Do you remember a Y2K bug? When the world's computer systems were to melt down in an Armageddon of vital services failure and possible nuclear accidents?
The Y2K panic is a great example of flat-Earth news: something that gets passed on in the media chain from those unsure to those who might have a vested interest in maintaining it as fact to those who are completely ignorant, and in the process gets bigger and bigger and - almost accidentally - assumes a status of orthodox, accepted truth.
Such developments, though, although commonplace in science and technology news and frequently behind moral and health panics, are only the beginning of the story.
Nick Davies is less interested in how such stories originate and why they are believed and more in asking "why nobody checked?".
This book explores the reasons for the decline of investigative journalism and paints the resulting media landscape that is more than ever full of distortion, imbalance and plain fabrication.
It's a well organised account, combining academic research, opinions and experiences of numerous journalists and several case stories (themselves examples of investigative journalism).
Modern journalism is more often than not "churnalism": endless recycling - without performing any checks - of stories run by wire agencies and press releases from business and government PR departments.
However tempting is to see a propaganda conspiracy at work, Davies has a simpler, and in a way more worrying and more sinister mechanism: that of commercial, money-making priorities.
In the last thirty or so years, less and less reporters (especially local ones, working in the field, finding and checking stories) have to file more and more stories on shorter and shorter deadlines. This declining ratio of column inches to headcount is one of the most important reason for the decline in standards and increasing reliance on ready-made "news" served on the plate by the wire agencies and PR departments.
The time pressure and lack of resources to investigate and follow up is combined with a number of unspoken but pervasive "rules of production". Stories have to be cheap and easy to report, with safe facts and safe ideas.
The commercial mechanisms at work in the press have been more recently reinforced and extended by an organised propaganda machine of the governments in general (and the military in particular).
The chapter on rules of news production was particularly well written, convincing and enlightening. The section dealing with emerging government/military propaganda machine working on a global scale was fascinating and occasionally shocking. It's hard to believe the extent of actual fabrication - not just distortion, bias and selective reporting, but blatantly making up things - that goes on.
Davies attempts to be reasonably balanced although his progressive beliefs occasionally do influence his judgements.
He spends a lot of time lamenting the decline of investigative journalism and small budgets for "real journalism" and then produces an extensive account of Daily Mail activities that suggests just the opposite. I know that Davies thinks that Mail does it in an unworthy cause (and I very much agree with him) but I suspect his attitude to the use of "dark arts" would be a little bit more forgiving if it came from his side of political allegiance.
The book seems to be well researched and Davies offers plentiful examples, quotes from printed media and personal communications to back up his argument. Where he fails is in providing no source information. The citations in the text are usually attributed, but often not very precisely (e.g. with a name of the author and the title of the source, but with no date information) and there is no list of sources, no footnotes, no bibliography, no endnotes. Davies' website provides explanations, extra information and source material to several issues covered in the book but seven (even extensive) footnotes don't amount to comprehensive referencing.
Still, and despite the more technical shortcomings, Flat Earth News is a must for all that read newspapers, watch TV and have any interest at all in what passes for information in the current age. It's a truly riveting account and occasionally shocking.
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