Nick Davies: Flat Earth News

Nick Davies is an investigative journalist who writes for The Guardian and has been named Journalist, Reporter and Feature Writer of the Year in the British Press Awards. He came to the shop to discuss his new book, Flat Earth News, which exposes the reality of daily life in the Fleet Street news factory and makes a passionate appeal for a return to the first principles of truth-telling journalism. He highlighted the sophisticated new techniques of the PR industry and of the new machinery of propaganda, both of which now manufacture pseudo-news on a huge scale, and spoke about the impact of a corrupted news media in a world where we are encouraged to believe stories that are completely false, from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq.