More on THAT book

Nick Davies' book has created quite a stir amongst journalists.

Mary Riddle's review in the Observer on Sunday,whilst agreeing with many of Nick's sentiments

Much of Davies's analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating, if gloomy

takes issues with some of his attacks on the Observer and on the Mail

Davies is wrong, however, to suggest that the Mail's investigation of Stephen Lawrence's murder, a campaign of courage and commitment, was purely based on the rumour that Stephen's father had once done some work on Dacre's house

Moreover his assertion that Roger Alton lifted chunks of Alistair Campbell's memos to form the basis of the paper's pro war editorials has irked Riddle greatly


Stephen Glover in the Indy yesterday suggests that

Whatever we may think of the journalist Nick Davies, we should take his new book seriously.

And further tells us

Unsurprisingly, plans to run excerpts of Flat Earth News in The Guardian have been abandoned. The Guardian Media Group is behaving as though it would like the controversy to go away

Adrian Monck takes issue with the research that forms the basis of the book whereby

your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job.

Yet Adrian suggests that this does not take account of technological improvements,freelance workers and the like.Her writes this on the issue of journalists reliance on PR.

The real filler in newspapers (and online) is wire copy. This is presented as something of a shock and Nick conflates this misleadingly with PR material (at least he does on the Today programme). Actually the only shock is that newspapers have hidden their reliance on the agencies for so long.

You can see the full report from Cardiff University HERE

http://www.mediawise.org.uk/files/uploaded/Quality%20and%20Independence%20of%20British%20Journalism.pdf