John Lanchester - Riots, Terrorism etc.

Posted by Adrian Toll on March 1st, 2008

The 6th March edition of the London Review of Books includes Riots, Terrorism etc. a review by John Lanchester of what appears to be a fantastic book - Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. John Lanchester has been writing some excellent articles for the LRB over the last year, including Warmer, Warmer about climate change, and Cityphilia about the current crisis in the financial markets.

Essentially Riots, Terrorism etc. is a précis of the entire book, with some observations along the way - and it makes both fascinating and depressing reading. Hyperbole generally disgusts Lanchester, but he starts the review with a bold claim:

‘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, 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.

The idea for the book started with the press coverage of the “millennium bug”, which was supposed to bring the world to its knees as computers failed to cope with the change of year from 1999 to 2000:

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.

Lanchester goes on to show how Davies’ research team illuminate his claims with some simple but effective research:

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 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 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 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked.

So only 12 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 12 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.

This leads to observations on the pervasiveness effect of PR in the news media, 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 and a reappraisal of the way that Alastair Campbell deliberately distracted the UK media from the lack of WMD in Iraq by the “scandal” of the “sexed-up” dossier. Definitely worth a read - and it’s available for free, along with the other two articles mentioned at the beginning, on the London Review of Books website:

Buy Flat Earth News by Nick Davies on Amazon.co.uk

Riots, Terrorism etc., a review by John Lanchester of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

Warmer, Warmer by John Lanchester

Cityphilia by John Lanchester

Post categories: Essays and Blogs, Media

Tags: churnalism, climate change, credit crunch, economics, john lanchester, london review of books, millennium bug, news, newspapers, pr, press, press association