Reddit mentions of Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media

I agree, our news media share a common decline, with common causes, and often common bad guys. There's actually an excellent book about the decline in the British, American and Australian media, written by the guy who uncovered the tabloid phone hacking scandal, which is called Flat Earth News.

And the same guy, Nick Davies, also has a website with background documentation to the case studies presented in the book, for instance here about the building of mythology around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Edit: typo

Roberto Bolano - The Savage Detectives - E genul de carte care nu te părăsește niciodată. Mă gândesc constant la ea, la mai bine de trei ani după ce am citit-o. E, într-o singură carte, o glorificare și în același timp o demistificare a stilului de viață boem.

Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice - Pynchon e printre autorii mei preferați, dar e un scriitor greu de citit de obicei, pentru că e dens, plin de referințe la orice de la jazz din anii 20 la fizică la teologie. Dar Inherent Vice nu e așa. E Pynchon-lite. E foarte digerabilă, ciudată, amuzantă și cool. Recomand foarte tare ca punct de intrare în Pynchon. S-a făcut și film.

Philip Roth - American Pastoral - Ca majoritatea romanelor americane bune, e despre moartea visului american. E scrisă foarte bine și o să te facă să fii nu de partea tinerilor radicali, ci a moșnegilor conservatori, ceea ce e impresionant în sine.

Nick Davies - Flat Earth News - Dacă ți se pare că presa a devenit foarte proastă în ultima vreme, nu ești doar tu. Tipul ăsta folosește presa tabloidă din UK și războiul din Irak ca să îți demonstreze cum și de ce asistăm la o degradare puternică a presei.

Jennifer Eggan - A Visit From The Goon Squad - Volum incredibil de mișto de povestiri legate între ele (protagonistul fiecărei povestiri e adesea un personaj secundar dintr-una precedentă) despre oamenii din jurul scenei punk, despre tinerețe, bătrânețe, despre sărăcie, bogăție. Acțiunea se petrece oriunde între ani 70 și viitorul apropiat.

Edit: Paul Murray - Skippy Dies - Are acțiunea plasată într-o școală catolică din Irlanda și urmărește un an din viața elevilor și a profesorilor de acolo. E o tragi-comedie genială care e atât de amuzantă în primele trei sferturi, că nu te aștepți niciodată să fie atât de tragică în ultima sa parte. Cea mai bună carte pe care am citit-o tot anul ăsta.

Spune-mi ce te-ar interesa mai mult, ca să îmi calibrez recomandările.

and read Nick Davies' Flat Earth News which is from 2009

It's not journalism.

It's "news" websites, it is absolutely not journalism. It's not even "churnalism"[0], it is just page-click generation from things happening now.

Due to the infinite breadth of the web "news" can cover everything from the serious to the completely trivial. If we give this article more of our time and attention than an article on what is happening right now in Avdiivka then that that reflects badly on us, not the people providing such news-entertainment.

Real journalism is slow and expensive. We live in an age where spending a week or two getting to the bottom of a story is a wasted investment. By the time a the full story is uncovered everyone will have "moved on" and people won't pay it attention unless it is dramatically revealing somehow, which almost all of it will not be.

Journalism is seen as a wasted investment by papers and news media struggling to meet the bottom line.

Initially this led to churnalism, the process of barely re-writing stories from the wire before pushing out to live leading to a lack of critical eye and reporting PR puff pieces and heavily biased sources as "news". Now it has gone further and reporting twitter comments - even from effectively unknown people - is "news".

If Donald Trump tweets, then I considered that fair game for being news worthy. If someone random happens to say something a bit witty that the editor - I am not sure the correct term for someone who puts together these stories - it is not news and reprinting it as such is just pure entertainment. It is copying something witty for the sake of entertaining visitors and has absolutely no news worthiness. That it's put in both in text and then repeated as an embed is down to a combination of SEO and wanting to fill the page.

[0] Coined I think by Nick Davies in Flat Earth News, [2009]. Amazon links: UK US. A must read about the decline of British journalism which pre-dates the bulk of the phone hacking scandal, or at least the fallout from it and pre-dates the impact of twitter and social media on the news media.

Totally agreed. For what it's worth, this sounds like what Nick Davies called 'flat Earth news' - a story that gets repeated and repeated without anyone stopping to check the facts. If you're interested in how (pre-Trump, pre-Brexit) news is so vulnerable to falsehood, distortion and propaganda, it's well worth reading his book.

Anyone with a real interest in just how close the media is tied to PR firms should read Nick Davies's recent book Flat Earth News. You'll never trust journalists again:

http://www.amazon.com/Flat-Earth-News-Award-Winning-Distortion/dp/0099512688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318790573&sr=8-1

If you're interested in this sort of thing you should definitely read Nick Davies Flat Earth News.

Read a great book about that almost a decade ago that explained the process of degradation and the consequences which were already in full swing since the early 2000's. Where we are now did not come as a surprise and I highly recommend the book, written by an English fella. Always have a couple of chuckles whenever I stroll through r/worldnews while witnessing the "being on the right side of history" hive mind. There's always that comment along the lines of "if only the other side knew how much they're being brainwashed!".

They would go after the lawyer and his family. There's a good book by a journalist on how the Mail operates http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distortion/dp/0099512688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457562674&sr=8-1&keywords=flat+earth+news. It's actually very good on how all newspapers work. The Mail chapter is scary.

You can read about their lawsuits here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Libel_lawsuits and see the penalties for losing are higher than for winning. Also..not very many for a shitstirring paper?

This is a little bit off-topic but there is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies for general media bias which touches on state censure and propaganda, there's also Trust me I'm lying by Ryan Holiday which is mainly about PR.

People really need to read Flat Earth News, this stuff has been going on for years. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0099512688

Flat Earth News by Nick Davis. Seriously, once you've read this book you will never look at news in the same way again. I've turned into a cynical bastard about everything I read. I think I preferred living in ignorance.

But still, read it.

Also, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

Read Flat Earth News for an explanation.

Give Flat Earth News a read, it's not even about political news, just news in general. There are examples showing how everyone uses bad scientific conclusions and just poor reporting in general to make false conclusions to further a goal or just to make money.

Also if you like that you'd also like Propoganda by Edward Bernays.

Flat Earth news is a book all about this sort of 'churnalism'. Well worth a read.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. It's a pointless story released solely to make up for him fucking about in Las Vegas. The mindset that blindly publishes this crap is the same one that blindly published all the WMD bollocks being put out by US and UK governments prior to the Iraq war. 'Only publishing what they told me to gov' is not a defence.

I think you'll enjoy this book www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distortion/dp/0099512688/

and this website www.churnalism.com.

A good book about this is Flat Earth News, which details how and why the media have changed in the last couple of decades. I found it very insightful.

The gist of it is that because most media are owned by media conglomerates, fewer reporters are paid less to produce more, which has inevitably led to a lack of fact-checking, copy-pasting press releases from whoever sends them in, and no time or money for investigative journalism.

Some media maintain a high standard of journalistic excellence, such as the New Yorker and the Guardian, but the industry as a whole has changed dramatically.

The best point the author makes is that journalism has traded in objectivity (finding out what's true and reporting it, a time-consuming, tedious task) and neutrality (reporting the controversy and letting both parties have their say, without taking sides, an easy task that requires no knowledge of the point being debated).

The more extreme politicians and activists are wise to this and use it to their advantage. The government shutdown is a good example: in the past, the GOP would have been cut down by the media for sabotaging the country just to postpone a law that passed through Congress, was signed into law, and passed a constitutionality test in the courts. Now, the shutdown is presented as a "game of chicken" in which both sides are on equal footing.

It's also a logical consequence that you can get a lot of made-up bullshit reported as truth by the media. This has been proved time and again.

Nick Davies - Flat Earth News

Every News outlet as a predetermined agenda and self censors on that basis; to believe in the shiny beacon of "freedom of the press" is deeply naive. "Freedom of Expression" in the press is kept under check in a narrowly defined agenda to suit their corporate interests and political agendas. I would highly recommend reading Nick Davis Flat Earth News. The Narrative being pushed now is that freedom of the press is under attack is a sham; that disappeared a long time ago.

The BBC is/used to be a reliable source. See 'Flat Earth News' for more on this topic.

Not only that but also a bit of churnalism into the mixture: basically the media copies what comes in from other media, wire stories and from press releases (by the government) without undertaking any research or checking due to pressures of time and cost. Then a sort of consensus is formed in the media and in the public opinion: wikileaks is the bad guy who endangers lives. It's not really any sort of censorship, it's more the way the media network works which allows for governments and public relation firms to easily inject stories into the press that get bounced around the news (like an echo chamber). I recommend anyone interested to read this excellent book: Flat Earth News

My citation is to a book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distortion/dp/0099512688

And the quote is about a study done by an academic in a university and published.

And the book talks about global media.

The fact that you're upvoted more than my comment just shows how much people want to believe rather than research.

Here's a review of the book:

Author and journalist Nick Davies has written one of the best exposés of the media. The book started when he saw that the government's lies about Iraqi WMD became widely accepted as true because too many in his profession spread them uncritically. As he writes, journalism without checking is like a body without an immune system.

Commercial forces are the main obstacle to truth-telling journalism. The owners cut costs by cutting staff and local news suppliers, by running cheap stories, choosing safe facts and ideas, avoiding upsetting the powerful, giving both sides of the story (unless it's the official story), giving the readers what they want to believe, and going with moral panics.

He cites a Cardiff University study of four quality papers which found that 60% of their home news stories were wholly from wire agencies, mainly the Press Association, or PR material, 20% partially so, 8% from unknown sources, and just 12% generated by reporters. The Press Association reports only what is said, it has no time to check whether it is true. There are now more PR people, 47,800, than journalists, 45,000.

News websites run by media firms recycle 50% of their stories from the two international wire agencies, Associated Press and Reuters; those run by internet firms recycle 85% of their stories from those two. On a typical day, Google News offered 14,000' stories - actually retelling just 24 events.<br /> <br /> The government has 1,500 press officers, issues 20,000 press releases a year, and also spends millions more of our money on PR firms. The Foreign Office spends £600 million a year onpublic diplomacy'. The CIA spent $265 million on information operations' in 1978 alone, more than the world's three biggest news agencies together. It focuses its efforts on the New York Times, CBS, Newsweek and Time.<br /> <br /> Davies notes the non-stories - bin Laden before 9/11, 80% of world's people living below the poverty line, poverty and inequality surging since the 1980s, wars in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Congo and Nepal, the global water shortage, and the vast expansion of tax havens (a third of the world's GDP goes through them).<br /> <br /> He notes how the scare about heroin, which is not a poison, led to the rise of the black market and the consequentwar' on drugs, which now costs the USA $49 billion a year. In Britain, every pound the state spends on prohibition stimulates £4 worth of crime. Again, the nuclear power scare is based on lies: Chernobyl killed just 56 people (World Health Organisation figure), not the six million that Greenpeace's Russian representative claimed.

Finally, Davies shows how Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Neil destroyed the Sunday Times and its Insight team, how the Observer suppressed stories that disproved the government's claims about WMD and how Paul Dacre rules the Daily Mail through fear.