of their own.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Y2K is less an example of flat earth news and more of mass hysteria. Thankfully, it was largely a non-issue when the clocks rolled over. I recall recruiters hiring people students straight out of COBOL and Assembler classes in the latter years of the 90’s to deal specifically with Y2K issue. There was definitely a massive and successful effort on the part of companies and programmers to avoid potential problems (though not to the scale widely reported) related to Y2K. That said, flat earth news is definitely an issue. News and media companies typically report what makes them money. If that means not critically looking at issues or being coerced by advertisers of government agencies, so be it. Journalists and the public both suffer at the price of turning a profit.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
It’s the fact that people don’t stop and think about what they’re really doing. The impact of them doing their job. When it comes down to it, it’s the employees that are doing the work and the thing is, they’re not thinking about what they’re really doing. They’re just “doing their job”. It’s like when a soldier kills civilians without thinking because he was ordered to. If people would stop and think, they might decide to NOT do their job and we’d live in a completely different world.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Most of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton was, to use the technical term, bollocks. Just pushed out on this huge scale.
I hope your book is shelved in the comedy section, Nick.
What’s wrong with ‘the media’ is that they don’t report, they ‘interpret’. And unfortunately for them, they’re all a bunch of socialists.
Keep your book, polish up your fast food skills, ’cause you’re going to need them.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
You’ve missed a big element to the degradation of news — it’s entertainment. The need to publish more and more sensational and outlandish stories is strong in today’s media. It’s so strong in fact that many news organizations are perfectly willing to poke and prod a subject so that they can consciously alter a story to continue to keep it interesting. The very reporting of a subject alters it; the continued reporting of it alters it further. Britney Spears is a prime example of someone who has been altered by reporting. Tabloids and entertainment news shows love to report her every move, and they’re pushing her toward suicide because that is the ultimate story. It’s selfish and psychotic, but that’s news today.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Please stop spreading the flat Earth myth that humans have thought the Earth was flat as recently as the 1600s. We’ve known the Earth was spherical for two millennia. You’re confusing the belief in a flat Earth with geocentrism, which was only widely disproved by the like of Copernicus and Galileo in moderately recent times (although even some of the ancient Greeks proposed heliocentrism,).
Considering that you pride yourself as a journalist running around with a book and pen asking questions, you really should have asked questions about this flat Earth myth. Now your book now has an inaccurate name.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
As if this was not bad enough, try this on for size.
Here in the US, 80% of the fire service is staffed by volunteers. Most companies get minimal funding from local government, with the majority coming from the public.
I am the president of such a fire company, and I have been labeled a heretic by other members because I have decided to tell the truth to our community by leaving available for public inspection our financial records and dealings for any and all to see. My logic is that it’s public money, they deserve to see where it went.
But so internalized is this idea of message control and spin that the members have constantly scolded me, saying “what happens in the fire company, stays in the fire company.”
My dismay at this attitude - that the facts and truth of our (fair to poor) financial situation would tell a better story than anything else was too frightening for the majority of these working and middle class folks to accept.
They know that the manipulated message they had been putting out (We are near collapse! We’re closing! You’ll have no fire service!) is one that works for keeping the fund raising events going, but revealing that with sound fiscal management and a slight uptick in municipal funding would allow us to spend more time fighting fires and less time fund raising is undesirable for a few.
We’re not only reading spin, we’re spinners ourselves.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Excellent article… How do we change this sorry state of things?
February 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Sober credible account of the third tower collapse can be found here
http://www.structuremag.org/Archives/2007-11/SF-WTC7-Gilsanz-Nov07.pdf
February 16th, 2008 at 12:29 am
God, you think this is bad, just wait until everyone starts realising the global warming reality.
February 16th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Edward Bernays’s legacy runs deep and wide.
February 16th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I 100% agree the regulation of the media, though it might end up a ‘who will regulate the regulators’ situation.
Democracy or not, they still find a way to control us.
PS steve roberts is clearly a tosser.
February 16th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Ditto to the first comment. The idea of the Europeans believing in a flat earth circa Columbus’s time is one of those popular history myths with no basis in reality. The ‘flat earth’ myth comes from a fictional 19th century account of the voyages of Columbus, when in reality, any educated person of the Columbus’s time would have known the earth was round.
I do however sympathize with the goal of this article. I’ve been highly displeased with the news reporting by the main cable networks (and others) since late 2001; however, since this article starts out with a myth itself, I have to question the rest of it.
February 16th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
even the bible stated that the world is round . Hebrew prophet Isaiah, of the eighth century B.C.E., indicated that the earth was spherical. He wrote: “There is One [Jehovah God] who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers.” (Isa. 40:22) The Hebrew word here rendered “circle” also may be translated “sphere.” (A Concordance of the Hebrew and Chaldee Scriptures, by B. Davidson)
February 16th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Very good. Reminds me of the news services who usually throw in a part about President Ahmadinejad of Iran’s alleged quote of “wanting to destroy Israel” when he in fact said no such thing.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
I agree with everything you say, except for your analogy - people actually never really thought the world was flat, or maybe some did but they were peasants and laborers and the like who didn’t really think about these things, nor care, but men of science for thousands of years have assumed the Earth was spherical. The commonly held belief that Copernicus and Galileo disproved was that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the Sun orbited around the Earth. They were called heretics for saying it was the other way round. You’d be more accurate to call it “Geocentric solar model” news but I understand the majority of the population wouldn’t identify with that. Still, the idea of using a popular media myth to criticize popular media myths is a bit ironic, I think.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I know it’s a minor point in what is otherwise an insightful essay, but given the emphasis on repeating falsehoods here, I can’t let it slide:
“The millennium bug story” was NOT a flat-earth story. In fact, I’d say it’s a counterexample: one case where media hype actually ended up focusing enough attention on a problem that it was successfully addressed before disaster struck. I’m a professional programmer and I can tell you that if it hadn’t been for the massive effort that was largely driven by the doomsday scenarios in press accounts, bad stuff would have happened. Would the world have ended in flames? No, of course not, but fundamentally it was not a hoax.
Saying the story was an example of flat-earth journalism is like saying that it was a waste of time to start exercising because you didn’t die of a heart attack afterwards. The problem failed to happen because the hype made people worry enough to fix it, not because it wasn’t actually a problem.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
“The reason it has that title is that for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat. Indeed it was a heresy to challenge that statement. Eventually someone, Galileo or Copernicus, bothered to check and discovered they were wrong.”
No, that’s completely wrong. Aristotle reasoned that the Earth was round in 350BC and Eratosthenes worked out the diameter soon after. European kings throughout the middle ages had jeweled spheres representing the Earth. It was common knowledge.
Galileo and Copernicus both argued for the heliocentric model of our solar system - that the Sun rather than the Earth is the centre of our solar system. They didn’t bother claiming the Earth was round because everybody already knew that.
And while I’m on the subject. There’s also a widespread belief - mostly among graduates of American schools - that Columbus set out to prove the world was round. That’s not true either. The court and Columbus both knew the world was round but disagreed over the diameter. Columbus believed the western route to India was shorter than the eastern route. The court believed the western route was much further and he would run out of supplies about halfway. Columbus based his beliefs on incorrect calculations of the world’s diameter. He’s lucky that he stumbled across a previously undiscovered continent or his crew would have died of starvation.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I loved this post and agree with your take on “churnalism.” But man … this is a l-o-n-g post. I’d enjoy reading something as thoughtful as this as a series of shorter articles.
Just a friendly suggestion — not intended as criticism. I run on myself, sometimes.
)
February 16th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Seems like a stronger and stronger case for proper and rigourous media studies courses in schools. We did it effectively in English at school, separating fact from fiction etc. But wait a minute aren’t I always reading the news that media studies is one of these soft subjects ? Oh I geddit!
February 16th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Excellent article.
It all boils down to greedy profit mongers with whacky ideology.
They make billions while creating their own “reality” How can we stop this death spiral?
February 16th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
The remark about the irony behind the flat earth comment is itself evidence of ignorance being portrayed as fact. The Hellenistic Greeks certainly know the Earth wasn’t flat. The fallacy of your critique is believing that knowledge can’t be lost. The Catholic Church ruled over education and societal development for 1500 years after the fall of said empire. All manner of knowledge from the Greeks and Romans were lost. The Catholic Church burned the greatest library in antiquity. It isn’t coincidence that those years were referred to as the Dark ages. There are many many works by “respected thinkers” (who had to be vetted by the church) during the Dark Ages that espoused the self-evidence of the Flatness of the Earth and the fact that it was the center of existence. Knowledge can be lost and destroyed if there are institutions powerful enough that desire its removal. Just clearing that up.
Downfall
February 16th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
As a “churnalist” I must agree with Nick Davies. Any evidence of old-fashioned journalism is gone, especially at my newspaper.
Unfortunately, press releases = news. Advertorials, too, are a cheap substitute for news.
The last hard news I tried to do resulted in a threatening phone call from a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hint of a lawsuit? Forget the story. And, as a “freelancer,” I get to pay for my own legal costs.
Color me fed up. If the local residents want the power of the press as a hedge against the next landfill, or eminent domain land steal - count me out!
February 16th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
How Zarqawi miraculously had sprouted a second leg? Well, this miracle is called artificial leg.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
A journalist with an agenda is no longer a journalist, he’s a PR flack. That describes you perfectly, although you get paid in self satisfaction rather than cash. If you’re “not an expert on Iran or Iraq,” then perhaps you should become one before pontificating about their problems, or else stick with reporting on the Ladies Garden Club or whatever your regular beat is. Everybody has an opinion, if you are going to claim to be a journalist, then you need to be professional about it and keep your own opinions under control. Question your own assumptions and give the readers all the facts so they can make up their own minds. The slickest way to lie is to tell half the story, and then shut up.
If you can actually prove any of the allegations promulgated by the enemies of the Bush administration, you will win a pulitzer, and probably a Nobel prize along with it. If you can’t, you’re still part of the problem.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Nick Davies: How “flat earth” news is killing journalism…….or rather…Don’t blame us for not doing our jobs. Blame the government. Blame society, blame PR, just don’t blame us. Bah! If you are a reporter, then report. If you are an investigative journalist, then investigate. If your editor tries to kill your story, report that too. Get OUT of bed with the government. Get OUT of bed with your political ideology and get OUT of bed with your hatred of the common man (and your love of celebrity). You should be embarrassed at the poor job you’ve been doing.
February 17th, 2008 at 12:06 am
People have known the Earth was round for millenia, since at least the ancient greeks and Aristotle (to my knowledge). Copernicus and crew simply showed the Earth orbited the Sun, instead of the other way around.
February 17th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Well, someone beat me to it already, thanks steve_roberts. The author was tricked in his very example for the book and title by propaganda. Yet, he didn’t seem to check his facts on this before building a whole book around it. Interesting….
I do agree with the general thesis of this article though. But it brings up a good point for all to consider. Everyone has a worldview and political angle. Just as pre-911 material was messed with in this manner, so is the message of the terrorists and world-image of the USA, for example… and the campaign to ‘out’ the intelligence pre-911.
It should stop us for a moment to check a bit better into possible ‘flat earth-isms’ lurking in our day. I could write a pretty long list.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:07 am
I would like to complement what “steve_roberts” says.
Neither Copernicus nor Galileo had anything to do with whether the world was a sphere or not, by the times they lived that was settled. Some people think that Columbus had to convince the courts of the kings of Portugal or Spain that the Earth was round to get the financing for his voyages, that is another great misconception, the real objections against Columbus is that he had grossly miscalculated the size of the Earth, so, he thought Asia was way closer than what it really is. Do you know what? Columbus was dead wrong, the whole Pacific ocean and the American continent are farther than what he tried to prove to the courts that Asia was…
I find appalling how the ignorance of Mr. Davies has destroyed his otherwise valid argument. I would not expect gross errors such as this from Grammar Schools, let alone supposed professionals in the “Investigative Reporting” discipline. If I had a stake in the “Guardian”, I would request Mr. Davies dismissal.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:47 am
The discussion so far does not deal with the role of historians as the curators of ‘museums of truth’.
Let us hope that historians do eventually wash the spin and lies out of the media and have constructive debate to seek the truth and learn lessons.
Sadly historians have limited influence in current policy debates.
This emphasises how important it is to support academic history and to teach children the ‘pitfalls’ of unreliable sources at all levels from primary upwards.
It is to the credit of the UK public service that many senior civil servants have history degrees. Let us hope that the traditions of frank, fearless and independent advice can be restored.
It is likely that developed societies will have to learn to be much more frugal due to pressures from overpopulation, global warming and energy constraints. What contribution will the free market media make to reduce our need for things we do not need?
February 17th, 2008 at 1:50 am
I refer you to Dr. David Brin’s book ‘The Transparent Society’ it suggests a few methods whereby we might control things like ‘flat earth journalism’.
Particularly multiple, separate entity fact checking organizations, something like consumer reports. These entities would rate various news feeds for accuracy, perhaps as a percentage, and publish that rating for people to use as an evaluative tool. It might not be a perfect solution, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.
February 17th, 2008 at 2:02 am
The Y2K bug was DEFINITELY real. But it was fixed on time.
February 17th, 2008 at 4:33 am
The third tower is a joke. You can find footage of a (I think..) BBC reporter with a live shot of the skyline in the background, saying something like “we’ve just heard that building number 7 has also fallen, apparently from structural damage.” She says this as you can see building 7 standing in the background…. manufactured?
Also the coverage of the explosions, multiple ones, flashpoints on impact, molten metal for months under the ruble, cut beams, thermite. put it all togethor and you get a pretty news story. (Watch the documentary 911 The Ripple Effect, the footage i mentioned is in it) Not saying its true… but it outlines your question, and addresses many more you may have related to it.
People need to take notice of these things, more generally take note of Nick’s plea for putting a leash on business as usual in our mass media. We may not “own” it but we can sure as hell not watch it. Share all your alternative and independent news sources with everyone you know, even the few mass media ones that are half decent if their scared to miss out on the lies.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:52 am
I really look forward to reading this book. It has been driving me crazy seeing most of the things that come out in the news because so much of it is so obviously political propaganda, yet so many people accept it as fact. It seems that everyone is lazy and indifferent now. It wasn’t very long ago when people would have been outraged by torture, but now it’s accepted and buried. It was Ben Franklin that said any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Howard, very well thought out post.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Nick you are perfectly “in tune” with the recent and rapid demise of objective journalism brought on by the wages of spin.
I’ve worked for a lowbrow tabloid- the Daily Mail. I witnessed first hand how advertisers influence content. I personally worked on the integration of Sky programming into the Daily Mail TV pages. I helped in the commercial transactions that eased the unholy alliance between Murdoch and Associated Newspapers. Perhaps this is why I now feel drawn to working in the voluntary sector?
I also worked on a journalism course where tutors were told they could only spend 30 - 40 mins marking a final year dissertation. Some of the students in their final year could not even differentiate adverts from editorial. This journalism course accepted a small amount of funding from Procter & Gamble (P&G) for a project which gave the students creative intellectual property to P&G. P&G then presented the students ideas as their own to the worlds media at an international media conference. The worlds media lapped up these ideas in the belief that some boffin at P&G had dreamt these ideas up…..
The decline of the western news media is a sad reality of the world we live in. Only last week we were treated to a G.W. Bush interview on Newsnight, justifying the various reasons for the forthcoming trials in relation to the 9/11 attacks. How the mighty are fallen. Newsnight has lost it’s independence and now appears to be wholly in the grip of the Labour spin machine.
I am now teaching the relevance and importance of the Human Rights Act to some of the most deprived kids in London at Kids Company Academy. I hope these kids who are the ones most likely to be affected by “flat earth news” will understand the link between objective journalism and human rights.
Andy Worthington suggested I tune into your blog - which has offered huge relief amongst the wages of spin. I will be referring to your blog in my forthcoming lectures, if you don’t mind?
Keep up the good work. Thanks for the inspiration.
Stay tuned………….
February 17th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Spot on. Require newspapers (particularly) and TV/radio to label every article as either fact or opinion. No doubt there will be other shade of grey categories such as “unverified” that will be useful.
Go further - make it a crime to mislead, it doesn’t matter whether intentional or not. This would then catch not only media activities but also advertisers, retailers, politicians, snake-oil salesmen. Make everyone responsible for thinking about whether the information they are disseminating is reliable or not.
However, I’m unsure of the social importance of good old-fashoned gossip so let’s take care
February 17th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Great piece. The fix to this problem can only be a) a complete decentralization of the media, or b) a centralized systemic correction legally enforced at the national level. Both are immensely challenging propositions, technically, socially and politically.
@steve_roberts
Yes, at least some of the Greeks believed the Earth was round. However, before and during the middle ages, this bunch of assholes called “Christians” went on a book-burning binge, and as a result, for several hundred years the knowledge was lost. This, as far as we know, the majority of Europeans believed the Earth was flat during that period. So no, it is not a flat-Earth belief.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:35 am
The y2k bug was a big problem that was mostly remedied. So the cause for concern was valid. A large effort amongst IT departments fixed the codes that were identified. Lots of time and money was spent and if it wasn’t done there would of been lots of problems.
Otherwise you right. The mainstream media is failing miserably to inform people and in most cases journalism is propaganda.
February 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Couldn’t agree more. Remember when the Americans rapidly invaded and took complete control of Afghanistan in 2001? Two weeks of war and then total military victory. Only a couple dozen deaths on the US side, and only a few thousand on the Afghan side. And then, a few days later, Hamid Karzai, CIA asset, was installed as interim President, in the “first BLOODLESS change of leadership in the history of Afghanistan”. Say what? Yes, every Western news outlet in the world called it the first time leadership was changed in that country “without a drop of blood spilt”. Every single news mainstream source in the Western world. WTF?
February 17th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Is not this whole gripe a little self serving to the point of being disingenuous? The corporate run news departments are not giving reporters enough time to really report. Ok, accepted as fact. Perhaps it’s b/c these reporters insist on being paid. They also want their expenses to be picked-up. This money has to come from somewhere. Shareholders demand a return on their investment. For years CBS in the states ran the news department at a huge loss; paid for by the entertainment programming’s advertising revenue. But in the age of 24 hour news it just can’t be done anymore.
Perhaps a more enlightened book would tackle the entire business model of news reporting. And instead of just bitching about the problem it would offer some solution.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
To add to the very accurate post from Steve Roberts : what Galileo sustained was that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, hence his supposed saying “and yet it moves” : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove%21
February 18th, 2008 at 12:03 am
So Nick, you tell us you’ve written a new book about how reporters don’t check their facts; and you get the flat earth thing wrong, the Clinton thing wrong, and Y2K thing wrong. You sure made your point!
That said, he’s right about the news these days, but it goes beyond that. Something very weird is going on and I don’t know whether to blame media, religion, government or education. In end, of course we have no one to blame but ourselves.
But when are we going to say, “Enough of this crap!” Hmmm, maybe someone already has see this NY Times book review: http://tinyurl.com/2e2knu.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Amusing.
So many positive comments from the readers of this article but one thing I picked up from THE ARTICLE is that it makes a lot of POSITIVELY pointed statements and offers no hard and fast proof.
What this article points out to me is that even when we are being told that we are being misled, we are beaing lead and people are happy to cheer that fact while falling into line, like Lemmings, for a once only rush over the edge of the cliff. An experience that is a once in a lifetime thing!
I dont disagree that the media are leading us to wrong conclusions. It happens, so I have proven to myself, a fair bit. However, to line up behind THIS article and use it as the bullet to fire so that you now have the infamous “Smoking gun” is ridiculous.
Stop being lead around by the ring in your nose, people. Examine what you read as you read it. If you have no way to prove the truth or incosistency of something you read, then admit that to yourself at least. Admitting you dont know is the first step towards knowing, should you care to know. Lord help me you only need to look UP at night in order to see the thing that is the most dangerous to the survival of this planet, possibly the solar system too.
If none of what I said makes any sense, there is an old SF short story (cant remember who wrote it now - Niven? RAH? Asimov?) entitled something like “March of the Morons”. It adequately points out what society actually *IS* in 2008 around most of the world. Those parts that it doesnt describe dont read the news nor listen to advice arising from same.
Short answer - grow a brain everyone. I am no genius, just skeptical. You should be, too.
Greg (skeptic but not belonging to that organisation either)
February 18th, 2008 at 3:42 am
“You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago.”
I believe this is true for almost every industry and can be largely attributed to the improvement of productivity due to computers, internet, technology in general, etc. These same computers perhaps given rise to both increased appetite for news and increased laziness in fact checking. There is lots of info on the web but it’s sometimes hard to ascertain what is factual and what is not.
February 18th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
That’s great in depth reporting right there….
Let’s see, 1 minute with google :
Copernicus : 1473 -1543
Galilleo: 1564 - 1642
Eratosthenes (calculated the circumference of the earth) : 276BC - 194BC
First person to prove the earth was round (via circumnavigation) :Juan Sebastián Elcano : 1522 (magellan is sometimes credited with this acolade, but it doesn’t really count since he died half way round).
February 19th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
In Plato’s republic Socrates noted the flaw in the administration of Justice,
” Justice is the art of theft, to be practiced to benefit of our friends and the harm of our enemies”. several susequent pages were devoted to discusion of the difficulties the state has in differentiating between freinds and enemies.
One of the greatest tools utilized today to adhere to this mandate were the economic benefit of the spooks outweights all other considerations is the media ( or lack there of )
Hence the Canadian / International Media will not expose this:
Proven (stolen) Replacement technology for Fossil Fuel Powered Electrical Generation.
note:Canada-Israel Opportunity Fund
Dennis Baker dennisbaker2003@hotmail.com
http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/010/0001/0001/0012/0002/0008/s7_e.htm
Wednesday, March 27 1996
The radiolitic decomposition of organic materials generates hydrogen gas.
Hydrogen gas is a very useful energy course; burns clean with water as the emission by- product. Humans generate a phenomenal amount of organic waste. The United Nations is very concerned about oceanic contamination by organic waste. Human organic waste could be treated to prevent methane generation, then exposed to nuclear waste to generate hydrogen gas. The potential solving of three issues with one action.
http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/010/0001/0001/0012/0002/0008/s7_e.htm
NUCLEAR WASTE UPDATE
A free service from Nuclear Waste News | January 14, 2008
First Plasma-Waste Treatment Facility Slated for Romania
An Israeli company has announced plans to build Romania’s first plasma-waste treatment facility.
Under a $30 million, 25-year build/operate/transfer (BOT) contract, Environmental Energy Resources (EER) will build a plant that uses plasma gasification melting technology. The system — developed by Israeli and Russian scientists at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology — sorts municipal and solid waste in a reactor, where metal particles are separated by magnets, with the remaining waste broken down by high heat.
That organic material is converted into gases, and the remaining waste becomes black gravel suitable for use in infrastructure projects. EER said the system also can break down medical and radioactive waste, thereby providing a waste treatment solution for nuclear power stations.
EER’s shareholders include Urdan Industries Ltd. (TASE: URDN), Shrem Fudim Technologies Ltd. (TASE:SFKT), Makoto Takahashi’s Tokyo Financial Group, the Canada-Israel Opportunity Fund, Leon Recanati and Shlomo Nehama.
–
because I think what you are doing is very essential for the survival of the planet, and anybody who is hindering that needs to be pushed aside.
Dennis Baker
February 19th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
ROFLMAO. The Y2K bug was real! I worked so much overtime before the date change and our entire IT department was on hand over night that New Years Eve. You can say that this is an example of hype in media but you would be wrong. This was very dangerous and critical. A lot of us worked our asses off and gave up our new year eve to prevent. Don’t tell me it didn’t happen or it wasn’t bad. Just because you slept thru it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I have to agree with your general premise however. Global Warming is a huge scam from the socialist watermelons. Oooh! One degree of warming over a hunder years! Scary! The planet is not going to flood or kill us all from heat. CO2 is NOT a forcing agent for warming. There is no evidence that it is. Real science is founded on skepticism. Pretending there is a consensus is a complete lie foisted by the leftist media.
The media also chose the republican presidential front runner before 12 delegates had been won in any primaries. How can the media do that? Because the masses are complete gullible idiots who will believe anything they are told.
9-11 ‘troothers’ who say ‘Steele never melted in fire. Google it!’ are complete idiots. It only takes about 600 degrees before steel loses its structual integrity. Even Bill Maher laughs at the crazy ‘troothers’.
Look at how people are constantly fainting the at the Obamessiah rallies. What fools. Here is a guy who never served a single term in congress as he has spent most of this, his first term, running for president. He has written no laws in Congress. He has no accomplishments. No executive experience. He is even less qualified than Hillary who has two terms as senator. And that isnt enough experiance to be the executive anyway. Obama says he will raise taxes on ‘the rich’ which will send capital and jobs out of the country. He has a plan to rob everyone with a pension or 401K by ‘taking those oil company profits’. It is not against the law to have a profitable business that millions of people invest in. But Obama wants to take your money out of your 401K because he doesn’t understand economics.
The media have foisted this Obamessiah on us too. The stupid, misleading, lying media has given us a lot of horrible outcomes. And there will be more. If the media gets their darling Obamessiah into office then our country will be history as he and the democrat congress will raise up entitlements and taxes until every good jbo has fled the country to places where the taxes on business are not so onerous.
We need to take power away from our Senate and government: we need to see that the FairTax becomes a reality and the 16th amendment is repealed. That will return more power to the common man than any other proposal in the history of our country so naturally the press is dead set against it. http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Answering-Critics-Neal-Boortz/dp/0061540463/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203447394&sr=8-1 It is only $8.00 because the authors are not taking any money from the sale. They want to free us from the IRS. I am ready. I am ready to see trillions of dollars race back into our economy bringing good paying jobs for every one with it.
Naturally the media hates the fair tax because it does not help the political class.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:43 am
Whooooa, Steve(Feb 19th)! What a propoganda rant! Further to Mike’s post (Feb 17th) here is a youtube link with the BBC report in question (incidentally - the BBC claims the original footage of this was accidentally lost. Oops!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7SwOT29gbc
That, coupled with so many other questionable little incidents on that day has certainly left me asking a great many questions.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:50 am
Howard Davies commented:
“Incidentally, where is there a sober, credible account of what happened to the third tower on 9 11? Most of the people I mention this to weren’t even aware there *was* a third tower. ”
Justin replied:
The third tower (WTC 7) collapsed after a flaming 110 story building fell on it. There was an electrical substation situation in the first 10 floors of the base of the building with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. There are many credible accounts that detail the mechanics, engineering, and physics behind its destruction.
Justin, have you actually seen any of the 9-11 footage or this so called evidence? The 110 storey builing you speak of, practically fell into its own footprint as did WTC 7 with only a minimal amount of debris from the main towers hitting building 7. “110 storey building fell on it”, what a joke. You believe “tens of thousands of gallons of fuel” was present based on that evidence? However, one of your comments i believe was acccurate, “There are many credible accounts that detail the mechanics, engineering, and physics behind its destruction.”.. And mosts of those accounts come to the conclusion ‘Controlled Demolition’.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Interesting. I’ll definitely get hold of a copy of the book - though i see its currently sold out (at least on amazon)
Ironically, I just discovered that i’m a perfect example of a member of the public being an easy target for manipulation by the media. Call me gullible, but on reading the above post i thought, ‘oh yes, absolutely!’..
Then….
I just read Mark Borkowski’s article (hes one of the top names in british PR) in response to the accusation that PRs are ‘feeding’ the news, and guess what - now I dont know what to believe!
It’s well worth reading Borkowski’s article…. get yourself a ‘balanced’ picture of whats REALLY going on…..!?
http://www.markborkowski.com/?p=7345
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:37 am
[…] Nick Davies: How “flat earth” news is killing journalism article from Media Workers Against the War […]
February 24th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
It seems to me that powerful people have been putting a spin on the news since Moses came down from the mountain.
The difference today is that, potentially, technology allows a tighter grip on the media than ever before. At present, the Internet works both ways. It lets us discover things that some people would rather we didn’t know and it’s as easy to publish propaganda for a Jihad as for government policy - but it won’t always be so.
One aspect of information war is the phenomenon of the expert. These days, unless you have a PhD in the relevant discipline, you sometimes feel you haven’t even the right to express a view. For example, take this “story”:
http://www.mailarchive.ca/lists/alt.astronomy/2005-07/2500.html
If there’s any truth in this, we could be looking at a sudden and very nasty end of the world. Yet, how many people understand this stuff well enough to even have an opinion on it?
February 25th, 2008 at 7:30 am
[…] A transcription of a speech given by Nick Davies, looking at what has happened to journalism in the last decade (give or take a few orders of magnitude). Its really fascinating, and a highly recommended read. […]
February 25th, 2008 at 9:27 am
[…] How “flat earth” news is killing journalism Research from specialists at Cardiff University [PDF], who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail… found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories. […]
February 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
To be honest most journalists are very badly educated, usually innumerate and have no grasp of history. Secondly they are economically insecure and have to churn out stories as Nick says. Thirdly, the standards and systems for fact checking have declined rapidly as owners have used the arrival of the internet and digital publishing technologies to get rid of so called restrictive practices. But some of these practices were the very thing that ensured a degree of accuracy and investgation. Now a press release is considered sufficient for a fresh journalist to write a story. there is no come back from inaccuracy or distortion - unless someone powerful is hurt, in which case there may be trouble.
So accuracy and investigation have lost their premium, since everything now is about speed and keeping up with the Jones’s. Who is going to reimpose standards and revive some degree of journalistic scepticism. Certainly not those who make plenty of money out of the current set up. Not the government either. Who does that leave - the journalists?
February 25th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
And the only people who ring up to complain are the very same PRs who fed the journalists the story in the first place!
February 26th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
A history student in 2090 will conclude that there’s lots of evidence of people being aware that the basis for the Iraq war was based on a lot of fabricated evidence.
That doesn’t detract from the main point that the dominant PR outlets of the UK and US govns succeeded in shaping the news agenda so that these lies were reported as a fact. How many people believed these lies is debatable but there’s little doubt the reports of 45 minutes from being bombed, anthrax scares, Al Qaeda in Iraq etc were widely reported uncritically.
So how is that different from the ‘flat earth’ theory? Despite the fact that it was wrong it was widely believed and - despite the evidence of a few enlightened critics - became the prevailing orthodoxy.
It’s like those trying to claim we have a balanced press by pointing at the anti-war voices in the papers. They ignore the fact that 90% of the media regurgitates the government propaganda without checking.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Governments and corporations tend to forget that the messages they create to sell their ideas and products are read by people who spend their working lives inside similar industries and organisations. We are all insiders. We all know the exact value of the PR and advertising used to sell products we know quite well. We live in an age where distortion and exaggeration are the norm. And so we have learnt to judge accordingly. It is mankind’s redeeming feature - the ability to laugh at other monkeys.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I heard Nick Davies on Radio 4’s “You And Yours” program today. I was interested enough to track down his book and order a copy.
As he says, flat earth news and propaganda are not new things.
I remember listening to the World Service during the eighties and hearing cold war news which was being told by the BBC. It seemed that the reporting was reliable and because it was from the BBC, believable. One night after hearing a cold war story from the World Service I happened upon the same story from Radio Moscow (told in english) and the slant was very different indeed. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that Radio Moscow and the World service were both BBC productions and both broadcast from the same building.
Another facet of news reporting that I find amazing is how quickly unpopular opinions are dubbed conspiracy or outright crazy. Take for example the homemade film “911: Loose Change” by Dylan Avery. It is easier to find this video under a conspiracy theory heading than it is an alternative view heading. I would ask you to take he time to watch this video, it’s available to see for free on the web.
The only question to answer at the end of it is, is this the alternative view or propaganda that we’re advised to reject?
I’m not quite sure I’ll ever know the answer.
March 8th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Is there any value in taking issue, legally possibly, with organisations who have advertised your job therefore offered you a particular contract, such as “Journalist”, which in reality lacks what is considered essential characterists of that position (due to the lack of requirement for in depth probing, lack of time etc.) so the job isn’t as advertised — your contract has been broken. The organisations shouldn’t be able to have it both ways: advertised for Journalists which makes them look like they intend to do a proper job, but then not require those people to do journalist work. Do you see my point?
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
Joe Gill (Feb 25th) says that most journalists are very badly educated, usually innumerate and have no grasp of history. If this forum is anything to go by they can’t spell either.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
[…] In case you bought into Scott McClellan’s claims that the US media failed to ask questions (of - erm - Scott McClellan) in the run up to war with Iraq (echoed by odd bedfellows like Nick Davies here in the UK), Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay at McClatchy have posted an impressive rebuttal. Here’s what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents: […]
June 12th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
[…] Here is how Nick summed up that research in November 2007: The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. […]