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

Media By Nick Davies 2008

 

Explosive, controversial and timely — award-winning investigative journalist Nick Davies exposes the shocking corruption of today's media.

"Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession." When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.

Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat — from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq — tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts — a profession corrupted at the core. Read All About It. The news will never look the same again.

Prologue

Dog doesn’t eat dog. That’s always been the rule in Fleet Street. We dig into the world of politics and finance and sport and policing and entertainment. We dig wherever we like—but not in our own back garden. In the last fifteen years, we have at least started running media pages, but the truth is that they are there primarily to attract advertisements; they don’t usually put the spade in too deep.

Flat Earth Stories

‘The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing, and the duty of the journalist is to write what this journalist sees in reality.’

—Anna Politkovskaya

‘The Earth is flat.’

—Anybody anywhere until somebody checked