by Nick Davies is an expose of the crisis in British journalism at the moment. Davies is an experienced journalist who has worked for several of the major papers, and is very even-handed in his criticism of them.

His argument is that in the old days, journalists used to go out in the field, interview people, dig up evidence, and above all check their stories. Nowadays commercial pressures mean that there are fewer journalists per page of output required, and rolling news means that deadlines are tighter than ever. The result is “churnalism” where a huge amount of what is produced is the result of recycled PR and even government propaganda. Very few papers have the resources to do proper, old-fashioned investigative journalism any more. They rely more and more on press agencies, but even these have fewer people and are not there to set an agenda, only to report who said what.

He kicks off with an account of the millennium bug fiasco – how we were told the millennium bug was going to mean the end of civilisation, nuclear bombs going off etc.etc. and it simply didn’t happen, and explains how the dangers were wildly exaggerated by people with vested interests, and journalists simply didn’t know whether these claims were true and didn’t bother to find out.

The book contains many other anecdotes, for example on how the Observer (the Guardian’s sister Sunday paper) fell for the Washington / Downing Street line on weapons of mass destruction and ended up supporting the invasion of Iraq, despite having evidence to the contrary. There is also a scary chapter on the Daily Mail, which any right-thinking person loathes. Apparently it once sent a reporter to investigate the murder of a woman and her children in the north of England, only to recall him as he was halfway there because the paper had just found out that the victims were black.

This is a scary book, and it has opened my eyes and confirmed some of my prejudices. Experts get wheeled out to make comments and no indication is given of the fact that they are paid by industry interests. I was extremely pleased to discover that Susan Jebb, who is a nutritionist at the Medical Research Council and is always making anti low-carb diet comments, is funded by the flour industry. Hmmm. Reminds me of the time my doctor gave me a leaflet on how to lose weight which said sugar was fine. I immediately wondered if it could really be ok for me to live on wine gums, as it didn’t seem likely. Then I saw in small print on the back page of the leaflet that the British Sugar Council had helped pay for it. That was at least ten years ago and I haven’t trusted NHS nutritional advice since.

As for PR, only the other day I was listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme, which is its early morning news flagship programme, and heard a piece about a book on derelict London. It was essentially a five-minute plug for a book someone had written. This is not what I pay my licence fee for. But before reading Flat Earth News, I probably wouldn’t have realised that this was PR masquerading as news.

The question the book raises is who can you trust? And it sadly doesn’t have any prescriptions on that front. I think from now on I’ll take my news with a large pinch of salt, and rely on the London Review of Books which carries lengthy articles by well-informed people. I’m also considering subscribing to the New York Review of Books and resubscribing to Private Eye.