Though Cowards Flinch

I’ve been meaning to write a thorough review of Nick Davies’ new book, Flat Earth News, for a while. I think my problem in writing it has been that to do it justice requires the marshalling of several trains of thought, which I simply have not had time to do. At any rate, let me begin.

Flat Earth News attempts to lay open the multiple cancers eating the heart and strength out of journalism. It is a continuation of Davies’ previous form in attempting to debunk what he considers to be popular myths – hence, flat Earth. One of his more famous attempts in this regard was his speech in front of a Parliamentary panel in favour of the legalisation of heroin.

Davies demonstrates the point of his book with clarity and wit. No doubt this sharpened by the fact that no few of the journalists who have fallen prey to the cancer Davies’ outlines have been his colleagues and friends. Whether dealing with Rupert Murdoch’s editorial control over the Sun, the Times and his other media interests or denouncing the corruption of news values (add together two opposing arguments and divide by two), Davies provides plenty of evidence to support his point.

This evidence has been tested in the pages of Private Eye recently with one BBC executive attempting to rubbish some of Davies’ claims. In my view, Davies comes out of the dispute further reinforced. In this case, the evidence on which Davies’ bases his arguments are private conversations and internal BBC memos – the latter much more concrete than the former. The very executive who writes in to complain is shown to be no less a person than the author of the policy the existence of which he denies!

Fatalistic in its presentation of this overwhelming evidence that journalism is rotten to the core, I think Davies’ forfeits what could have been a strong line of polemic. As a result, I think the greatest service the book provides is the collection into one place of a vast amount of information. These pertain to, among other things the Downing St insertions of wording to independent intelligence briefings, the lead up to the Iraq War and certain media-sponsored false perceptions about the Butler and Hutton inquiries.

The escapades of Alistair Campbell, the use of private investigators to corrupt public officials from the police to the civil service and how the exclusively profit-seeking motive of owners has directly led to the decline of real journalism; all and more are challenged. The weakness of Davies’ approach is that he does not provide footnotes upon which to check all of this evidence and to evaluate it for oneself. Given the percentage of readers who will ever make active use of it, that’s probably a small complaint.

Particularly poignant out of all of the stories which Davies’ relates is that of the Sunday Times Insight team. Insight was once a powerful, unbiased, non-partisan group of reporters employed in the days PM (pre-Murdoch) that went to great lengths to challenge the British government over the ‘Famous Five’ Soviet spies; Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, MacLean and Philby. Davies documents its decline to the nadir of propagating the claim that Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy.

He also documents the rise of insidious editorialisation over the story of the killing of IRA terrorists on Gibraltar in the 1980′s. This was a story in which witness accounts and Spanish government spectacularly disagreed with the official British account – an account the Sunday Times endorsed. It was also a story which the authors on the ground, investigating in Gibraltar, disowned the final product which was thrown together by their editor to support Thatcher’s government.

In short, this is a vital book for those interested in solidifying in their own minds the impression that, over the last few decades, something hasn’t been quite right. It details the collapse of truth-telling in the media without falling into the trap of asserting the existence of a journalist golden age. The book also succinctly and persuasively entwines the collapse of journalistic integrity with the deliberate, profit-driven undermining of the NUJ by media proprieters. It is an important addition to the arsenal of facts one can array against the media.