Peter Oborne's review of Nick Davies' new book, Flat Earth News: The Vile Behaviour of the Press in the Spectator (U.K.) is intriguing, infuriating reading. Some excerpts:...This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law.
It is hypnotically readable, commands attention right to the end and has troubled me profoundly ever since. No journalist with any sense of decency can read this work without at times feeling anger and personal shame. I have worked for 25 years as a reporter and thought I understood the business fairly well. But again and again Davies provides fresh jaw-dropping evidence that journalism in Britain today is bent. If the practices he discloses were present in any other walk of life, they would have been exposed long ago, public outrage would have followed and criminal charges brought.
But newspapers have an unwritten compact that they never, under any circumstances, expose each other — one reason why Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black remained in business for so long. Over the last few decades only Private Eye (which is serialising this book — presumably no paper would do so) has made it its business to draw attention to press corruption and hypocrisy.
This code of omerta is very widespread. Davies shows that no paper will ever expose the illegal practices of rivals because they are all at it...
Occasionally these practices come to light. For example, in 2006 a private investigator, caught blagging information out of British Telecom, was charged and convicted. With the exception of a small story on the Guardian website, no newspaper reported this event, let alone exposed the sordid underworld that lay behind it.
A glaring double standard is at work here. As Davies points out, every newspaper bangs the drum about law and order. And yet, supposing what he says is correct, most newspapers seem to regard themselves as above the law. If any commercial organisation or government department were guilty of the kind of criminal conspiracy to uncover personal details about private citizens that comes as second nature to newspapers, there would have been a tremendous scandal. Indeed when the Inland Revenue incompetently but innocently lost details concerning the tax records of millions of citizens, the ensuing row went on for weeks. The way newspapers ferret out private information from government and commercial databases is far more sinister and threatening, and yet it is never publicly discussed...
