It's worse than you think. A new book shows just how much of the media has been corrupted by PR and state disinformation, and weakened by corporate ownership
Woof woof. "Dog doesn't eat dog," writes Nick Davies on page one. Hasn't he been down the pub lately? Does he never read "Street of Shame" in Private Eye? Has he been a journalist long? Bow wow.
Let's start with the title gag and the punchline, which clunks in with all the surprise of a Scooby Doo plot denouement some 390 pages later: "If you check, you'll find that the truth is that the earth is not flat." Nick, no one serious thought the world was flat after the 6th century BC. Homer, Aristotle, Pythagoras, King Alfred the Great, Dante, Notker the German of Sankt Gal len and Herman the Lame all worked out that the earth was round long before Columbus sailed west. Ships went hull-down below the horizon, see? The "flat earth" notion was a silly 19th-century prejudice about how people in the Middle Ages were stupid, and it was false. It's still good shorthand for group wrong-think, but there is something not quite right about Davies's tone in Flat Earth News - po-faced, flat-footedly on the moral high ground, ungenerous - which invites the custard-pie treatment.
And that is a shame because this book asks many of the right questions about how the media (in particular the newspaper industry) are galloping off in the wrong direction. Sometimes Davies is bang on target and you cannot but cheer his stuff. It is also fair to say that having a go at the powers that be in the media requires courage.
His setpiece annihilation of the greed and dullness of the PR racket is terrific. Read all about "Toxic sludge is good for you". Davies on the newspaper magnates who have switched off the life support on nearly all good local newspapers, local press agencies and court reporting is brilliant. Courts up and down the land never see a journo from one week to the next - unless some celeb has ended up in the wrong bed and the lawyers get involved - and that means the natural checks and balances to prevent injustice have been removed. Local news agencies are dying. That means the whole of Britain's media is becoming more and more reliant on the Press Association, which, to keep the media barons happy, has cut its staff to cut its costs. Democracy, accountability and quality suffer, argues Davies, and he is absolutely right. He calls it "churnalism" - churning out crap, not proper, sceptical copy - and one can only agree.
One of the frustrations of this book is that Davies, rather snootily, dismisses the red tops on page four: "Nobody needs a book to tell them that the tabloids are an unreliable source of information." Yes, but they are so much a part of our society, so much reflect the passions and hatreds of their readers, that to dismiss them out of hand strikes me as elitist dross. And bad storytelling.
Part of the drive to cut costs in the newspapers business has been generated by Richard Desmond – and there’s not a word about him in Flat Earth News. So here’s a book on what’s wrong with the papers and there is nothing about the proprietor of the Express empire, the ex-‘Big-Uns’ and ‘Asian Babes’ baron. No mention, for example, of the astonishing allegation by friends of Desmond’s former company secretary, Jamie Brown (he once got seven years for shoving a sawn-off shotgun in someone’s face,) that £2million in cash was paid to the Gambino crime family in New York after a US porn deal went awry. The mob allegedly used an electric cattle prod on the testicles of his hapless managing director to prompt speedy payment – that’s the claim we reported on the Money Programme. Desmond denies paying the money and doubts whether his former MD was abused. In 2005 Gambino soldier Richard ‘Ricci from the Bronx’ Martino pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiring to extort money from Desmond. True or not, you get good yarns in tabloid-land which Davies pooh-poohs at his peril.
Davies reserves his firepower for the quality papers and the Daily Mail. His attack on how the Observer - my old paper for 12 years - got the story about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction so horribly wrong is a great lesson in how not to do it. Davies puts the boot in to David Rose, the reporter whose slavish retelling of CIA propaganda on Saddam's connections with al-Qaeda in 2002 ended with him making a grovelling apology in 2004. Rose wailed that his stuff had been "misplaced and naive . . . I look back with shame and disbelief." So do we all, David, so do we all. One of Rose's worst howlers was to take at face value the CIA claim that the 11 September 2001 mass killer Muhammad Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague - evidence of the "Saddam connection". Funnily enough, at that same time, for the BBC's Five Live Report, the producer Bill Law and I flew to the Czech capital and met the old head of counter-intelligence. He assured us that although Atta had been to Prague, the thrust of the story was not true. We binned it and got drunk - well, I did, anyway. Sometimes it's the stories you don't do that you're proudest of. The lesson for Davies of Rose's richly deserved humiliation is simple: check before you print.
Yet Davies ignores his own advice almost immediately. He launches a savage attack on the Observer's former editor Roger Alton - without, it seems, asking Alton upfront and direct for his side of the story. Davies underestimates and misreads Alton so disastrously that it makes me question much else in the book. He writes: "Roger Alton has never claimed to be a political animal. His passions are far from government, much closer to sport and women." Although Alton does swear like a trooper, ogle "totty" and play the sporty oaf, that is just a front. He is the son of an Oxford don, mourned the death of Joseph Brodsky, and quotes bits of contemporary novels at you every now and then to test that you're up with your reading. He is as subtly dangerous an office politician as you would expect an editor of the Observer to be. To imply that he is some kind of inky Freddie Flintoff is to show ignorance of the man.
But at least some of Davies's mud sticks. He has a go at Alton for his support for the war against Saddam - and for running pro-war copy and blocking stories by more sceptical reporters on the Observer. The villains of the piece are Rose, in bed with the spooks, and the then political editor Kamal Ahmed, in bed (but not, one hastens to add, in that way) with Alastair Campbell. The heroes are hacks such as Andy McSmith - in effect fired by Alton when he hired Ahmed - Martin Bright and Peter Beaumont. These three are friends of mine. I know many writers on the paper felt frustrated and angry that their copy was nit-combed for accuracy and turned down for odd reasons while Rose's and Ahmed's stuff wallpapered the office. That seems very wrong.
Elsewhere, Davies gives the Sunday Times a good kicking for not being the paper that Harry Evans ran in the good old days. Fair enough, but the Sunday Times has run some great stories in recent times, especially its revelations about "cash for honours". Some of his attacks on essentially good reporters on the paper seem neither fair nor balanced.
The Daily Mail also gets a beating for being, in Davies's view, racist. His evidence is anecdotal and anonymous. Rather too loftily, the author dismisses the Mail's article outing the main suspects in the case for the killing of Stephen Lawrence. It was a bloody good story, full stop. And Melanie Phillips gets an honourable mention for her 2002 column "The global warming con-trick". More, Melanie, more.
The Telegraph group, however, barely gets a look-in. There is no mention of David and Frederick Barclay, the reclusive twins who own both the daily and the Sunday papers. Surely, anyone who gets me banged up for criminal libel in France can't be all bad? Les jumeaux Barclay must be worth a mention, mustn't they? It seems not. The BBC's web pages get a hammering for no good reason, but Davies isn't that interested in broadcasting. ITV and Channel 4 appear to have done little wrong. The Guardian, his own paper, is let off pretty much scot-free, which is a bit Uriah Heepy-creepy.
Excellent as some of the book is, the tone - snooty and snotty by turns - lets Davies down. "Journalism without checking is like a human body without an immune system," he declares, smacking just a little too much of the preacher-man. Davies is not beyond criticism. He claims that "heroin is not a poison". The junkies I have met differ. His book about Beverley Allitt, Murder on Ward Four, writes up Professors Roy Meadow and David Southall as they would prefer - as impartial experts. Meadow's criminalising diagnosis, Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, is written up pretty much like a press release. There's not much sign of the sceptical reporter at work there.
Davies concludes Flat Earth News bleakly. He says his book is a snapshot of a cancer, and to him it looks as though the illness is terminal. That judgement feels too flat-earthist to be true.
John Sweeney is a reporter for BBC1's Panorama
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