Nick Davies (2008) Flat Earth News, London, Chatto & Windus. 408 pages. ISBN-13. 9780701181451. £17.99 paperback

The Bigger Picture

Journalists, especially those working for newspapers, are notoriously sensitive to criticism, even from their fellow workers. Indeed, when Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army uttered the immortal lines ‘they don’t like it up ‘em’, it was clearly journalists and not Germans that he had in mind. As Nick Davies puts it in Flat Earth News: ‘dog doesn’t eat dog. That’s always been the rule in Fleet Street. We dig into the world of politics and finance and sport and policing and entertainment. We dig wherever we like – but not in our own back garden’. It was thus not altogether surprising that journalistic responses to Nick Davies’ best-selling book were not entirely positive – particularly amongst the upper echelons of Fleet Street, at which the bulk of his barbs were aimed.

A common line of attack was to accuse Davies of harping back to a golden age of the press. Thus in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on February 8th, 2008, Simon Jenkins argued that journalists ‘should not chastise themselves with fantasies of past virtue’ (see link below) whilst Peter Preston in the Guardian the following day developed this theme further. According to Preston, Davies, whom at one point he gratuitously refers to as Saint Nick, ‘believes that, once upon a time, the press enjoyed a golden age. He can’t quite put a date to it … But in any case, things ain’t what they used to be. Then (whenever then was) journalists had time to check agency copy, make their own calls, go out and order coffee; time to think. Now all that’s gone to hell on a turbo-charged handcart’. However, for Preston the supposed ‘golden age’ was also the era of ‘Beaverbrook, union disputes stopping the presses, and regional mini-barons intervening to keep their Rotary Club chums out of the headlines. It is a dream and a confection. It is also chock-full of self-deception’. And in the Press Gazette February 15th, David Leppard, former editor of the Sunday Times Insight team and the subject of considerable criticism in the book, claimed that: ‘according to Davies, nearly all of us – except him – have abandoned the standards of some bygone golden era’.

The only problem, however, is that Flat Earth News, which is very well informed about the history of journalism, quite explicitly rejects the notion of any golden age. Thus, as Davies clearly states: ‘there never was some kind of golden age when all journalists were free to tell the truth. They have always had to work against the clock and they have always been the targets of attempts to interfere in their stories. They have always been – as they still are – restrained by media law which, in Britain, remains particularly restrictive in its approach to official secrecy and libel. There always were accidental screw-ups and deliberate lies’. Davies furnishes various examples of just how bad journalism could be in the past, most notably coverage of black people by the US press in the nineteenth century which was distinguished by ‘casual news reports about meetings of the Ku Klux Klan as a good Christian organisation; plenty of comfortable jokes about the stupidity of poor niggers’ and reports such as ‘the lynching picnic was postponed until Saturday … A thrilling time is expected here’.

But what is really at stake in such criticisms are not different views of the history of journalism but different conceptions of journalism itself – in particular the old dispute about whether journalism is a trade or a profession. On this point, Preston is clearly a tradesman, arguing that ‘low blows and dodgy statistics are also a part of the business all journalists really belong to – which … is a trade, and a rough one, at that’. Preston concludes that ‘one inescapable point about journalism is that, base or lofty, ruthless or idealistic, it is a mess, and always has been. That shouldn’t stop us from trying to clean it up point by point, problem by problem. We can’t afford not to be serious about our serious trade. But nor – like rather too many tremulous tradesmen – should we wallow in a froth of self-loathing that blots out the good and the necessary and the essential, too’.

A similar, if more cynical, line was followed by Tom Fort in the Sunday Telegraph, February 24th, who stated that: ‘Nick Davies is a distinguished reporter who specialises in very long and depressing stories for The Guardian on subjects most other journalists prefer to leave untouched, such as poverty and the failings of the criminal justice system. He has now turned his virtuous investigative eye on his own profession. His reaction is almost spinsterish in its horror. Davies’ notion of what journalists and journalism are for is idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. Whoever told him that this is an industry “supposedly dedicated” – as he puts it in his prologue – “to telling the truth”? Where did he get the idea that journalists should be, or ever have been, reluctant to lie, cheat, deceive and resort to low tricks of every kind?’

However, the clearest evidence that Davies’ conception of journalism is very different from that of some of his colleagues is provided by a particularly revealing response to one of the most symptomatic examples of ‘churnalism’ in the book, which concerns a story put out in 2006 by the Press Association about a football fan who insured himself against emotional trauma in the event of England failing in the World Cup. As Davies himself puts it: this story contains all the ‘essential ingredients for the concoction of all Flat Earth News – an unreliable statement created by outsiders, usually for their own commercial or political benefit, injected via a wire agency into the arteries of the media, through which it then circulates around the whole body of global communication. And, most important, at every stage, as it passes through the hands of all those journalists, nobody checks it’. Many people might react to this tale with horror, or simply weary resignation, but not Jon Harris, the managing director of Cavendish Press, who responded in the Press Gazette, February 15th that it was ‘clearly a fabricated stunt and has been done to death before, but if it still entertains the reader, then who cares?’ Harris is clearly a total stranger to irony, as nothing could illustrate more starkly Davies’ contention that one of the rules of modern journalism is ‘if we can sell it, we’ll tell it’, and that editorial judgement has collapsed under the enormous pressure to ‘give people what they want’.

Particularly crass though it may be, Harris’ response actually shares a tendency with some of the more positive responses to the book, namely to miss the bigger picture and to fail to see the wood for the trees. Drawn as they are to easily communicable and digestible statistics (not to mention press releases), most journalists homed in on the fact that, out of 2000 news stories in The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent and Mail, only 12per cent were wholly composed of material researched by reporters, and 80 per cent were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. (The make-up of the remaining 8 per cent was unclear). Furthermore, the ‘facts’ had been thoroughly checked in only 12 per cent of the stories. As Davies himself put it in the Guardian, February 4th: ‘the implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have geneally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda’. Furthermore, Davies’ researchers discovered that ‘the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time. Add that to all of the traditional limits on journalists’ trying to find the truth, and you can see why the mass media generally are no longer a reliable source of information’.

However, this is only part of the story, albeit an important one. Particularly in Chapter 4, ‘The Rules of Production’, Davies broadens his analysis very considerably to take in all the various factors which combine to ensure that certain kinds of stories are routinely accepted as being newsworthy and that others are equally routinely rejected. And although Davies doesn’t actually say so, what we have here is nothing less than a version of Herman and Chomsky propaganda model, with the five filters replaced by ten rules. These include: run cheap stories, select safe facts, avoid the electric fence, select safe ideas, give them want they want, and go with the moral panic. Davies sums up his model thus: ‘the rules of production of the news factory themselves impose their own demands as media outlets pick easy stories with safe facts and safe ideas, clustering around official sources for protection, reducing everything they touch to simplicity without understanding, recycling consensus facts and ideas regardless of their validity because that is what the punters expect, joining any passing moral panic, obsessively covering the same stories as their competitors. Arbitrary, unreliable and conservative. Most worrying, however, this flow of falsehood and distortion through the news factory is clearly being manipulated, by the overt world of PR and the covert world of intelligence and strategic communications’. And in a particularly telling comment he remarks that ‘there is no need for a totalitarian regime when the censorship of commerce runs its blue pencil through every story’, although what is especially chilling about the book is the way in which it shows commercial and political forces working together to produce forms of censorship the more dangerous for being largely covert and invisible.

Davies concludes that ‘what we are looking at here is a global collapse of information-gathering and truth-telling. And that leaves us in a kind of knowledge chaos, where the very subject matter of global debate is shifted from the essential to the arbitrary; where government policy, cultural values, widespread assumptions, declarations of war and attempts at peace all turn out to be poisoned by distortion; where ignorance is accepted as knowledge and falsehood is accepted as truth’. Perhaps, then, it’s no wonder that Fleet Street journalists ignored the wider picture.

Link:

Comment by Simon Jenkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/08/politics.media