Book review: "Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media" by Nick Davies

For anyone interested in knowing how the media works, I would recommend reading Nick Davies’ excellent book “Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media”. Davies is a veteran British journalist who has seen all the changes in his industry over the last few decades. The picture he paints is not a pretty one. Much of the changes have not been for the better, such that today the mass media operates like a “global village idiot, deeply ignorant and easily led.”

From the Millennium Bug to the existence of WMD in Iraq, used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the media has not told the truth and engaged in what Davies calls “Flat Earth News”. This is when “a story appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes heresy to suggest that it is not true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.” It seems that the media’s role in the build-up to war in 2003 is what compelled Davies to write this book and investigate why truth telling has disintegrated into the way it has. He is aided by a specially commissioned team of researchers from Cardiff University.

What has led to falling standards in the media over the years? Why are journalists today failing to perform the basic functions in their profession such as fact checking and instead recycling second-hand wire copy and PR material? The author traces this trend to the 1960s when the new corporate owners began taking over newspapers and imposing their commercial logic on the industry. The “grocers” as the author likes to call them, such as Rupert Murdoch, cut costs and more costs over time to improve their profits, and at the same time increased the content of newspapers, which resulted in less fact checking and more “churnalism”.

It is not just British newspapers but newspapers across the world that have suffered the same plight as their British counterparts. This means that Flat Earth News has gone global. The fall in quality has made it easier for PR companies and the covert world of intelligence agencies to infiltrate the media. He cites the case of the “NatWest Three” as an example of PR at work. A very successful PR campaign transformed the image of three very corrupt employees of NatWest Bank, who were involved in a scam, into poor innocent victims of American law when faced with the prospect of extradition to the US. There is a whole chapter dealing with the production of propaganda in the media, which is nothing new but seems to have grown significantly since 9/11 without much public debate. Davies is careful to point out, however, that much of the distortion is done by feeding unsuspecting journalists than through directly controlled assets.

The various unwritten rules of news production are laid bare: prefer cheap safe stories, especially with statements from official sources, to tricky expensive ones; avoid the electric fence of the Official Secrets Act and, to a larger extent, libel law; fit the surrounding consensus and give them what they want to hear even if it’s not true; always give both sides of the story just as a safety net;  go along with moral panic; and run stories which are being widely published elsewhere (“Ninja Turtle Symdrome”). When journalists don’t toe the line they can face the consequences – as Andrew Gilligan found out when his story attacked the government for its handling of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons.

Nick Davies is credited for his part in exposing the phone hacking scandal and he touches upon it here in a chapter on the “dark arts”. From bribing police officers and civil servants to using private investigators, the author gives a disturbing insight into the world of the dark arts. It is true that the dividing line as to what is legal and illegal is ill defined, but the greater problem is the greed of newspapers for wanting to make money out of confidential and salacious information.

Nick Davies

The book is very well researched and skilfully written with plenty of examples to back up the author’s points. Indeed, it is the examples in the book that make it such an interesting read. There is a chapter each on three of the most well known British newspapers – The Sunday Times, The Observer and The Daily Mail; unfortunately none of them make for comfortable reading. The seesaw in fortunes of the Insight Team at The Sunday Times, which famously exposed the MI6 agent Kim Philby of being a KGB operative, is a particularly interesting tale that mirrored the change in ownership of the newspaper and its priorities. Although Davies is primarily a Guardian man, he tries to be as objective as possible, criticising both right-wing and left-wing newspapers, but it’s clear he is no fan of Rupert Murdoch.

For those people who have long suspected some falsehood and distortion in the media, this book gives adequate credence to that view. It is not so much that journalists deliberately set out to tell lies, but more the case that circumstances, driven by commercial interests, have led to the current state of affairs. With less time to file their stories, less resources at their disposal and the pressure to adhere to the production rules, truth telling has suffered. Davies doesn’t finish on an optimistic note and I share his pessimism. Everything he has described in the book, he confesses, seems to be symptoms of a disease that has set in and just seems to be getting worse. The book is both an illuminating and depressing account of our global media.

Jimmy Savile: a tragic lesson for everyone

As the allegations of sexual abuse mount, it’s becoming increasingly apparent to a shocked nation that one of their most beloved television stars, the late Jimmy Savile, was in fact a paedophile. The television documentary a few weeks ago by former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas finally blew the cover on the other side of Jimmy Savile – the side the general public rarely got to see. Since then, of course, more and more of Savile’s  victims, who until now had been too scared or simply not been believed, have come forward to tell their stories. Currently there are 340 complaints to the police, and the number is increasing!

Now the question being asked is “why didn’t someone do something earlier?” Why has it taken so long for the truth to come out? It’s becoming increasingly clear that people who worked in the BBC had their suspicions of Jimmy Savile. Some even went so far as to raise matters with their superiors, but nothing was done. Savile was such a high profile and highly influential celebrity, who did so much for charity, that his image seemed impregnable. He was knighted by the Pope and by the Queen.

Victims of sexual abuse often take a long time to pluck up the courage to open up about what happened to them. Feelings of fear, guilt and shame plague them for years. If they were molested when they were young, they may not even have understood what happened to them at the time. Only years later do they realise that they were abused. There is the fear that if they tell someone that they might not be believed. Then there’s the worry of what others might think of them. So it’s not surprising they open up after considerable time.

As the details of Savile’s predatory behaviour emerge, he appears to have been the worst kind of offender, using his celebrity status to maximum effect to prey on young vulnerable girls. But there were clues. In his interviews, especially the ones toward the end of his life, there were ominous hints about the dark side of his character. He wanted to be like King Solomon with a 1,000 wives. In another interview, recorded in a restaurant in Leeds, he talks about sharing a meal with a young girl he finds very attractive and can’t help lusting over. Although I can understand the general public being fooled, I find it difficult to believe that those who knew him on a personal level didn’t suspect anything.

My feeling is that people close to him did have serious fears, but chose to ignore them. They went along with the accepted consensus that he was a lovely man, who did a lot for charity, and was fond of children but nothing more than that. He was perhaps a little eccentric, but aren’t other celebrities too? They didn’t realise that this was a deception that Savile was spinning himself.
The BBC rightfully deserves criticism for not investigating allegations of abuse by Savile much earlier. However, as Fr Lucie-Smith in the Catholic Herald explains, there is all too familiar tendency in human beings to deny shocking offences when confronted with what they know to be wrong. Drawing parallels between the Savile case and recent instances of child abuse within the Catholic Church, he says “things that are too awful to think about do lead people to bury their heads in the sand.” He adds:

“When the German government in the mid-1930s turned against German citizens of Jewish extraction, no one, or hardly anyone, protested. They pretended Kristallnacht somehow had not happened. They went on to ignore Auschwitz. By then they had a massive stake in denial.”

It often takes a lot of courage to go against the grain of accepted consensus and speak out against evil.

This leads me to my next point, which is the media coverage of this story. Isn’t it hypocritical that on their front pages, newspapers like The Sun are scolding the BBC for being a “cesspit” of immorality, yet the very same papers rely on highly sexualised content to sell their products? It was after all the media that created the celebrity figure of Jimmy Savile, colluded with him while he was alive, and it is now the media tearing up every shred of his reputation while he is dead. There is the smell of hypocrisy all around.

The British media often indulges in paroxysms of self-righteous rage. Yet it is better to realise that evil exists everywhere and in everyone, not just in aberrations like the late Jimmy Savile. Sadly the concept of sin has largely gone out of the window in our modern day society of moral relativism. If sin and evil are not fought closer to home early on – within everyone on of us – it is no wonder they can grow and have tragic consequences as in the case of Jimmy Savile.