Global journalists get it wrong
by Steve Weinberg Posted Tue, Apr 21 2009
Nick Davies, a reporter based in London who has traveled the world seeking investigative stories, knows that credibility is a journalist’s primary tool. With credibility, journalists can at least occasionally right wrongs. Without credibility, journalists are perceived as worthless and can change nothing for the better.
After 30 years of reporting, primarily for The Guardian, Davies began to notice that journalists in nation after nation were failing to ferret out the truth on difficult, meaningful topics. Simultaneously, Davies detected a phenomenon even worse than failure to uncover the truth: the publication of downright lies.
As a result, Davies decided to bite the hands that pay him by compiling a chronicle of fateful (and sometimes fatal) errors global journalists commit. Flat Earth News is the high-quality, depressing result.
The first detailed case study, “The Bug That Ate the World,” examines the seemingly endless coverage of how computers, plus other sensitive hardware and software, would crash as the year 1999 become the year 2000. Journalists often reported that this would send hospital-based health care, air traffic control systems and a multitude of other vital operations into chaos.
Davies demonstrates how painstaking reporting mixed with common sense in newsrooms would have given lie to the predictions of disaster. Instead, journalists became part of the chain of lies and exaggerations. “This is flat earth news,” Davies says. “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.”
The possibility of success in “the war on drugs” is one of many additional examples presented compellingly by Davies. Why have journalists accepted the conventional wisdom by ideologues of self-sufficiency and extreme moralists that spending billions of dollars every year hoping to eradicate illegal drugs will end addiction? Careful reporting has shown over and over that attempting prohibition provokes sickness, crime and death.
Foreign correspondents seem especially likely to be fooled by those who disseminate flat earth news. Because almost all correspondents are assigned to cover huge areas and so many fail to speak the local languages well, they find themselves relying on governmental public relations handouts. Sometimes journalists rely too heavily on each other, thus amplifying inaccuracies.
Critics of journalism abound and always have. But there are outsider critics who fail to understand the obstacles to finding truth, and then there are critics like Davies who understand the obstacles quite well.
The special values of Davies’ critique flow from his insider’s knowledge and his decision to examine the bugaboo of inaccuracy in multiple perspectives—those of reporters, editors, publishers and news sources who lie or, at minimum, spin. Perhaps the most acute revelation arrives when Davies ties “the rules of production” to misinformation disseminated by journalists.
The following are rules journalists often follow that lead them astray: – Publish stories that are inexpensive to gather – Select safe facts – Select safe ideas – Always give both sides of the story, also known as false balance – Give them what they want, and want to believe in – Go with the moral panic – Use stories being published widely elsewhere, even if they lack merit
Value resides, too, in the solutions Davies suggests. One solution has received an increasing amount of discussion in the past year or so: the spread of not-for-profit journalism. This is exemplified in the United States, for example, in the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. Those operations do not depend on advertisers who can exert direct and indirect pressure. Instead, the Center for Public Integrity relies on donations by well-intended donors who agree to abstain from trying to influence the specific investigations they fund. ProPublica depends on one large donor who also agreed to abstain from influencing reporting and editing during investigations.
Some Internet operations might change journalism in positive ways, too, Davies hopes. Despite the downside of the Internet as an “information madhouse,” Davies believes it could “liberate the mass media … By delivering news electronically, the Internet has the potential to slash the costs of production, reducing or completely removing the heavy costs of printing and distributing conventional newspapers. If those savings were recycled back into the newsrooms, to employ more journalists, we could start to reverse the process which has made the media so vulnerable to flat earth news.”
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.