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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 and journalist Nick Davies has written one of the best exposés 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.

In this devastating book Nick Davies clinically buries `the powers that be' of the `free' press.
Newspapers are now part of a pseudo-world of organized ignorance (fabricated stories, pseudo-events, propaganda, distortion, lies by systemic omission or falsehoods supported by `independent experts'). It is a world created and manipulated by agitprop men, lobbyists, PR `specialists' and intelligence agencies who serve commercial, political, ideological and `moral' (e.g. anti-abortion) pressure groups.

The decline of the honorable profession began when media corporations were taken over by `pure money men' turning the primary purpose of newspapers into `money making' by attracting advertisements.
Costs were cut, provoking a global collapse of information-gathering and testing of raw facts. The average own news production fell to 12 % of the output with the rest being recycled stories supplied by other sources (AP, AFP, internet) and chosen by people in the service of powerful interests. Nick Davies calls it `churnalism'. For the author, the honorable profession turned for its greater part into a corrupted and dishonest bunch of `second-hand' newsmen who don't have the time or the ambition to tell the truth.

But, there is a far darker side to this `logic of commerce'.
As E. Bernays states: `the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power ... we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who pull the wires which control the public mind.'
There is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception with the assistance of the mass media. There is `a nervous preoccupation with the perils of democracy' (S. Ewen), `a collective panic among the power elite' for the instauration of `real' democracy.
They try to create a consensus for capitalism (their power base) and to link free enterprise with freedom, which is an integral part of democracy.

J. Pulitzer said: `A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself.'
However, Nick Davies shows us overwhelmingly that the newspaper industry risks to die ('its illness is terminal') before `people' will be converted into manipulated `Pavlov dogs'.

This book is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in.

This is a brilliant analysis of what is wrong with journalism primarily in Britain and the U.S. His revelations about the squalid and criminal behaviour of Fleet St rags in pursuit of gossip was stunning in its pinpointing of the everyday moral paucity the police and upper management. Now Rupert is acting shocked that some unsavoury things were done on one of his papers but only a child would swallow his guff. This kind of thing is endemic and its ultimate result is a terrible wasting away of the ability of a democracy to function while we are all staring into the gutter or at gawping at the circuses and scandals strewn across our breakfast tables. His arguments are well researched and seemingly irrefutable in the light of recent events in case anyone remained unconvinced. Do yourself a favour and read this book. The TV news and our front pages suddenly make perfect sense in light of his characterisation.