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Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media

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Author: Nick Davies
Publisher: Chatto and Windus
Category: Book

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Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

10 reviews
Sales Rank: 191

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.7

ISBN: 0701181451
EAN: 9780701181451
ASIN: 0701181451

Publication Date: February 7, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new book dispatched from UK

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Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Generalisations, deletions, distortions May 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I'm partway through this book. Enjoying it thoroughly. I'm learning a lot from it.

I used to think journalists were lazy and would just publish any rubbish, or government spin they were fed.

I now know that Phil Space is the great journalistic archetype, and that he or she will indeed publish any rubbish sent their way. More usefully I now know why they have to do this, and the pressures of time and resource they are forced to operate under.

The great themes of capitalism- destroy professions, deskill, reduce terms and conditions, demand more for less, pretend it's all getting better, confuse change with progress, display themselves.

Sadly as consumers we do not demand enough of our newspapers so the grocer proprietors get away with churnalism, and a lower quality product.

This book is excellent, and it helps me understand the pressures journalists are working under. We have the connected world wide web but papers are getting narrower in their sourcing and coverage. Something's wrong, and maybe the blogs are the way out of this.

Whatever the answer this book will help you understand the problem.

5 out of 5 stars

Required Reading May 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I don't think I will ever quite be the same after reading this ground breaking book. Mr Davies has written an entirely original work which is good to read, intellectually rigorous, and meticulously balanced.Like Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile says 'I guess I stopped believing in the early morning news'. Now I have read Flat Earth News I know why. The most telling aspect, in my opinion is that one learns that journalism, like so many other aspects of modern day working life, has been degraded entirely by the so-called good of unbridled and counter-productive capitalism. Thoroughly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

Bloated - got a bit dull April 23, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I'm a fan of Nick Davies. Dark Heart was excellent. However, I was disappointed with his latest offering. It just wasn't up to scratch I'm afraid.

The concepts were good and I would say I generally enjoyed the first half of the book. However Davies fell into a trap. He is not alone; many of our best left-wing writers are in there with him. He spent far too much of the book boring his readers about the government's manipulation of the press over the war in Iraq. I found myself skipping pages and pages of examples of this. All true I'm sure - it just didn't add anything for me.

It is not badly written. It is very interesting. It just needs a harsher edit.

5 out of 5 stars

Why are Newspapers so Cheap? April 12, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I brought this book after reading a few snippets in Private Eye. All I can say is that Nick Davis has written a fascinating insight into the journalism business in the UK. By writing a truly insightful book with an abundance of hard facts, Davis answers the question indirectly as to why newspapers are so cheap in the UK. The Sun can be purchased for 20p these days; I wonder why? Davis not only addresses why the UK media is so distorted; but how.

As he mentions in the chapter `The Private Life of Public Relation', PR firms inject falsehood into the British media so surreptitiously which the weekly columnists are completely oblivious to. For instance, he cites the case of the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips who wrote "a series of outspoken columns denouncing the whole concept of man-made climate change". Davis goes on to mention one of her articles in the Mail in February 2002 which said `The latest evidence is provided in a report published today by the European Science and Environmental Forum, in which a group of the most eminent scientists from Britain and America shed the theory'. Fair play to Phillips for doing her research, but was it researched enough? Davis gives us the pleasure of looking deeper into the roots of the story and writes "the forum whose work she {Phillips} was quoting was, in truth, yet another pseudo-group, created with the help of two PR agencies (APCO Worldwide and Burson-Marsteller) with the specific intent of campaigning against restrictions on corporate activity". He also mentions how the report "Phillips referred in such glowing terms was recycled work which had been funded by Exxon".

This is just one of many fascinating examples on how the minds of ordinary British folk are distorted so unnoticeably that many people regard what they read as the truth. And its not just the tabloids. Davis cites many examples from the likes of the Times to the Guardian that have been proven guilty of misleading their readers on a mass scale. If there is one book I could recommend anyone it would be this. I have been reading papers for some time now, and this book will completely change the way you read and look at things. It can even be quite fun reading the papers and trying to pick out stories that have been influenced by PR; it's amusing to make a game out of it.

Overall I would give this book 5 stars for its plethora of research and insights that can prove beneficial to anybody who likes to be informed.

5 out of 5 stars

Very useful study of the media April 2, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

Author and journalist Nick Davies has written one of the best exposes of the media. The book started when he saw that the government's lies about Iraqi WMD became widely accepted as true because too many in his profession spread them uncritically. As he writes, journalism without checking is like a body without an immune system.

Commercial forces are the main obstacle to truth-telling journalism. The owners cut costs by cutting staff and local news suppliers, by running cheap stories, choosing safe facts and ideas, avoiding upsetting the powerful, giving both sides of the story (unless it's the official story), giving the readers what they want to believe, and going with moral panics.

He cites a Cardiff University study of four quality papers which found that 60% of their home news stories were wholly from wire agencies, mainly the Press Association, or PR material, 20% partially so, 8% from unknown sources, and just 12% generated by reporters. The Press Association reports only what is said, it has no time to check whether it is true. There are now more PR people, 47,800, than journalists, 45,000.

News websites run by media firms recycle 50% of their stories from the two international wire agencies, Associated Press and Reuters; those run by internet firms recycle 85% of their stories from those two. On a typical day, Google News offered `14,000' stories - actually retelling just 24 events.

The government has 1,500 press officers, issues 20,000 press releases a year, and also spends millions more of our money on PR firms. The Foreign Office spends 600 million a year on `public diplomacy'. The CIA spent $265 million on `information operations' in 1978 alone, more than the world's three biggest news agencies together. It focuses its efforts on the New York Times, CBS, Newsweek and Time.

Davies notes the non-stories - bin Laden before 9/11, 80% of world's people living below the poverty line, poverty and inequality surging since the 1980s, wars in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Congo and Nepal, the global water shortage, and the vast expansion of tax havens (a third of the world's GDP goes through them).

He notes how the scare about heroin, which is not a poison, led to the rise of the black market and the consequent `war' on drugs, which now costs the USA $49 billion a year. In Britain, every pound the state spends on prohibition stimulates 4 worth of crime. Again, the nuclear power scare is based on lies: Chernobyl killed just 56 people (World Health Organisation figure), not the six million that Greenpeace's Russian representative claimed.

Finally, Davies shows how Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Neil destroyed the Sunday Times and its Insight team, how the Observer suppressed stories that disproved the government's claims about WMD and how Paul Dacre rules the Daily Mail through fear.