Author under fire over Iraq exposé
A campaign is afoot to suppress the brilliant new book Flat Earth News by award-winning journalist Nick Davies analysing the media’s collective failure on Iraq.
The Sunday Times is preparing to sue Davies for libel, as reportedly is the Observer’s former political editor. One executive editor has threatened to punch him in the face, while another has promised to bankrupt him. Another has tried to smear him with a made-up story about his private life.
More importantly, the media’s big guns have been wheeled out to rubbish the book in the crudest terms. As Davies himself wrote to the Times last week: “I am discovering what it is like to be on the receiving end of the press.”
Editors, former editors, managing editors, media professors – a string of top media people have come out to attack the book’s central observation that that the modern media are churning out PR to make money, leaving them wide open to manipulation by the rich, the powerful and the warmongers.
Moreover, the more subtle commentators on the right are trying to claim the book as their own. So John Lloyd of the Financial Times says that Flat Earth News merely shows how cynical journalism has become, repeating his Blairite mantra that “comment” is “papering over the cracks down which facts and investigation have disappeared”. There is a whiff off this attempt to co-opt Davies for the right in the Spectator’s review of his book.
You can follow the story in detail on the Press Gazette’s excellent blog, where you will also find a few insightful and sympathetic reviews.
Davies has replied to some of the attacks here and here. He writes: “What’s wonderful, of course, is the irony of seeing senior journalists attacking the book by reproducing precisely the kind of falsehood and distortion which it attempts to expose.”
This campaign by the media elite is so obviously self-serving – no editor of a national newspaper or broadcaster is going to admit that his or her product is a sham. It is striking how none of the critiques of Flat Earth News take up Davies’ points about media ownership and the crucial role of Murdoch in crushing the media trade unions at Wapping in 1986.
But Davies has taken on a powerful and ruthless establishment. Anti-war media workers must give him every support. As Davies explains on page 1 of his book, his research “started with a single, notorious story – the long and twisted saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. … It’s about everything I found when I started trying to explain how we managed to do so badly in covering what is probably the biggest single story of our era.”
Disgust with the “war on terror” runs right through this book. The anti-war movement must get behind its author.
Email him here: www.flatearthnews.net/contact
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