I've been thinking about that edition of Your and Yours devoted to the Nick Davies book, Flat Earth News. As I said before, it's a good intro to Davies' crticisms of the current news media and is worth a listen.

But if you wanted to take a more analytical view, it's worth stepping back and thinking how the issue is framed by the show as a whole. You and Yours is Radio 4's consumer phone in show. Standard territory for them might be complaints about banks or estate agents or schools. They often interview experts to set up the issue then take calls from the public, who call to air specific grievances.

So the show has a consumerist/individualist approach. It moves towards personalising issues. The idea's there in the title. So the show as whole moves from the expert view (in this case, Davies and various ex-hacks/academics (Roy Greenslade, Peter Preson, Eve Pollard) to contributions from callers, who often personalise the issue in question. So in this episode you get contributions from people who say things like:

• The press covered something involving me and got it all wrong
• I turned up an interesting story (involving me) and the press refused to cover it
• I work for the press and I don't do the things Davies says

So the discussion gets kind of randomised and personalised. It kind of stops having a political dimension and stars becoming a kind of consumerist 'are you being properly served' discussion...

Is that the best way to cover this issue? How does this kind of framing affect the way you see the book (I guess it makes you perhaps want to buy the book and maybe stop buying newspapers - but could it encourage a more political response?).

Interestingly enough, the presenter begins the show by noting that Davies is highly critical of the influence of PRs on the news agenda and that it's therefore kind of ironic that his book is being heavily promoted by various PRs. And, of course, that promotion is the reason You and Yours are covering 'Flat Earth News' in the first place.