Journalists criticising journalism

To kick things off, it might be interesting to look at the fuss surrounding 'Flat Earth News', the new book by the well known investigative journalist, Nick Davies. Over the years, he's done lots of really interesting work for The Guardian, covering things like crime, drugs and education.

This time round, his subject is the current state of journalism. In his new book, he talks about the way newspapers in particular are being undermined by commercial pressures - mainly the desires of big media companies to cut costs and maximise profites.

In particular, he focuses on the way journalists increasingly rely on wire agencies and prs for stories. They rework press releases, often without checking facts, often because they're under pressure to fill more and more space and have less and less time to do it properly. Davies' term for this is 'churnalism'.

The problem with this is that increasingly it's PRs and press agents, not journalists, who are setting the news agenda, who are doing the original reporting and writing. And of course PRs usally have a particular agenda, a particular line to push...

I'm simplifying a little. We can go into more detail over the coming weeks. But I think 'Flat Earth News' sounds like a really interesting example of journalistic criticisms of journalism.

Lots of journalists, once they get too old/tired to put with late nights and deadlines, sit back and start to worry about what they've been doing for the last twenty/thirty years of their lives. And they sometimes get round to writing books that explore those worries. It's interesting to set this kind of thing against the kind of critique made by academics and theorists.

For example, Davies is concerned about the effects of commerce, the way big businesses, governments and the PRs they use increasingly set the public agenda and how all this undermines journalism's 'fourth estate role'. In some respects, there are links to the arguments made by Chomsky and Herman about the propoganda model, an attempt to account for systemic bias in the news media.

You should be looking at Chomsky in one of the next two sessions with Rod. Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction to the Propaganda model, if Rod hasn't got to it yet, though a better bet would be to get 'Manufacturing Consent', the book in which Chomsky and Herman develop the idea, out of the library (there are lots of copies in there).

If you want a quick introduction to 'Flat Earth News', there's a basic summary and an extract on the promotional web site. Alternatively, try this introduction to the argument which Davies wrote for The Guardian.

Alternatively, have a listen to today's episode of the Radio 4 phone-in/consumer show, You and Yours. It's devoted to Davies' book and features him and various other ageing Fleet Street notables arguing over the book. I'll post more on this tomorrow.