Book Review: Flat Earth News by Nick Davies One of the many things in life that fascinate me is the way something becomes news. In my previous life in Pakistan, I had the opportunity to explore this issue further. Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media Nick Davies Vintage, 2009 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 420 pages. Buy the eBook. List Price $18.52 CAD. Price: $14.89 CAD. Get $5 off (Save on your first purchase worth $5.01 or more). Flat Earth News. By Nick Davies. Share your thoughts Complete your review. Tell readers what you thought by rating and reviewing this book. Rate it * You Rated it * 0. Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media Nick Davies Random House, Nov 30, 2011 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 432 pages. https://brownaudio346.weebly.com/blog/painkiller-hell-and-damnation-pc-trainer-download-free. Download Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media – Nick Davies ebook An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.
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Does 'fake news' really exist? Find out from the ultimate insider.
After years of working as a respected journalist, Nick Davies, in this shocking exposé, reveals what really goes on behind the scenes of this contentious industry.
From a prestigious newspaper that allowed intelligence agencies to plant fiction in its columns, to the newsroom that routinely rejected stories due to racial bias, to the number of papers that accepted cash bribes. https://brownaudio346.weebly.com/download-3ds-max-2009-32bit-full-crack.html. Gripping, thought-provoking and revelatory, this is an insider's look at one of the most tainted professions.
Carl orff carmina burana. 'Meticulous, fair-minded and utterly gripping' Telegraph
'Powerful and timely..his analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating' Observer Publication Details
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Nick Davies (Author)
Nick Davies writes investigative stories for the Guardian, and has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year in British press awards. Between July 2009 and July 2011, he wrote more than a hundred storie..
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After years of working as a respected journalist, Nick Davies broke the unwritten rule of the media by investigating the practices of his fellow colleagues. In this eye-opening exposé, Davies uncovers an industry awash in corruption and bias. His findings include the story of a prestigious Sunday newspaper that allowed the CIA to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom..more
Published February 7th 2008 by Random House UK
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Popular Answered Questions
PabloThe thesis of the book is honest, it is long-winded though. Don't read it.
Bad Girl BexNot really. Although at 5hrs and 10mins the author quotes someone who uses the f-word about 4 times in a single sentence. But this is included really…moreNot really. Although at 5hrs and 10mins the author quotes someone who uses the f-word about 4 times in a single sentence. But this is included really just to emphasise the frustrated desperate state of news reporting at the time. Swearing doesn't really crop up much at all in this book, I'm about 6hrs into it and that one quote was the only instance of swearing I've come across.(less)
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Oct 18, 2011Nigel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Well, this is cheerful stuff. Nick Davies, respected journalist, gives the lie to the notion that the biggest threat to journalism is the interference of owners or the threats of advertisers. His thesis is that the drive for profits has driven journalism to the brink of destruction. Staff cuts and spending cuts have resulted in fewer journalists working with fewer resources on more stories. Unfortunately those stories are provided by the booming new sector that is the Public Relations industry,..more
Dec 21, 2014Emma Sea rated it it was amazing
Shelves: non-fiction, critical-theory, cultural-theory, media-studies, auckland-library
'Media outlets pick easy stories with safe facts and safe ideas, clustering around official sources for protection, reducing everything they touch to simplicity without understanding, recycling consensus facts and ideas regardless of their validity because that is what the punters expect, joining any passing moral panic, obsessively covering the same stories as their competitors. Arbitrary, unreliable and conservative . . . this flow of falsehood and distortion through the news factory is clearl..more
This is quite possibly the best non-fiction book I have ever read. I was gripped by it all the way through.
Davis takes us on a journey through contemporary journalism and critiques many aspects of the news that many of us take at face value. His assaults are brilliantly argued, well reasoned and engaging. He attacks churnalism, the lack of journalistic rigor brought on by 24 hour news (for example, some BBC news articles are written in just 5 minutes!), the influence of PR, morally and legally d..more
As a news junkie who loathes Metro and the redtops, this was right up my street, and depressingly re-inforced my suspciions/cynicisms and added a whole heap more.
John Humphries says 'If you watch the news you should read this book' but don't let him put you off. This is an insider's expose of how and why journalism has descended into 'churnalism' - regurgitating agency news feeds, press releases and celebrity gossip as 'news', squeezing more column inches from tired journalists, and more pounds..more
Interesting, depressing, and a little repetitive. Worth a read, but the writing style is dull and becomes a chore after the first few chapters.
Jan 14, 2019Ana rated it it was amazing
Shelves: author-biographical, page-turner, racism, law-abiding-citizen, a-little-historical, economy, geopolitics-security, borrowed, non-fiction, on-writing
I studied as a journalist; worked as one for a while, and can sadly vouch for Mr Davies grim take on the world of the media. Things have probably worsened since this book was written - the internet has decimated the industry and more than ever its a wing of the PR and Marketing world.
Two bugbears for me, which Davies addresses, among others: one, the under-representation of real news, that is, local news which might make a difference to local communities. The national papers use a common agenda,..more
May 26, 2019Denise rated it really liked it
An excellent discourse on why you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspaper, hear on the radio or see on TV. Davies digs into the pitfalls of for-profit (above every other consideration) journalism, corruption, biased reporting, the problems arising from valueing speed over accuracy, and much more.
Dec 24, 2011Jur rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Hopelessly late in reading this, but Nick Davies Flat Earth News is probably more true now than it was when published first in 2008, before the great culmination of scandals that brought down the Sun and threatened the Murdoch media empire.
Davies argues that by the establishment of media empires in the 1980 and 1990s there started a trend towards rationalisation of news production. Budgets were lowered, fewer journalists were required to produce more news. This has led to a decline in the qualit..more
Apr 09, 2012David Cheshire rated it really liked it
Phone hacking is not in the index of this book, published in 2008 so just before that story broke. Every other journalistic crime is. The central argument is that corporate commercialism in what we used to fondly call 'Fleet Street', has created two huge abuses: firstly cost and corner cutting, so 'churnalists' no longer have time to check stories,but rely on re-churning everybody else's stories; secondly profit-chasing, resulting in news 'values' which pander to market prejudice and the rejecti..more
Jun 21, 2013Pvw rated it it was ok
It seemed interesting when I picked it up in the library: an insider account on how the modern media are being corrupted by mass hysteria, propaganda and commercial objectives. Unfortunately 'Flat Earth News' has become an endlessly long list of examples that are treated in the utmost detail. You quickly get the jest of it, but start to wonder if yet another example is really going to make the point even better. The book seems to favour quantity over quality where evidence is concerned. Therefor..more
Reading this book (published first in 2009) at the end of 2017 raises much curiosity how Davies would react and analysis today's 'fake-news' 'Post-Truth' environment. In many respects Flat-Earth News lays the ground-work for modern 'news' and explains clearly how we got to this place of political echo chambers, shareable garbage and click-bait. The greatest irony is towards the conclusion of the story Davies saw the internet as a possible solution to the problem of inaccurate and biased media.
An..more
This could also have been called 'why news is crap and should not be believed'. The book itself, even though showing the somewhat obvious fact that most journalism nowadays is biased, distorted and outright wrong, has the same issues itself - there are parts where you stop and start asking yourself 'why is this piece of information presented in this way?'.
The book is focused on the UK with bits on the US, but as the media is becoming more and more global (and more crap), a lot of the description..more
Jun 11, 2018Thorkell Ottarsson rated it it was amazing
An amazing book. Even more relevant today than it was back when it was written. It fact it shows what went wrong and why people like Trump and Putin could so easily manipulate the media. So if you want to understand how we got here, this is a good place to start.
It is also a sober reminder of why we have to be critical of the media, even though it is a necessary foundation of democracy. In fact if the media is the 4th state, then the reader is the 5th state. As a side note. I thought I could not..more
Nov 23, 2017Francesco rated it liked it
Vote: 3,50
Class: P-B1 (FP) This was a surprising book, which made me open my eyes about what I diary read in the newspaper. This was also a sad book, because now I know for certain (I already had my doubts!) that much of what I see in the news has very little to do with the truth. It was a surprising book and it was a good book to read, but it has its flaws: - it is too long and often slow to come to the point; - the author too has his personal battles and prejudice: is anger toward Murdoch (maybe ju..more
Flat Earth News examines the reasons behind the decline in both standards and depth of news media in the UK.
Nick Davies looks at the changing face of media owners. They are no longer people whose main interest is good news reporting but business folks whose focus is profit over good journalism and that is reflected in ever increasing cuts in budgets and resources leaving little time for fact checking. The increasing reliance upon and influence of PR is examined. It's sobering to note that there..more
Apr 22, 2012Tara van Beurden rated it really liked it
This is a really important book. I stumbled upon it in the back of another book (I think it was Female Chauvinist Pigs) and when I was working in London I found it in Barnes and Noble and bought it. It was not lost on me that I discovered the TV show ‘The Newsroom’ about two months after I read this book, late one night while staying in New York City with my parents, after I’d finished my stint in London. This book compliments what the show is trying to do.
Davies worked on Fleet Street, home of..more
Mar 07, 2016trang rated it it was ok · review of another edition
I read the Vietnamese version of this book. Hence, any comment/judgement in this review is only applicable to the translation.
First of all, the publisher successfully managed to publish a book with low translation quality. To think this book is an award-winning work of a well-known journalist, I strongly recommend a re-do of the translation. Many times it was easy to guess the English words for the Vietnamese texts that I was reading (and I was so sure that my reverse translation would be very c..more
this should be compulsory reading for anyone who reads newspapers or who likes to pass on 'news' items as truth. and while you might think you are aware of the role of PR in current media, or how rupert murdoch is changing global media and politics, this is still a necessary read. davies makes his statements and then backs them up with example after example of how media manipulates and is manipulated. and unfortunately, the conclusion is rather depressing.
i reread the bit on chernobyle, after a..more
Feb 06, 2009Terry Clague rated it liked it · review of another edition
'The type of political culture that accompanies the rise of the corportate media system worldwide looks to be increasingly like that found in the US: in the place of informaed debate or political parties organizing along the full spectrum of opinion, there will be vacuous journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic political advertizing and limited debate on tangible issues. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civ..more
Fascinating insight, but at the same time quite a depressing read as you learn about the inner workings of not just the press, but all of our news media. Most of us know that our news maybe biased, distorted a little, small details omitted to steer opinion, but after reading this book, the situation is far more serious than that, where stories are systematically fabricated, unchecked, and cynically skewed to alter our perception of the world. This book isn't a rant from some journalist with a gr..more
Depressing, yet excellent. A highly insightful study into how news, global and otherwise, has been distorted by the relentless quest for breaking news, and how cuts have weakened local news immensely. Papers such as The Daily Mail and the Murdoch collection are the worst on the planet, and are threatening the very fabric of our society. Read this.
I chose to listen to the Audio Book version to fit into my on-road activities..
Very intersting!
Dec 18, 2014Amy Laurens rated it liked it
Stop trying to make 'Flat Earth News' happen. It's not going to happen.
Flat Earth News Nick Davies Epub VkDavies covers a number of compelling topics that fall into the dubious category of flat earth news. From the Y2K bug to Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He also touches the tip of the phone hacking scandal iceberg, that he would later go onto develop further and fully on his outstanding, “Hack Attack” a few years later. He also gives a terrifying insight into the CIA’s reach and power within the world of media, describing its latent presence in almost every capital city in the world. He bri..more
I’ve been putting off writing this review for a little while now. It’s a difficult one for me. I only read Flat Earth News because so many people had recommended it, and most of them are people whose views I tend to agree with. But I’m afraid I didn’t really like it.
Flat Earth News is Nick Davies’s “exposé” of the practices of the media. Nick is, of course, a brilliant Guardian journalist, and is perhaps the journalist most responsible for the eventual uncovering of the widespread use of phone h..more
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Jul 28, 2014Richard Bartholomew rated it really liked it
'Flat Earth News' is Davies' term for a particular phenomenon: 'A story appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda'. Davies makes the case that such Flat Earth News is now endemic in the media: not because of a conspiracy to placate advertisers or (primarily) because of editorial interference by owners: rather, it is 'forces of commercialism which now provide the greatest..more
Calm hatchet job on what I will call mainstream media - but don’t thereby imagine me in a tin hat. I was on a news diet anyway (though this doesn’t mean disengaged), so this told me what I’d already nastily assumed: commercial ownership of outlets means vast staff cuts and over-milked productivity; which mean no time to research or check facts; which means “churnalism”, the frantic-lazy reproduction of PR and State material, and worse, their interpretations. (88% of all UK stories are now based..more
Oct 08, 2017J.A. Ironside rated it it was amazing
Shelves: non-fiction, definite-tbr-in-2017-august-novemb
I won't go into too much detail because this is a book everyone should read, despite not being at all comfortable to look at. The proportion of news that is in fact inflated, exaggerated, recycled or just false is terrifying. Worse still is the amount of news that never gets reported when it deals with issues that the public really do need to be cognisant of. And it all comes down to money and by extension time - like so many things. I have found myself sifting news stories even more cynically t..more
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