ABSTRACT
In Flat Earth News, his scathing critique of the standards of contemporary British journalism, Nick Davies argues that, for the most part, news stories are now selected according to embedded and largely unacknowledged rules, “a kind of quality control system which instantly rejects any raw material which does not meet the factory’s requirements” (2008, p. 113). Davies enunciates ten such rules, which, it will be noted, overlap somewhat:
Run cheap stories• . This rule simply requires the selection of stories which are quick to cover and safe to publish. Consequently, journalists typically eschew complex, long-running and thus expensive journalistic inquiries while foregrounding stories which are simple, uncontentious and easy to obtain. Select safe facts• . Reporters go with the offi cial line because it is safe and means they are less likely to be attacked by the subjects of their stories. Avoid the electric fence• . As well as reporting only safe facts, journalists favor offi cial sources and adopt deferential attitudes to any organization or individual with the power to hurt them or the news organization to which they belong. Select safe ideas• . The safe facts are then embedded within frameworks of safe moral and political values. These values are not expressed overtly in the story but are the undeclared assumptions on which it is built. They are also all the more covert in that they seamlessly refl ect the surrounding consensus. In Davies’ view, the effect of this approach is to “rip the rudder off journalism and leave it to be swept along by the current of prevailing prejudice. Moral and political judgements are allowed, but only if they are rendered invisible by refl ecting popular belief” (ibid., p. 129). Always give both sides of the story. • Davies calls this ‘the safety net’ approach because “it suggests that, if all else fails and you end up having to publish something that is not ‘safe’, you bang in some quotes
from the other side to ‘balance’ the story” (ibid., p. 131). Thus “the honourable convention aimed at unearthing the facts has become a coward’s compromise aimed at despatching quick copy with which nobody will quarrel” (ibid., p. 133). Give them what they want• . This is the mantra of market-driven journalism in which audience-maximization is all: “if we can sell it, we’ll tell it” (ibid., p. 133). The bias against truth• . This rule extends the commercial imperative of the preceding rule beyond the mere selection of stories and into a series of prejudices about the way in which the stories themselves are actually told. Davies argues that the effect of this rule is to rob stories of their context and to institutionalize “a preference for human interest over issue; for the concrete over the historic; for simplicity rather than complexity; for certainty rather than doubt” (2008, p. 139). As stories become shorter and shorter, so the events at their heart become ever more drained of meaning and signifi cance, generating distortions so severe that they amount to a “bias against truth.” Give them what they want to believe in• . Not only facts, but also ideas should be selected with profi t in mind. Go with the moral panic• . This applies particularly in times of perceived crisis and “combines the recycling of readers’ values with the bias against truth, by attempting to sell the nation a heightened version of its own emotional state in the crudest possible form” (ibid., p. 142). Ninja Turtle syndrome• . This might also be called the rat pack syndrome, and requires a media organization to run the same stories which are being widely published elsewhere, even if they clearly lack any journalistic credibility.
