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[Bill Totten]

by John Lanchester

London Review of Books (March 06 2008)

'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 (2008), 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.

His book starts at the point at which he got interested in the story of
what he calls 'flat earth news': 'A story appears to be true. It is
widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not
true - even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.'
That's flat earth news, and Davies became interested in the phenomenon,
via the story of the millennium bug. How on earth did so many papers get
sucked into producing so many millions of words of, it turns out, total
nonsense about the impending implosion of all government, all commerce,
all human activity, by the catastrophe which was going to be caused by
the bug? 'National Health Service patients could die' (Telegraph);
'Banks could collapse' (Guardian); 'Riots, terrorism and a health
crisis' (Sunday Mirror); 'Pensions contributions could be wiped out'
(Independent); 'Nato alert over Russian missile millennium bug' (Times).
The British government spent a figure variously reported as GBP 396
million, GBP 430 million and GBP 788 million. And then, on the big
night, a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth harbour. That was pretty much
it. Countries which had spent next to nothing - Russia, for instance,
whose government of 140 million citizens spent less on the bug than
British Airways - had no problems.

There are several ways of looking at this story, which has some of the
aspects of a panic and some of those of a hoax or job-creation scheme
{1}.  Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words
written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had
no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn't
know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic
function of journalism, in Davies's view, is to check facts. Journalists
don't just pass on what they're told without making an effort to check
it first. At least, in theory they don't. In practice, contemporary
journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and
stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The
consequences of that are pervasive and systemic.

Nick Davies is an unusual figure in British journalism, mainly because
he has persisted in holding the admirable belief that reporting is the
central task of the trade. Journalists report much less than they used
to, and much less than they should, as the papers have switched over to
a reliance on columnists and opinion. Back in the day, an ambitious
young toad going into journalism would have seen All the President's Men
once too often, and would dream of bringing down governments with a
single scoop. Good luck to them. Davies was like that. Today the
equivalent ambitious young toad would dream of having a column with
their picture at the top, as a precursor to a well-timed move to TV or
politics or some other form of showbiz.

Davies, however, is still a believer in legwork and in getting the story
first-hand. This led him to recruit researchers at Cardiff University's
school of journalism to quantify what was happening in the British
press. The result is illuminating and grim. The team looked at a
fortnight's production from the posh papers and the Daily Mail, and
analysed in the process 2207 UK news pieces. They focused on two things:
the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases;
and the number that were taken straight from the main British news
agency, the Press Association. The results were amazing, and not in a
good way.

They found that a massive sixty per cent of these quality-print stories
consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a
further twenty per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR
to which more or less other material had been added. With eight per cent
of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That
left only twelve per cent of stories where the researchers could say
that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The
highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news
stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR ... The researchers
went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of
fact and found that with a staggering seventy per cent of them, the
claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only
twelve per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central
statement had been thoroughly checked.

So only twelve per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story
that a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and
only twelve per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten
wire copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies's stinging
coinage, 'churnalism'. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin.

As for the wire copy, most of it comes from the Press Association:

When the queen wants to talk to the world, she gives a statement to the
Press Association. When the poet laureate wants to publish a poem, he
files it to the Press Association. Every government department, every
major corporation, every police service and health trust and education
authority delivers its official announcements to the Press Association.
It is the primary conveyor belt along which information reaches national
media in Britain.

The boffins in Cardiff found that thirty per cent of home news stories
are direct rewrites of PA and other news agency copy; another nineteen
per cent are 'largely reproduced' from this copy; another 21 per cent
'contained elements' of it. That's seventy per cent of news stories
wholly or in part from wire copy. The general rule in journalism,
increasingly honoured more in the breach than the observance, is that a
story has to have two sources to be confirmed, but according to BBC
guidelines, 'the Press Association can be treated as a confirmed, single
source'. That practice is widespread.

As a result, it matters deeply what the PA actually does - and here
Davies has more grimness to impart. The agency's network of reporters is
stretched increasingly thin, with, for instance, four reporters
(including trainees) to cover the whole of Cardiff, South Wales and the
Welsh Assembly. The staffers, according to one of them, write an average
of ten stories in a single shift: 'I don't usually spend more than an
hour on a story'. The emphasis is on catching what people say
accurately. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, puts it, 'our role is
attributable journalism - what someone has got to say. What is important
is in quote marks.' If the government says Saddam has WMD, that's what
the PA will report. Because the PA is the basis for such a huge
proportion of what's in the papers, and because its stories tend not to
be checked, it is a highly effective way for PRs to plant stories across
all the national media simultaneously. 'It is infinitely preferable
logistically to send it to the PA than to try and contact 150
journalists', one of Davies's sources, a PR who works for one of the
political parties, told him. 'And we are rarely subjected to the sort of
cross-examination that, say, the Sun or the Times would give us. PA does
not do as much of the probing and difficult questions. They are
journalists but to some extent they are an information service.'

So we have arrived at a place where 'the heart of modern journalism' has
become 'the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material,
much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of
those who provide it'. In the old days, at this point in the story, it
would be time to Name the Guilty Men. They would once have been the evil
proprietors, top-hatted cigar-smoking manipulators of public opinion. I
don't agree with the conspiracy theory of the proprietor press, nor does
Davies: he thinks that it's sheer commercial pressure that is to blame.
It's the pressure on costs - to produce more, cheaper copy - that is the
ultimate culprit for the state of the modern press.

Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is
exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to
be cheap, meaning 'quick to cover', 'safe to publish'; they need to
'select safe facts' preferably from official sources; they need to
'avoid the electric fence', sources of guaranteed trouble such as the
libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on 'safe ideas' and
contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or
context-rich problems; and always to 'give both sides of the story'
('balance means never having to say you're sorry - because you haven't
said anything'). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue
stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of
celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic.
That's the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of the
newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler effects
too. There is more space to fill - in the British papers, three times as
much - but no equivalent expansion of the resources to do the work.
Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In 1970, CBS had
three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US
media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign
correspondents to cover the whole world.

As the pressures on journalism have increased, so the PR industry has
come along with what appears to be a solution. Want news? We'll give it
to you. Britain now has 47,800 PR people to 45,000 journalists. It isn't
the case that PRs just beg for coverage for their clients: they're much
more cunning than that. Once one grows alert to the question, you can
see PR influence almost everywhere in the press. The greatly missed
Auberon Waugh used to say that behind any claim in any way interesting,
striking or surprising in the news, there was either someone demanding
more government money or a press release. That is truer than ever, only
these days the press release will announce the result of a survey (a
favourite PR tactic) or a 'release' statement from a phoney pressure
group, such as one of the many set up to create uncertainty over the
question of climate change. These pressure groups are known as
'astroturf' in the PR industry, because their grass-roots are fake, but
that doesn't stop their statements and surveys from getting on the news.

PR is not exactly the villain of the piece, but Davies is persuasive
about its all-pervading nature in modern journalism, and also about the
increasing sophistication of its techniques. He cites the way the
'NatWest Three', the British bankers involved in the Enron frauds,
managed to have themselves depicted as victims of the American legal
system, with businessmen, civil rights pressure groups and MPs all
campaigning on their behalf, when, in truth, they were total crooks.
There are plenty of other examples in Flat Earth News. Davies, informed
by his knowledge of PR, even has a fresh angle on Alastair Campbell and
the Kelly affair. In his account, 'Campbell used it as a decoy to
distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging
slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction did not exist'. Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew
Gilligan's Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it
specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints department, and
had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan's boss, Richard Sambrook.
But he then made 'three key moves': on 25 June he denounced Gilligan's
story to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs ('Until the BBC
acknowledges that is a lie, I will keep banging on'); on 26 June he
wrote to Sambrook demanding a reply that same day, and released his own
letter to the press; on 27 June he more or less invited himself onto
Channel Four News to attack the BBC, live. Davies observes: 'This move
finally established the decoy story as the main media line. The original
questions about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were shunted into
the sidings. Several political reporters wrote at the time that this
looked like a diversionary tactic. Nonetheless, all of them agreed to be
diverted. PR works.' This explains what Campbell meant, as recorded in
his diary for 25 June: 'Flank opened on the BBC'.

Davies adds a few chapters of detail on the ways in which the papers
have gone astray: the industry-wide use of bent private detectives, the
culture of error at the Daily Mail, the ease with which the government
co-opted the Observer to make the case for war in Iraq. These chapters
aren't really necessary for the central thrust of the book, even though
Davies's specifics are uncheering. For instance, in Britain only the
rich can sue for libel; everyone else has to seek remedy via the Press
Complaints Commission, set up by the industry to regulate itself. But
the PCC rejects 90.2 per cent of all complaints on technical grounds
without investigation. Of the 28,227 complaints received by the
commission over ten years, 197 were upheld by a PCC adjudication: 0.69
per cent. The one or two points at which Davies disses fellow
investigative journalists have a strangely ad hominem feel; there are
moments when it seems old grudges are playing a role. This has in turn
led to something of a backlash in early reviews of Flat Earth News,
including a bizarrely hostile (as opposed to merely negative) review by
Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian, Davies's paper, from 1975 to
1995. Preston had a number of harsh things to say about 'Saint Nick',
one of which had some traction: that he exaggerates the extent to which
there was once a golden age of the British press. True. But all these
details are less shocking than the more general data about the broad
trend towards churnalism.

So this is Davies's ultra-bleak portrait. The British news media are
crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed,
corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of
independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of
reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial
interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply
indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to
be sufficiently interested in reality. I would add a couple of details
to the indictment, to do with the way in which the papers have succumbed
to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make
no attempt to report on the world, in favour of sermonising about it. I
would also add - borrowing a point from a journalist I spoke to, who was
in depressed and reluctant agreement with Flat Earth News - that the
collapse in news leads to a huge knock-on in the rest of the papers.
Most columns and features are hung on a news-related peg, so if the news
isn't fulfilling its basic function to report and to check, then nor is
anything else. Davies doesn't mention that, but it doesn't matter much,
since his portrait of the British media could scarcely be any darker, or
more convincing. His conclusion is in the same key as the rest of the
book. 'I'm afraid that I think the truth is that, in trying to expose
the weakness of the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it
helps a little to be able to see the illness. At least that way we might
know in theory what the cure might be. But I fear the illness is terminal.'

Note:

{1} As a nerd, I feel a duty to point out that computers do sometimes
have these problems. Nasa has never had a space shuttle in the air at
the end of a year, over the transition from 31 December to 1 January,
precisely because it's not confident about the onboard software coping
with the switch. (Nasa's annual budget is $16 billion.) The truth,
according to Davies, seems to be that the bug, while theoretically a
problem, would only occur in computers which fitted all the following
conditions: they (a) had internal clocks (most big, 'embedded' systems
don't), (b) had clocks which calculated time using an internal calendar,
rather than just by measuring the gap between dates, (c) used two rather
than four digits to calculate the date and (d) were in use by programmes
which were calculating dates across that boundary. The number of
computers that ticked all those boxes turned out to be vanishingly small.

_____

John Lanchester is a contributing editor at the LRB. His latest book is
Family Romance, a memoir.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/lanc01_.html

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