The ten rules of ‘flat earth news’
I’ve just finished reading Nick Davies Flat Earth News. Davies is a Guardian journalist and the book’s sub heading is ‘An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propagada in the global media’. There you go.
Davies idea of flat earth news owes a lot to Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ in Manufacturing Consent. The basic premise is that due to increased corporate ownership and focus on profits (with associated redundancies, cost-cutting and targets) journalists are no longer able to check stories like they used to. Combine this with a reduction in the quality of the wire services and increased PR and you end up with stories that are false being widely believed and reported as true – ‘flat earth news’.
Davies list the ten rules of flat earth news. Here they are:
Rule 1 – run cheap stories
This rule requires you to select stories that are quick to cover and safe to publish. This discourages tricky investigations and distorts the selection of ordinary news stories in favour of those that are simple, uncontentious and easy to get hold of.
Rule 2 – select safe facts
This rule requires you to favour factual statements which are safe, especially those that can be attributed to official sources. If an official statement accuses a man of being a criminal, you can’t be sued for using it, but if a man accuses a government official of being a criminal, it can.
Rule 3 – avoid the electric fence
This extends the rule of safe facts from favouring official sources. Always avoid writing about any organisation or individual with the power to hurt you or your news organisation.
Rule 4 – select safe ideas
This runs parallel to the selection of safe facts by requiring you to select moral and political values which are also safe. In other words, use ideas that reflect the surrounding consensus.
Rule 5 – always give both sides of the story
This is the safety net rule. It means that, if all else fails, and you end up having to publish something which is not safe, you bang in some quotes from the other side to ‘balance’ the story. Balance means never having to say you are sorry – because you’ve not said anything.
Rule 6 – give them what they want
Write stories that increase readership or audience. If we can sell it, we’ll take it.
Rule 7 – the bias against truth
Don’t provide a context, select stories that are short and can be written quickly. ‘Short stories, more fun and plenty of variety’.
Rule 8 – give them what they want to believe in
Always select ideas with commerce in mind. Don’t run stories that you are not going to get money for. If the public want negative stories about asylum seekers. that’s what they’ll get.
Rule 9 – Go with the moral panic
This only applies to periods of ‘crisis’. Always sell the nation a heightened version of its own emotional state in the crudest possible form. Unlike the other rules, it is compulsory, if you waver and fail to express your part of the moral panic you will be hunted down and attacked.
Rule 10 – Ninja Turtle syndrome
This requires you to run stories which are being widely publicised elsewhere, even if those stories clearly lack merit. (Based on parents having to give in when their kids got picked on at school for not having Ninja Turtles).
Got this far? Well, get the book. Or at least visit the Flat Earth News website.
I never had Ninja Turles, by the way.
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I have a feeling that old ideals of “professionalism” “objectivity” and “quality journalism” are dying away slowly. It is just too expensive financially to support this kind of industry in our “free” economy. Murdoch is right in this respect however I despise his solution.
Perhaps “journalists” should now all become politically-motivated activists (documentary filmmakers, book writers, political campaigners, researchers) and the function of “news” would only be to add the additional layer of filtering for those who need this. That is, not to source or create material but to re-package and re-mix it.
journalists, especially those who work in print – when i say print, i mean newspapers, magazines and even online text – are already being trained everywhere in this new journalism of re-packing, analysis, and storytelling.
without going into the historicity of this, i do believe this is a reaction to the free economy. if news is going to be free-ish, then what justifies cover prices? well, different angles, interpretations, etc – that is to say, things which may not be explicit in the news break itself.
the question still, is who is going to produce the news break? if it is the wire services, then you still need reporters on the wire. if it is PR practitioners, then you still need writers in PR. you can cynically call them the “new reporters.”
due to the above 10 rules, and the propaganda model, it is true that there is little economic benefit for publishers to want to run anything controversial.
and if independent media seems to be nothing much more than advocacy journalism, where does society get its “investigative” journalism from?
perhaps from the tension of mainstream vs alternative press. or in an ideal (utopian?) world, public news service has to be revived and there has to be enough public will and engagement to ensure that any political encroachment is severely frowned upon, if not punished.
but that may be asking for too much now…
thanks for sharing this pontus…your last statement made me wanna leave a comment. I was suddenly like wait did he write this or did this just automatically come up from google ads or something “Got this far – then buy the book…” haha good publicity, u shud get paid for it. On the other hand, i am just about to go and buy the book…
Thank you Pontus for sharing this.
I agree that Nick Davies’ “ten rules” are very suited in current situation BUT very dangerous as well. If this world full of “re-package/re-mix” ‘jounalists’(they are not), PRs or propaganders, I am afraid the the NEWS IS DYING!!!