Now available in paperback

In Flat Earth News Nick Davies exposes the reality of the Fleet Street news factory and makes a passionate appeal for a return to the first principles of truth-telling journalism. He highlights the sophisticated new techniques of the PR industry, now manufacturing pseudo-news on a huge scale, and shows the impact of corrupted news media on the world. We are encouraged to believe stories that are completely false, from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq. Davies writes investigative stories for the Guardian and has been named Journalist, Reporter and Feature Writer of the Year in the British Press Awards.

‘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.

(LRB 6 March 2008)

Chatto | hardback 408 pp. |ISBN: 9780701181451