[DEBATE] : Flat Earth News

[Dominic Tweedie]

Riots, Terrorism etc


John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 6 March 2008

Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, published by Chatto, 408 pages, ISBN:
9780701181451


'Important' is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means
something like 'slightly above average', or 'I was at university with
her,' or 'I couldn't be bothered to read it so I'm giving a quote
instead.' Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean 'a book
likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about
the same subject'. Nick Davies's Flat Earth News, however, is a
genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently,
the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.
Davies's book explains something easy to notice and complain about but
hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and
attenuation of the British press. It's not literal thinness: the
papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less
in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to
opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things
out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the
impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and
offers no hope that things will improve.

His book starts at the point at which he got interested in the story
of what he calls 'flat earth news': 'A story appears to be true. It is
widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not
true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and
propaganda.' That's flat earth news, and Davies became interested in
the phenomenon, via the story of the millennium bug. How on earth did
so many papers get sucked into producing so many millions of words of,
it turns out, total nonsense about the impending implosion of all
government, all commerce, all human activity, by the catastrophe which
was going to be caused by the bug? 'National Health Service patients
could die' (Telegraph); 'Banks could collapse' (Guardian); 'Riots,
terrorism and a health crisis' (Sunday Mirror); 'Pensions
contributions could be wiped out' (Independent); 'Nato alert over
Russian missile millennium bug' (Times). The British government spent
a figure variously reported as £396 million, £430 million and £788
million. And then, on the big night, a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth
harbour. That was pretty much it. Countries which had spent next to
nothing – Russia, for instance, whose government of 140 million
citizens spent less on the bug than British Airways – had no problems.

There are several ways of looking at this story, which has some of the
aspects of a panic and some of those of a hoax or job-creation
scheme.[*] Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of
words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists
who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply
didn't know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most
basic function of journalism, in Davies's view, is to check facts.
Journalists don't just pass on what they're told without making an
effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don't. In practice,
contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to
verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost
defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic.

Nick Davies is an unusual figure in British journalism, mainly because
he has persisted in holding the admirable belief that reporting is the
central task of the trade. Journalists report much less than they used
to, and much less than they should, as the papers have switched over
to a reliance on columnists and opinion. Back in the day, an ambitious
young toad going into journalism would have seen All the President's
Men once too often, and would dream of bringing down governments with
a single scoop. Good luck to them. Davies was like that. Today the
equivalent ambitious young toad would dream of having a column with
their picture at the top, as a precursor to a well-timed move to TV or
politics or some other form of showbiz.
Davies, however, is still a believer in legwork and in getting the
story first-hand. This led him to recruit researchers at Cardiff
University's school of journalism to quantify what was happening in
the British press. The result is illuminating and grim. The team
looked at a fortnight's production from the posh papers and the Daily
Mail, and analysed in the process 2207 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 amazing,
and not in a good way.

"They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories
consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a
further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to
which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of
the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left
only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all
the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest
quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories
were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went
on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of
fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed
fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per
cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had
been thoroughly checked."

So only 12 per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story that
a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and only
12 per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten wire
copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies's stinging
coinage, 'churnalism'. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin.
As for the wire copy, most of it comes from the Press Association:

"When the queen wants to talk to the world, she gives a statement to
the Press Association. When the poet laureate wants to publish a poem,
he files it to the Press Association. Every government department,
every major corporation, every police service and health trust and
education authority delivers its official announcements to the Press
Association. It is the primary conveyor belt along which information
reaches national media in Britain."

The boffins in Cardiff found that 30 per cent of home news stories are
direct rewrites of PA and other news agency copy; another 19 per cent
are 'largely reproduced' from this copy; another 21 per cent
'contained elements' of it. That's 70 per cent of news stories wholly
or in part from wire copy. The general rule in journalism,
increasingly honoured more in the breach than the observance, is that
a story has to have two sources to be confirmed, but according to BBC
guidelines, 'the Press Association can be treated as a confirmed,
single source.' That practice is widespread.

As a result, it matters deeply what the PA actually does – and here
Davies has more grimness to impart. The agency's network of reporters
is stretched increasingly thin, with, for instance, four reporters
(including trainees) to cover the whole of Cardiff, South Wales and
the Welsh Assembly. The staffers, according to one of them, write an
average of ten stories in a single shift: 'I don't usually spend more
than an hour on a story.' The emphasis is on catching what people say
accurately. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, puts it, 'our role is
attributable journalism – what someone has got to say. What is
important is in quote marks.' If the government says Saddam has WMD,
that's what the PA will report. Because the PA is the basis for such a
huge proportion of what's in the papers, and because its stories tend
not to be checked, it is a highly effective way for PRs to plant
stories across all the national media simultaneously. 'It is
infinitely preferable logistically to send it to the PA than to try
and contact 150 journalists,' one of Davies's sources, a PR who works
for one of the political parties, told him. 'And we are rarely
subjected to the sort of cross-examination that, say, the Sun or the
Times would give us. PA does not do as much of the probing and
difficult questions. They are journalists but to some extent they are
an information service.'

So we have arrived at a place where 'the heart of modern journalism'
has become 'the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand
material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial
interests of those who provide it'. In the old days, at this point in
the story, it would be time to Name the Guilty Men. They would once
have been the evil proprietors, top-hatted cigar-smoking manipulators
of public opinion. I don't agree with the conspiracy theory of the
proprietor press, nor does Davies: he thinks that it's sheer
commercial pressure that is to blame. It's the pressure on costs – to
produce more, cheaper copy – that is the ultimate culprit for the
state of the modern press.

Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is
exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need
to be cheap, meaning 'quick to cover', 'safe to publish'; they need to
'select safe facts' preferably from official sources; they need to
'avoid the electric fence', sources of guaranteed trouble such as the
libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on 'safe ideas' and
contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or
context-rich problems; and always to 'give both sides of the story'
('balance means never having to say you're sorry – because you haven't
said anything'). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue
stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of
celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral
panic. That's the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of
the newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler
effects too. There is more space to fill – in the British papers,
three times as much – but no equivalent expansion of the resources to
do the work. Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In
1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006,
the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141
foreign correspondents to cover the whole world.

As the pressures on journalism have increased, so the PR industry has
come along with what appears to be a solution. Want news? We'll give
it to you. Britain now has 47,800 PR people to 45,000 journalists. It
isn't the case that PRs just beg for coverage for their clients:
they're much more cunning than that. Once one grows alert to the
question, you can see PR influence almost everywhere in the press. The
greatly missed Auberon Waugh used to say that behind any claim in any
way interesting, striking or surprising in the news, there was either
someone demanding more government money or a press release. That is
truer than ever, only these days the press release will announce the
result of a survey (a favourite PR tactic) or a 'release' statement
from a phoney pressure group, such as one of the many set up to create
uncertainty over the question of climate change. These pressure groups
are known as 'astroturf' in the PR industry, because their grass-roots
are fake, but that doesn't stop their statements and surveys from
getting on the news.

PR is not exactly the villain of the piece, but Davies is persuasive
about its all-pervading nature in modern journalism, and also about
the increasing sophistication of its techniques. He cites the way the
'NatWest Three', the British bankers involved in the Enron frauds,
managed to have themselves depicted as victims of the American legal
system, with businessmen, civil rights pressure groups and MPs all
campaigning on their behalf, when, in truth, they were total crooks.
There are plenty of other examples in Flat Earth News. Davies,
informed by his knowledge of PR, even has a fresh angle on Alastair
Campbell and the Kelly affair. In his account, 'Campbell used it as a
decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which
was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction did not exist.' Four weeks after the
broadcast of Andrew Gilligan's Today story, Campbell had not asked for
an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC
complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with
Gilligan's boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made 'three key moves':
on 25 June he denounced Gilligan's story to the Select Committee on
Foreign Affairs ('Until the BBC acknowledges that is a lie, I will
keep banging on'); on 26 June he wrote to Sambrook demanding a reply
that same day, and released his own letter to the press; on 27 June he
more or less invited himself onto Channel Four News to attack the BBC,
live. Davies observes: 'This move finally established the decoy story
as the main media line. The original questions about the Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction were shunted into the sidings. Several political
reporters wrote at the time that this looked like a diversionary
tactic. Nonetheless, all of them agreed to be diverted. PR works.'
This explains what Campbell meant, as recorded in his diary for 25
June: 'Flank opened on the BBC.'

Davies adds a few chapters of detail on the ways in which the papers
have gone astray: the industry-wide use of bent private detectives,
the culture of error at the Daily Mail, the ease with which the
government co-opted the Observer to make the case for war in Iraq.
These chapters aren't really necessary for the central thrust of the
book, even though Davies's specifics are uncheering. For instance, in
Britain only the rich can sue for libel; everyone else has to seek
remedy via the Press Complaints Commission, set up by the industry to
regulate itself. But the PCC rejects 90.2 per cent of all complaints
on technical grounds without investigation. Of the 28,227 complaints
received by the commission over ten years, 197 were upheld by a PCC
adjudication: 0.69 per cent. The one or two points at which Davies
disses fellow investigative journalists have a strangely ad hominem
feel; there are moments when it seems old grudges are playing a role.
This has in turn led to something of a backlash in early reviews of
Flat Earth News, including a bizarrely hostile (as opposed to merely
negative) review by Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian, Davies's
paper, from 1975 to 1995. Preston had a number of harsh things to say
about 'Saint Nick', one of which had some traction: that he
exaggerates the extent to which there was once a golden age of the
British press. True. But all these details are less shocking than the
more general data about the broad trend towards churnalism.

So this is Davies's ultra-bleak portrait. The British news media are
crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed,
corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of
independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of
reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial
interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply
indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to
be sufficiently interested in reality. I would add a couple of details
to the indictment, to do with the way in which the papers have
succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most
of whom make no attempt to report on the world, in favour of
sermonising about it. I would also add – borrowing a point from a
journalist I spoke to, who was in depressed and reluctant agreement
with Flat Earth News – that the collapse in news leads to a huge
knock-on in the rest of the papers. Most columns and features are hung
on a news-related peg, so if the news isn't fulfilling its basic
function to report and to check, then nor is anything else. Davies
doesn't mention that, but it doesn't matter much, since his portrait
of the British media could scarcely be any darker, or more convincing.
His conclusion is in the same key as the rest of the book. 'I'm afraid
that I think the truth is that, in trying to expose the weakness of
the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little
to be able to see the illness. At least that way we might know in
theory what the cure might be. But I fear the illness is terminal.'

* John Lanchester is a contributing editor at the LRB. His latest book
is Family Romance.

From: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/lanc01_.html

2856 words

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