Books
Meet the press
by Helen Sissons
British journalist Nick Davies reveals the failures of his Fourth Estate colleagues.
I approached Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News with a sense of foreboding. Like many journalists, I have known for some time that there is something seriously wrong with the profession, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to learn the scale of the problem.
The book has already been the subject of angry debate among journalists in Britain. Many feel Davies, an award-winning reporter for the Guardian newspaper with a distinguished record in investigative journalism, has dobbed in his colleagues.
Davies admits it.
He has broken Fleet Street’s unwritten rule by investigating his fellow journalists: “Dog does not eat dog.”
But after reading Flat Earth News’ nearly 400 pages uncovering the failures of the Fourth Estate, I believe his actions are justified and his case largely proved.
He did it, he says, because every profession has its defining value. For journalists, the value is honesty, the attempt to tell the truth. That ethic has been overwhelmed by the mass production of ignorance.
Meticulously researched and compelling to read, his book catalogues example after example proving that much of what appears in several of the most respected newspapers on the planet is distortion, propaganda and worse – plain wrong. That is flat earth news.
“Finally,” he writes. “I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.”
To qualify as flat earth news, Davies says, a story must be widely accepted as true. Moreover, it becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true – even if it is -riddled with falsehood and inaccuracy.
Take the millennium bug story. Remember the catastrophe in the developed world when all computers failed at midnight on January 1, 2000. No?
But you do remember the media reports that predicted, with certainty, it would happen. How patients would die when hospital equipment shut down, banks would collapse and miss-iles could be launched.
In the event, the only rockets launched were the fireworks kind, and the only headaches were alcohol-induced. Oh, a tide gauge failed in Ports-mouth harbour.
How could so many journalists and media organisations be the purveyors of so much dangerous nonsense?
Davies argues convincingly that ignorance is at the root of media failure.
“Most of the time, most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong; they don’t know.”
They don’t know, Davies says, because they haven’t checked.
Davies, on the other hand, did do some checking. He asked researchers at Cardiff University to quantify what was happening in the British press.
The team looked at a fortnight’s -production from the quality national papers and analysed more than 2000 UK news pieces.
They focused on two things: the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases, and the number that were taken straight from the main British news agency, the Press Association. The results were not pretty. They found 80% of news is at least partially made up of recycled news wire or PR copy. Only 12% of the stories were provably based on material generated by Fleet Street reporters.
They also found a staggering 70% of stories that relied on a specific statement of fact showed no corroboration.
Journalists, Davies concluded, have turned from reporters into what he calls churnalists (although he didn’t coin the phrase). They simply churn out stories based on second-hand material that arrives in the newsroom either on the wires or in press releases.
They no longer decide what is news.
Let’s be honest, anyone who has worked in a newsroom in the past 10 years knows this is happening.
Davies blames changes in journalism practice: the cutting of newsroom numbers and the increase in pages output – the “never mind the quality feel the width” school of journalism, which prevents journalists discovering the truth because they don’t have time to check what they write.
My own research interest lies in this area. Although there has yet to be a definitive study of New Zealand journalism to match Davies’ indictment of the British media, we can expect to find similar results here and in Australia.
News organisations in this region are subject to the same harsh financial realities as their British counterparts, and the relentless flow of information from the PR industry also threatens to drown independent journalism.
My PhD study and ongoing work with colleagues in the School of Communication Studies at AUT University could produce some interesting results over the next year or two.
Flat Earth News is a passionately argued and important book that should be read by every journalist and student journalist. Unfortunately, Davies doesn’t have a silver-bullet solution. In fact, he is pessimistic about the future of the news industry.
Personally, I have never believed there was a golden age of journalism. But, now that I’ve read this book, if I had to choose a colour description of today’s journalism, it would be bubonic brown.
FLAT EARTH NEWS, by Nick Davies (Chatto & Windus, $59.99).
