In 1998, Roger Alton, newly appointed editor of The Observer, was invited to Downing Street, where David Milliband asked him what he planned to do with his paper. Alton replied: ‘Bit more sex on the front page. More sport. That kind of thing.’ A nervous soundbite maybe, but it revealed a sad truth about an industry in decline: newspapers aren’t too bothered about news any more.
This is a bleak history of modern journalism, in which overbearing owners, influential advertisers and market forces have led to newsroom penny-pinching. Fewer, less experienced hacks have less time to fill more pages, so quick, cheap, ‘safe’ stories are favoured, usually ones spoon-fed by PR companies or lifted straight from agency wires or other papers. This amalgamated ineptitude has led – as Davies’ solid case studies attest – to dangerous false positives. An inaccurate story, widely reported in the ‘quality press’, becomes truth. This is flat-earth news: news assumed to be gospel until somebody bothers to check.
Indeed, it’s a sorry state of affairs when Alastair Campbell is painted as a relative hero for inadvertently showing the public, through the fallout from the ‘dodgy dossier’, that far from being a staunch critic of PR and politics, the Fourth Estate is all too often their cosy bedfellow. ‘If Alastair Campbell had not existed,’ writes Davies, ‘it would have been necessary to invent him.’
Davies may be guilty of nostalgia for a bygone age of investigative journalism (the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times is mourned here), and he offers few ideas for how current trends might be reversed. Nonetheless, this is essential journalism, using unique research and hard facts to make its readers angry – no more so than in a chapter on the belligerent wrongdoings of the Daily Mail, ‘the professional foul of contemporary Fleet Street’.
