Jo Cox Book Review - Sept 2017

Sheila Chapman, August 2017
Book Review: Flat Earth News by Nick Davies
This book explores the falsehood, corruption, over-reliance on PR and shoddy work that corrodes
today’s mainstream press and undermines democracy with specific chapters shining a light on the
routine racism in the Daily Mail newsroom, explaining how the Observer were manipulated by
intelligence agencies and how journalistic standards collapsed at the Sunday Times under Murdoch.
What makes the book compelling is not the assertions that the Daily Mail is racist or that the
millennium bug was a non-event whipped up by the media, but the analysis of how we got here.
Churnalism
Davies argues convincingly that we are witnessing a “retreat from truth-telling” 1 within our media.
Whilst there have always been obstacles to truth telling (for example the political biases of the first
newspaper owners), the far graver problem today is that the barriers to truth telling have become
embedded within the newsroom.
The driver behind this retreat is commerce and the imperative to cut the costs of production and
increase the flow of revenue in pursuit of media owners’ desire to maximise profit. In pursuit of
profit, staff are cut and the journalists that remain haven’t got time to leave the office in search of
stories so they must rely on PR provided by corporates and government and newswire material. The
demand for 24-hour news adds to the squeeze and the fact that there are now only two newswires –
Associated Press and Reuters – means the same material is getting endlessly recycled; journalism, as
a trade is becoming deskilled and the requirement for quick copy means many stories are half
written before the events they relate to take place. Journalists cannibalise stories from other
journalists and an echo chamber is created where erroneous or poorly checked stories are amplified.
Davies dubs this process “churnalism” and it is ubiquity (because even the three global news
providers – the BBC, al-Jazeera and CNN all recycle AP and Reuters) contributes to consensus news.
The absence of judgement
Davies makes the point that News isn’t, and should not be, objective because decisions have to be
taken about what stories to cover and, crucially, what viewpoint to adopt. A viewpoint can be
selected honestly through editorial judgement or – and this is what argues Davies is happening now
– a viewpoint is arrived at by the application of rules embedded in the process of churnalism to meet
the logistics of mass produced news. Davies lists the rules that he claims have replaced judgement.
1. Run cheap stories.

2. Select safe facts.
3. Avoid the electric fence (i.e. don’t take risks for fear of breaching media law or being
aggressed by lobbyists – this results in self-censorship).
4. Select safe ideas – those that reinforce the consensus.
5. If your story isn’t “safe” then gives both sides. The resulting ‘balance’ makes the story safe
but ultimately frustrates truth-telling.
6. Give the readership what they want because the objective is to increase the audience. For
example, be aware that no one is interested in the operation of local government but people
1
Flat Earth News, Nick Davies, page 22
like to read celebrity gossip and as far as parliament goes, cover PMQs, not select
committees.
7. Give people event driven human interest stories with good pictures e.g. a missing child
(preferably one who is white and photogenic), rather than bothering to investigate the
processes that lead to structural inequalities in society that leave some vulnerable.
8. Give consumers what they want to believe in: “The readers are never wrong. Repulsive
maybe, but never wrong.” – Piers Morgan.
9. Go with the moral panic and run stories which are being widely published elsewhere, even if
they lack merit because you don’t want to cut your consumers out of popular debate.
The application of these rules in place of editorial judgement means that the news subjects selected
distort reality by systematic omission which serves to create a political and moral consensus that
reflects and reinforces the values of the most powerful.
The book was published in 2008. Since then the debasing of the media has gathered pace and has
had significant political consequences. During the recent snap election, the Tories paid Google to
effectively control people’s access to news and in the US we have a president who simultaneously
promulgates and descries ‘fake news’.
Connecting the dots
Davies’ book came perhaps a little too early for him to connect his central thesis (mass produced
news fosters mass ignorance) with the debasing of political discourse. But the analysis Davies does in
this book underlays the comments recently made by veteran journalist Jon Snow in the McTaggart
lecture and elsewhere. Snow said the media promulgate “ever more extreme and partisan sources
of information reinforcing people’s prejudices”.
Snow described standing below the smoking remains of Grenfell and thinking about the gulf
between us all. He heard residents challenging the media, asking them, Where were you? Why didn’t
you come here before? These are the questions the rest of us need to ask of ourselves and of the
media – why didn’t any of us see the Grenfell action blog before the fire, why didn’t journalists
enable the residents of the Grenfell Tower to find pathways to talk to them?
Snow joins the dots between the shortcomings of mass news production and the disconnectedness
of our society. He expressed a feeling of being on the wrong side of the terrible divide that exists in
this country. Many of us are. It is right that we hold the political classes to account for their failures
but we need also to take steps to close the gap between ourselves and people like those in Grenfell
and across the country who live amidst combustible cladding in high rise death traps. As consumers,
we need to demand that the media provide us with the news we need to enable us to close this gap.

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Sheila Chapman, August 2017

Book Review: Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

The absence of judgement

1. Run cheap stories.

Connecting the dots

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