Reviews are starting to appear of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies—an exposé of the narrowness and insubstantiality of much modern "news" culture—but I would challenge you to find a better account of its significance than John Lanchester's recent piece for the London Review of Books.
Lanchester, channelling Davies, gives a devastatingly precise account of the situation faced by anyone seriously interested in what's going on in Britain today. Put simply, the print media are drawing ever-more trustingly on an ever-narrower and ever-less-verified spectrum of sources that, in many cases, amounts to little better than a glossy repackaging of Press Association briefs. And who are the "baddies"? No-one in particular. The cultural pressures are far too pernicious for that easy a get-out:
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.I would, however, venture one up-side that Lanchester doesn't feature (although he has written along related lines elsewhere). These days, every citizen with a broadband connection is their own investigative reporter. And, increasingly, we're learning to use the daily newspapers and the news channels as stopping off points rather than definitive records: first ports of call in an information culture that thrives elsewhere on probing every gap, contradiction and untruth the mainstream simply regurgitates.
If this is starting to sound a little too much like a conspiracy theory, well, consider the bogus hysteria that has trailed everything in recent years from the millennium bug to Martin Amis's "racism," and whether this remotely constitutes "news" in the sense of verified information about the world. Yet one sector's loss is other's gain. Providing a longer and more sceptical look at what is being claimed as news—where a story started, where it's going and who wants you to believe it—is the prerogative both of magazines like Prospect and those legions of dedicated online amateurs whose investigations are, increasingly, setting the standard for people who wish to be fully informed. As the mainstream ratchets its commercial culture in ever more tightly, it may find the real action has begun to take place elsewhere.
