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Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media Paperback – 1 Jan. 2009
| Nick Davies (Author) See search results for this author |
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Does ‘fake news’ really exist? Find out from the ultimate insider.
After years of working as a respected journalist, Nick Davies, in this shocking exposé, reveals what really goes on behind the scenes of this contentious industry.
From a prestigious newspaper that allowed intelligence agencies to plant fiction in its columns, to the newsroom that routinely rejected stories due to racial bias, to the number of papers that accepted cash bribes. Gripping, thought-provoking and revelatory, this is an insider’s look at one of the most tainted professions.
‘Meticulous, fair-minded and utterly gripping’ Telegraph
‘Powerful and timely...his analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating’ Observer
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication date1 Jan. 2009
- Dimensions12.7 x 2.79 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-100099512688
- ISBN-13978-0099512684
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Meticulous, fair-minded and utterly gripping -- Sam Leith ― Daily Telegraph
If you read newspapers, you MUST read this book -- John Humphrys
A must-read for anyone worried about journalism - which, on this analysis, should be everyone -- Ian Hislop
Powerful and timely...his analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating ― Observer
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About the Author
Nick Davies writes investigative stories for the Guardian, and has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year in British press awards. Between July 2009 and July 2011, he wrote more than a hundred stories about crime in Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. He has written six books including White Lies and Dark Heart, and the bestselling Flat Earth News, exposing falsehood and propaganda in news media. Hack Attack is his latest book.
He has three children and lives in Sussex.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Paperback – 1 Jan 2009 edition (1 Jan. 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0099512688
- ISBN-13 : 978-0099512684
- Dimensions : 12.7 x 2.79 x 20.32 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 223,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 134 in Algorithmic Programming
- 247 in Language Communication Reference
- 373 in Business Ethics (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the authors

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Nick Davies writes investigative stories for the Guardian, and has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year in British press awards.
Apart from his work on newspapers, he also makes television documentaries and he has written four books: White Lies, which uncovered a racist miscarriage of justice in Texas; Murder on Ward Four, which examined the collapse of the NHS through the murder of children by Nurse Beverly Allitt; Dark Heart, a journey through the wasteland of British poverty; and Flat Earth News, exposing the shocking corruption of today's media.
He has three children and lives in Sussex.
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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.
'appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true. The most powerful institutions on the planet insist that it is true, but it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.' (p.32)
Davies provides an appetising smorgasbord of examples, from the idea that the Millenium Bug would cause computer systems round the world to collapse, and that heroin is a deadly poison, through to the Weapons of Mass Destruction which Saddam Hussein could launch in 45 minutes.
Why are Flat Earth stories so prevalent? Davies' diagnosis is that the economic incentives to verify stories are weak. Fact checking takes time, money and energy. But the penalties for printing inaccurate stories are minimal: only the richest can afford to use the libel laws and the Press Complaints Commission is ludicrously ineffective. When verification is so costly, and the risk of punishment so small, why bother?
Davies refers to an interesting study by a group at Cardiff University which analysed the source of 2,207 stories in the Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and Daily Mail over a two week period. They found that:
60% were wholly wire copy and/or PR material
20% contained elements of wire copy and/or PR material to which other elements had been added
8% were of unknown source
12% had been generated by the reporters themselves
In other words, at least 80% of stories were 'prepackaged' stories taken from wire copy (normally the Press Association) or PR material; at most 20% were original journalism.
The similarity of stories across different newspapers results from the fact that they typically come from the same source.
Wittgenstein once pointed out that you cannot check whether a story in a newspaper is true by buying another copy of the same paper. What the Cardiff research shows is that you usually cannot check whether a story is true by buying a copy of a different paper either.
Perhaps even more alarming than plagiarism is the use of the 'Dark Arts': hiring private investigators to gather stories by various means ranging from blagging to phone hacking. Here, the stories may be true, but the means by which they are obtained are illegal. Davies compellingly documents the endemic use of these techniques by the British media.
The book closes with chapters on the decline of investigative journalism at the Sunday Times and Observer, followed by a savage swipe at the Daily Mail.
It's an exhilirating helicopter ride over some of the most important UK news stories of the last twenty years. The one weakness, and it is an important weakness, is the absence of any references. For a book which insists on the need to chase everything back to the original source, it is very odd that Davies should provide no documentation for his claims.
For example, there is no reference to the title or authors of the Cardiff report. This appears to be 'The Quality & Independence of British Journalism', undated, by Prof. Justin Lewis at el. This is currently available on the Cardiff University website. But there is a puzzle about this. In Flat Earth News, Davies says 'I commissioned specialist researchers from the journalism department of Cardiff University to investigate a sample of stories...'. But in the Cardiff report, there is no mention of Nick Davies or of the fact (if it is a fact) that he commissioned the report. If he did, surely the authors should have mentioned this.
Incidentally, the idea that there was ever a time when it was widely accepted that the Earth is flat is itself a myth. The Greeks knew it is a sphere (more or less), the medieval world knew it as well. Or so at least it says on wikipedia...




