Amazon the victim of flat earth news

Here is a good example of how a press release can soon become disinformation

Writing at Slate magazine Timothy Noah says

The day after Christmas, Amazon put out a press release declaring the 2008 holiday season "its best ever, with over 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15." The story was eagerly snapped up by the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and even the Web site for Business Week, which really ought to know better.

However and here is the twist

Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.

Why it is not all gloom and doom

Simon Jenkins writing in this morning's Guardian says that

The cliche is that newspapers are so rotten and in decline that they merit no defence against the internet barbarians at their gates. So claim recent diatribes from John Lloyd, Alastair Campbell and, on these pages, Nick Davies. They are all talking rubbish.

He compares today's papers to those of the 50's and 60's where

They were dreadful. Newspapers were brief, humourless, reverential of authority and composed of Hansard, publicity handouts, court reports and agency copy. Wars were reported from "our" side. A political story was simply taken from a secret "lobby" briefing. Foreign news was rarely more than one broadsheet page

The whole article is def worth a read

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

Extracts from Flat Earth News

I am looking forward to reading Nick Davies' new book Flat Earth News,having heard the man himself give a sneak preview of his book in November of last year.An extract appears in this weeks' New Statesman


This takes a fresh look at the much critised Daily Mail including this blog,Nick says that

A lot of people misunderstand the Mail. They see it as a right-wing rag driven by an addiction to the Conservative Party and to the defence of the rich and powerful. That is not where the drive comes from at all