Public meeting on the state of our newsNick Davies, the award-winning Guardian journalist and author of Flat Earth News, has agreed to speak at an NUJ public meeting in Oxford early next year... Nick Davies, the award-winning Guardian journalist and author of Flat Earth News, has agreed to speak at an NUJ public meeting in Oxford early next year, to talk about what is happening to news reporting.
Davies has coined the term “churnalism” to describe how the traditional reporters’ craft of searching out stories, checking facts and contacting credible sources is being replaced by a reliance on press releases, soundbites and regurgitated news, where lies, distortions and propaganda are all accepted without question.
One key message of his book Flat Earth News, is that ‘lazy’ journalism is an inevitable result of chronic understaffing, and it leads, equally inevitably, to news services that fail their readers and viewers, serving instead the masters of spin who can feed the media with stories they know will be churned out without anyone bothering to check them for accuracy or dig any deeper.
It is a message we need to share with the public, at a time when our local ITV news is being reduced to a rump and the Banbury Guardian, which began publishing in 1838, is now reduced to sharing reporters and photographers with papers in neighbouring counties. AW 2008-11-03
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