LINKS:
Reviews of Davies' novel:
- Independent
- Guardian
- IRR

Review of Burns' novel:
- Guardian

- Blackwell bookshop

Truth and the Media
With Nick Davies and Gordon Burn
20 May 08
Arnolfini, Bristol

Can we trust modern media? Award-winning Guardian journalist Nick Davies investigated his own profession and found an industry in crisis. In Flat Earth News journalism is undermined by commercialism to the point wheremost reporters are no longer able to go out and find stories, make contacts or even check the facts which they recycle. "Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession", he said.

Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. He attacks pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.

With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.

Gordon Burn, novelist, artist and true crime author, wrote his most recent book as the news unfolded. Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel, looks at Summer 2007: floods, foot and mouth, the disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine McCann, the arrival of Gordon Brown, and terror attacks in Glasgow. Burn has taken the events from the bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us.

QUOTES:

"Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. It is hypnotically readable, commands attention right to the end and has troubled me profoundly ever since... His book should be read by every reporter, editor and proprietor as well as newspaper readers... This passionately argued and shocking book amounts to a call for action and reform. The worry is that the British press will collude to suppress it."
Peter Oborne, Spectator

"Flat Earth News is for the most part meticulous, fair-minded and utterly gripping. As an industry, we are less and less good at telling the truth, and it does Nick Davies credit to stand up and say so."
Sam Leith in the Daily Telegraph

"By turns riveting and rollicking, a truly shocking book that had to be written and must be read."
Mike Jempson, Director of Mediawise Trust

"If you read newspapers, you MUST read this book."
John Humphreys

"This brilliant book by Nick Davies, unrelenting in its research, ruthless in its honesty, is a landmark expose by a courageous insider. All those interested in truth - outsiders and insiders - should read it."
John Pilger

"A must-read for anyone worried about journalism - which, on this analysis, should be everyone."
Ian Hislop

"Born Yesterday is a brilliant and unsettling novel, reminiscent at times of the work of Don DeLillo. Some will ask whether it really is in a conventional sense a novel ... [but] given the fiction that so often passes for news, why shouldn't news provide the whole fabric of a novel. Burn's [book] is a coolly probing feat of documentary prose. It is also, in hindsight, a kind of deranged and beautiful poem."
Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement

"Gordon Burn is right. The news is now a novel or a movie."
Mark Lawson