Regret the flat earth

A good journalist will always regret the error, but printing complete fallacies is really the result of a larger calamity that is corroding the newsroom: Flat Earth News.

photo by Nico Macdonald

I interviewed Nick Davies at 6 a.m. earlier this semester, only to find my voice recorder didn’t capture anything. We talked about his recently released bombshell on journalism, Flat Earth News: An Award Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media. And in many ways, his book describes the reasoning behind Silverman’s noble crusade.

Flat Earth News. Can you explain the title of your book?

His title implies that the structural problems of journalism run so deep that journalists are likely to publish absolute lies. For the longest time people believed the earth was flat, just as, for the longest time, people believed there were WMDs in Iraq.

You funded some research conducted at Cardiff University. What was researched, and what did the findings reveal?

“I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail,” Davies told The Guardian. “They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their ‘facts,’ they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters.

“With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these ‘facts’ had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories.”

So, with only 12% of facts being checked, it is not difficult to see why Silverman can publish a 288 page book on errors in the press. Silverman notes in his interview with Chip Scanlan that “between 40 and 60 percent of newspaper news stories have some type of error, be it factual or something of a more subjective nature.”

This is where Davies’ work becomes crucial, complementing Silverman's work so well.

Churanlism is the term Davies has taken to. He explained to me that journalists are under such time constraints as a result of their corporation’s belt tightening that all they can do in churn out lies fed to them by PR machines and politicians. You take a press release, trim a few words and slap it on the page. Never mind checking the facts.

If Davies is looking at the machine that causes the chaos, Silverman is looking at the carnage left behind.

So an honest reporter like Silverman (at least we'd hope he's honest, having staked his career in honesty) says he doesn't want to put advertisements on his website because, “I [...] don't want to appear to be making money off of the mistakes of others.” Yet, the newspaper he works for is doing exactly that, making money off of the mistakes of others. Forcing journalists to become churnalists, printing lies that lead to rape, war and torture.

Davies closed by telling me that as journalists, we work in an field that is “structurally likely” to produce absolute lies. I asked him, what he would say to now disillusioned student journalists?

And this was a truly sincere moment in the interview–the rest was, ironically, PR. Davies said he is hopeful for student journalists that are eager and really looking for the truth. He said a battle is won every-time you tell your editor that you need more time.