This just in
Read this book. I am. I don't want it to end. As someone whose default setting has been, for some years, believe nothing you read in the newspapers, Nick Davies confirms my every suspicion. The conclusions are not pretty, but I always think it's better to know than not know.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 6:00 PM
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9 Comments:
Just started it today. Worried and intrigued so far.
Just finished it this morning. Considering it's a bulky hardback, that was a quick read. About six days. I've read a lot of negative reviews of the book from journalists defensive about Davies' wide-ranging attack on what is, after all, his own profession, but we must look past these. Even if some of his own facts are wrong (he repeats the story about President Bush's turkey being a fake when he posed with US troops in Baghdad at Thanksgiving, but I believe I'm right in saying that the fake story turned out to be a fake), the general thrust of the book is disturbing and speaks of a problem deeper than any individual ethical crime committed by any individual paper. It's significant that the book concentrates on the "quality" papers and not the soft target of the tabloids. And it's an explicit attack on the free market, whose cost-cutting and shareholder-pleasing lie at the root of journalism's decline.
I'm not knocking the book because I haven't read it, but why should you believe anything you read in it any more than you believe anything that's in a newspaper? Isn't it a product of the same people, the same politics (of all varieties) and the same free market? Are you more likely to believe the book simply because it does confirm your every suspicion? (Isn't that why people read the Mail and the Express?)
Hmm. I don't know if I could read it without becoming Mr. Angry from Dublin.
Or would I read it with a smug "oh yes I always knew that" expression on my face ?
I guess I'll have to suck it and see.
Just ordered it on the strength of your recommendation. It better confirm my existing view - that all modern media is, at best a bit shit, at worst totally corrupt - or I'll demand a refund from you!
Just in case I sound like a bit of a push over for a counter view of the world, I should add that I'm not normally one for conspiracy theories. Lee Harvey Oswald did kill JFK on his own, Elvis died in 1977 sitting on a toilet and man did land on the moon in July 1969.
An intriguing point you make, Dave, but for me it's always about the status quo and who stands to gain the most. Clearly, Nick Davies wants you and me to buy his book, as do Chatto & Windus the publishers, but the charges he makes are against the status quo, against the consensus. The might of Fleet Street is considerable, in terms of influence and power (the papers really can make or break a government, as we have seen, and they can certainly help governments to launch an illegal war), so - and you'll have to trust me on this, as you haven't read the book - you're wrong to jump to the conclusion that I believe the book because it fits my worldview. I'd rather the newspapers were noble and truthful. They're not. And that includes the newspapers I choose to read (the Guardian, Observer and Independent are implicated in many of the charges Davies makes against the "quality" papers).
The Mail and the Express give their readers what their readers want, and confirm their suspicions about immigration, race, sexual preference etc. This book makes me wish it wasn't true. That's an appreciably different effect, isn't it?
Hey, I'm no fool, I know that market forces are at work in book publishing too, but Davies also credits certain journalists and newspapers for confounding the consensus and sticking their necks out. It's not totally black and white, even if I made it sound that way. When a newspaper is politically biased, as most of them are, that stops being news and starts being propaganda. It's the immediacy of newsprint that gives it its power. Nobody buys books. Certainly not in hardback. It's rare that a book influences actual public opinion, so even though the free market influences book publishing as much as it influences newspaper publishing, its power is vastly reduced.
Once again, follow the power and you will find corruption. That's the naive view that keeps me going!
Elvis is dead ?
*gasp*
Incidentally, Peter in Dublin, some parts of the book made me angry, but most didn't, as there were few surprises. It was the arrangement and presentation of the evidence that I found compelling. The chapter on the Iraq war is head-turning, and I've read a lot about the Iraq war, as you know.
Thanks for such a thought-out and reasoned response to what was probably a fairly fatuous post by someone who really isn't getting enough sleep. I certainly wasn't intending to be dismissive of the book, which I think it probably looked like I was being.
I accept that the papers are more powerful than any book and that's probably a fair point. On the other hand Davies would probably have provoked little or no reaction if the thrust of the book had been crammed into a centre spread expose piece in your Sunday paper of choice. Of course that wouldn't have happened anyway, and the only way Davies could get his argument into the papers is by writing a book. But in fact the papers (and the media in general) are so self-obsessed and self-feeding that the book has arguably received a disproportionate amount of coverage. As I say, I haven't read it but I know more about it than I do about any other book doing the rounds at the moment. In fact I couldn't even name another book doing the rounds. In other words some books are more powerful than others, whether anyone reads them or not. (Who actually read Spy Catcher?)
But you're right because obviously one book isn't going to bring down The Press or even change it in any way. The only way I can see that you could change The Press would be to make large numbers of people stop buying papers. Is this book going to do that? I'm guessing that anyone interested enough to read it is someone who thinks newspapers are so important that he'd be a lesser person if he didn't read one. In all likelihood people will read it, tut, and carry on as before, much as they do when they read a paper. (The difference is the drip drip effect of reading a daily paper.)
I'm not absolutely convinced by the argument that the Mail and Express are telling their readers what they want to hear whereas this book is telling you something that you don't. Mail and Express readers would probably tell you that they don't want the country to be overrun by a flood of job- and baby-stealing immigrants. They read those papers because they fit with (and probably feed) their general view that the country is going to the dogs, that life isn't fair, and that the rest of the media are part of a liberal "PC" conspiracy that isn't telling us The Truth. I don't see that that's really different from your view (although of course it's totally different!). You don't like what the book is telling you but you like the book because you think it's telling an important truth.
I do realise that I'm essentially representing defeatism, inertia, and the status quo here. And so, naturally enough, I'm off to bed. It'll all look much better in the morning, I bet.
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