In 2001 I was in Genoa, Italy for
anti-capitalist protests against the G8. These were marked by
extremely violent attacks by the Italian police on protesters. In one
of these, a young anarchist activist called Carlo Giuliani was shot
dead by an Italian policeman. As a result of this,, the next day saw
Genoa swamped by enormous protests. I was one of the press contacts
for a British anti-capitalist group in Genoa and I did a number of
interviews with the British press. During the course of the day, as
it looked that there might be further clashes between police and
protesters, I was asked to do regular interviews for a 24 hour news
channel. The problem was, I was told by a journalist on the phone
from London, that the news organisation had no journalists in Italy.
They had been cut to save money.
Similar stories about the changes to
the international, but particularly the British media, are a running
theme through Nick Davies' book. He charts the decline of journalism
and locates the problems not with individual journalists, most of
whom he points out are hard-working, underpaid and over-worked.
Rather, Nick Davies argues that the systemic changes to the media
since the Second World War, and specifically since the 1980s are the
root causes. These lie with what Davies describes as a “grocer”
mentality, the notion that the sole purpose of the media is to make
the maximum possible profits. In order to do this, media workers are
increasingly pressured to produce the maximum number of stories, in
the shortest possible time with decreasing numbers of staff and
resources.
This would be bad enough and Davies
demonstrates particularly by looking at local British newspapers, the
way that staff are unable to do more than regurgitate press-releases
and rehash stories from other media sources. Often this is done by
staff without proper training, payment or experienced colleagues.
However the problem is exacerbated Davies argues, by new industries
that systematically distort stories and shape the news agenda.
“The old model, where news editors
and reporters selected stories and angles, is in a state of collapse.
We have seen how the structure of corporate news has converted
journalists from active news-gatherers to passive processors of
material – only 12% of which could be shown to be free of the mark
of wire agencies and PR consultants.”
These arguments are backed up by some
impressive studies, where Davies' researchers systematically analysed
newspapers stories and matched them up with press-releases and other
coverage. A truly depressing picture of the state of British media is
painted. The limitations are further shown, by a shocking figure
that Davies highlights, the amount of news reported by Google News.
Google News it should be remembered, is not a news agency, it
aggregates, or reports the sources of other news outlets – from the
BBC and The Guardian, to Socialist Worker. In
one day in 2006, Google News offered “access” to some 14,000
stories, “yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same
24 news events”.
While
large sections of this book are devoted to exposing the practises of
PR agencies and so on, large sections are devoted to a couple of
major news events. One of these, the build up to the invasion of Iraq
in 2003 was, as part of the “War on Terror” and the events of
September 11th 2001, probably one of the biggest news stories of the
last twenty years. It was also an enormously manipulated story.
Everyone from governments to intelligence agencies was involved in
creating a story that justified and encouraged the attack on Iraq. In
Britain, Tony Blair's government played a particularly shady role in
first supporting the US government but then attempting to manipulate
public opinion though a series of lies, half-truths and cover-ups.
They were aided in this, by a number of over-friendly senior figures
in the news industry. Davies studies in particular the career during
this period of Kamal Ahmed, the political editor of The
Observer a newspaper with a
previous reputation as left-wing, which had in the past been happy to
critique government policy and challenge the status-quo. Instead,
despite the reservations (and anti-war position) of many of the
journalists, the paper took a pro-war position. This meant that
stories against the war, or in one case a serious work of
investigative journalism that showed through interviews with senior
US intelligence officers that the “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
did not exist, were spiked. Links between senior news figures and
Downing Street meant that such criticism was hidden at the first
hurdle.
Davies
shows how changes at newspapers such as reduced numbers of staff and
resources mean that journalists are less able or less willing to
check facts and stories. In an era of 24 hour news reporting this
reduces the ability of the news rooms to find information, simply
regurgitating existing stories, or stories that appear to come from
reliable sources (such as the Press Association). But it also
encourages the journalists themselves to fit a particular political
agenda. In this sense news stories are less about explaining a
particular situation and more about pushing a “line”. This can
mean that work from journalists is distorted or re-written to reflect
a certain existing viewpoint. As Davies comments about the Sunday
Telegraph (in particular its
Insight Team):
“When the Insight Team were tasked
to look at immigration and asylum, they found that it was true as
right-wingers had alleged, that the asylum process was in chaos; but
they also found impressive evidence that immigration was good for the
country. They were allowed to only write the first part of the
story.”
Nick Davies argues
convincingly that a key problem is what he calls Flat Earth News.
These are the stories that “everyone” knows to be true –
immigration is bad, policemen are mostly good, the Iraq War was about
ending the terrorist threat and so on. Pressure to conform to these
existing ideas limits media investigation and critique.
The structural
changes to the media that Nick Davies highlights are part of wider
social transformations. The beginnings of the break up of the media,
reductions in staffing levels and the switch to stories that would
maximise sales of newspapers coincide with the era of neo-liberalism.
Many of the stories told in this book have their roots in Margaret
Thatchers first government, with its attacks on the power of the
unions and the beginnings of the destruction of the welfare state.
The same forces were at work in the media industry and the friendship
of individuals like Rupert Murdoch with governments since then have
accelerated this. This is not a process that is limited to the
low-end mass market tabloids either, as Davies comments while
discussing the activities of newspapers like The News of the World
whose journalists routinely broke the law in pursuit of a story;
“Ever so often, one of these
stunts would break out into the public domain. The tabloids would
deny everything and the post papers would look straight down their
noses and write slightly smug, slightly amused pieces about those
wild and whacky red-top chaps and their dodgy ways, as if this sort
of activity was something entirely alien to them. The truth is, that
by the mid-1990s the posh papers were bang at it too – because they
were suffering from exactly the same commercial pressures which had
corrupted their tabloid colleagues.”
Nick Davies
finishes this book on a less than optimistic note. He clearly
believes that the era of proper journalism and genuine media is at an
end. In part he hopes (with some justification) that the internet can
undermine this, but he clearly thinks that the forces of the market
have finally destroyed the golden age of the journalist. While the
picture painted of the media in Flat Earth News is very
depressing, I think that part of the solution lies in ordinary people
taking control of their own lives. This might seem far-fetched, but
in Greece in the midst of the struggles against austerity, some
journalists have taken over their newspaper and written what might be
called proper news. On a smaller scale part of an answer must surly
lie in the rebuilding of workers organisations at the newspapers, in
order to give journalists an opportunity through collective action to
stand up to the bullies and editorial lines forced upon them.
Despite this minor
disagreement I heartedly encourage people to read this book. Its
expose of the realities of the modern media will be eye-opening to
everyone, even those who are already deeply cynical about the press.
For those of us who have campaigned over the last few decades against
war and racism, many of the stories from the news-rooms inside will
explain why what we rarely made the headlines. And, for all those who
despise the Daily Mail Nick Davies explains the real reasons
for its relentless right-wing, scapegoating politics and the lies in
its stories (as well as some accounts of its shocking internal
racism). Ultimately, the problem with the media lies in a political
and economic system that is filled with fear of ordinary people,
that needs to divide and rule and which is driven by a hunt for
profits at the expense of all else. Nick Davies' book is an
extraordinarily fascinating insight into a small, but very very
influential part of that world.
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