Why Flat Earth News falls flat
Updated on 18 April 2008
Engrossing it may be but Nick Davies's book on the state of journalism fails to fully convince, says Jon Bernstein.
It might seem a strange time to review a book that been out since early February, but a panel discussion appearance with author Nick Davies on Wednesday night made me revisit some of its central themes.
Flat Earth News is an engrossing book, especially for navel-gazing journalists and PRs. It makes a coruscating attack on both professions. But it's also flawed.
Its central premise runs like this: falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the media - and the quality press in particular - is not a result of proprietor bias or a need to keep advertisers on side.
Rather, the state of British journalism rests with the commercial imperative of a new breed of owners.
This commercial imperative - to cut costs and maximise profits - means more and more pages are being filled by fewer and fewer journalists.
Falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the media, says Davies, is not down to proprietor bias or a need to keep advertisers on side but because of a commercial imperative.
This, in turn, creates a vacuum. The vacuum is filled by two sources - copy from wire agencies who are themselves cutting staff, and stories fed by public relations firms. Both, says Davies, are insidious.
It's a thesis - a news factory churning out unreliable, flat earth news - with an internal logic and is convincing up to a point.
To underscore the narrative, Davies commissioned the Cardiff School of Journalism to conduct a piece of research - a classic PR manoeuvre, by the way - into the changing shape and size of the British newspaper and broadcast landscape over the last 20 years.
Two headline figures emerge from the study, both repeated in the book and the first repeated by Davies on Wednesday night:
- Journalists produce three times as much copy as they did 20 years ago
- 70 per cent of home news stories in the 'quality' press are written wholly or partly using wire and/or PR copy
Both make depressing reading for anyone who cares about the quality of journalism in this country, not least the readers and viewers.
The problem is neither statement is to be trusted. Or, at least, the research isn't robust enough to support such bold claims.
Page fillers
Let's take the first one. To arrive at this figure, the Cardiff researchers sought to establish the editorial headcount of the main newspaper groups going back to the mid-1980s.
They concluded that the number had remained largely the same - 786 editorial employees on average per company in 1985 compared to 741 in 2004.
They then looked at the pagination of national titles then and now, using Monday to Saturday editions as a baseline. They found that there is nearly three times as much editorial space in today's paper - 14.6 pages in 1985 compared to 41 in 2006.
Case proven? Well, no.
Firstly, the headcount numbers are highly debatable. The Cardiff researchers concede that "collecting comparable, documented information about employment is difficult". There are plenty of caveats and footnotes in the study that bear that out.
Notably, too, none of the numbers account for freelance writers - the very people who are providing the bulk of the copy for these feature-led supplements, expanded op-ed pages and multi-section Saturday editions, that make up the increased page count.
So it's questionable, at best, that in-house journalists are being asked to write three times as much. And, they are certainly not being asked to produce triple the amount of 'hard news'.
Sure, all parts of the paper require tight editorial controls but the gardening expert isn't expected to produce two independent sources to stand up his column.
In his defence, Davies says the figures don't take into account the extra work journalists are being asked to do online - blogs, podcasts and the rest. That's true, but only more reason to treat the research with caution.
Return to the source
The second big claim - that 70 per cent of stories are wholly or partly made up of wire and/or PR copy - is equally suspect.
For starters there's a big difference between "wholly" and "partly".
Does a story about 42-day detention of terror suspects that includes a statement from Liberty provided through a press officer count as "partly" using PR?
Does an article about Shannon Matthews that draws on Press Association copy to tell some of the back story fall into this category too?
Secondly, the nature of the home section of a newspaper has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.
Flick through the Times on any weekday and you won't be surprised to find nestled next to a health service exclusive, a piece of puff on, say, GQ's best dressed men.
We can argue about the merits of the latter story appearing in a quality newspaper but in the context of this book, does it really matter that it is "wholly" derived from a press release?
But by overstating things with figures that come with as many caveats as these, Davies rather undermines his own argument.
Thirdly, the Cardiff study includes News in brief, aka Nibs, in its counts. Nibs are those stories found on the paper's sidebar that have either been demoted there by a late, breaking story or that were never deemed quite strong enough to deserve 400 words.
These stories are rarely contextualised to the extent of longer pieces and are highly likely to come from a single source. And guess what - it was ever thus.
Is it right to include them in this qualitative assessment? And given that Nibs account for one in every four stories the Cardiff researchers looked at, isn't there a chance that these briefs skew the results?
None of this is to deny that there are staff cuts in parts of the industry nor that churnalism exists. There are some telling - albeit anecdotal and largely off the record - evidence of this, especially in the regional press.
But by overstating the case with figures that come with as many caveats as these, Davies rather undermines his own argument.
Good journalist, bad journalist
The book appears to be written in two parts. One is about the news factory. The other tells tales of bad journalistic practice - from the dark arts of investigative journalism to the travails of the Daily Mail.
Davies reserves his harshest treatment, perhaps, for the Observer, a former and possibly future employer. He critiques the paper's coverage post-9/11 and pre-Iraq war.
He paints a picture of a political editor bewitched by Alistair Campbell, a terror correspondent duped by the intelligence services and an editor seemingly unwilling to allow stories that upset the paper's central pre-war narrative - namely, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's fingerprints were all over the attacks on the United States in September 2001.
But this telling of events has nothing to do with the news factory, churnalism or flat earth news.
This is not about economics. These journalists have the relative luxury of working to Sunday paper deadlines, a million miles away from the local hack churning out 10 stories a day.
This is not about economics. These journalists have the relative luxury of working to Sunday paper deadlines, a million miles away from the local hack churning out 10 stories a day.
No, this story - as told - appears to be one of bad journalism and poor decision making. Similarly, the account involving the death of infamous Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, a conman called Joe Flynn and Rupert Murdoch is about a proprietor's taste for a story.
Other long running stories - notably about the millennium bug and criminal justice policy - are more convincing arguments of the news factory at play.
But the inclusion of the Observer and Hoffa stories - and others - is at best irrelevant. At worst they undermine the central premise.
Rather than an issue of infrastructural vunerability could it be that there are good journalists and bad journalist, good editors and bad editors, hands-off owners and hands-on owners?
What about the web?
A final point - the book fails to properly acknowledge the wider media landscape.
People rarely get their first take on the news from newspapers today, but rather from rolling TV news channels and - increasingly - the internet. There's little on either in the book.
There's a danger, of course, that both these outlets could simply be additional vessels through which churnalism flows.
But there's a counter argument to be made, namely that the web can have a benign effect on our understanding of the world, specifically on our consumption of news.
Firstly, bloggers have proved a pretty useful check against some of the excesses of journalism - from the CBS-Dan Rather affair through to the case of Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer who was famously accused of embellishing images from the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.
There's a counter argument to be made, namely that the web can have a benign effect on our understanding of the world, specifically on our consumption of news.
Meanwhile, sites like (plug alert!) Channel 4 FactCheck and its many peers across the world, are the antithesis of churnalism - testing the claims of those in the news rather than just reporting what they say verbatim.
Secondly, the internet is a world of a million niches, many of them (by the way) big enough to be commercially viable. If the quality papers don't cover it, there's every chance someone in cyberspace does.
For example, Davies laments the disappearance of the army of Press Association lobby correspondents who used to dutifully cover parliamentary debates.
Gone, therefore, are the pages of coverage of Parliament in the quality press, save for Budget day, the Queen's speech and a sketch writer each Thursday post-PMQs.
But go online and you won't suffer for a lack of news, comment and analysis on British politics. Moreover, you can now read those parliamentary debates - unmediated by the fallible hand of a journalist - at Parliament.uk.
In short, Flat Earth News is an important but flawed account of the state of journalism in 2008.
Flat Earth News by Nick Davies is published by Chatto and Windus
