Guest Media Alert: A Comparative Review Of Flat Earth News And Newspeak

By Jonathan Cook
Znet

"Jonathan Cook has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from Nazareth, Israel, as a freelance reporter for the past eight years. Before that he was a staff journalist at the Guardian and Observer newspapers. His latest books on the conflict are ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilisations' (Pluto, 2008) and ‘Disappearing Palestine' (Zed, 2008). His website is www.jkcook.net

In the Guest Media Alert that follows, Cook attempts the truly Herculean task of dissecting and comparing the key arguments in Nick Davies's book ‘Flat Earth News' and our own recently published ‘Newspeak in the 21st Century.' The results are enthralling but demanding - even hardened media analysts will require a plentiful supply of tea and biscuits throughout.

Please do not underestimate the unique nature of the analysis Cook is offering. While Davies's book was discussed, reviewed, and applauded, far and wide in both print and broadcast media, our own book (published in September) has so far limped to just two, largely dismissive, reviews in mainstream outlets, in the Guardian and Times Higher Education (THE), totalling exactly 1,000 words. Our previous book, Guardians of Power (2006), has never been mentioned, let alone reviewed, in any mainstream national UK newspaper.

The truth is that dissident media analyses are consistently ignored in this way - it is not just us. And so Cook's comparison of Davies's mainstream view of the media with an analysis based on Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's "propaganda model of media control" is a vanishingly rare event. As ever, Cook's experience as a professional journalist adds a fascinating additional dimension to his analysis.

Cook produced this mega-review - nearly 10,000 words of it - completely free of charge. It is an extraordinary act of generosity from a fine and thoughtful journalist. We would like to express our sincere thanks to him. If you would like to thank him or otherwise comment, you can write to him here: mail@jkcook.net

The Two Books:

Nick Davies, Flat Earth News, Vintage 2008, pp. 420

David Edwards and David Cromwell, Newspeak in the 21st Century, Pluto Press 2009, pp. 299......

Conclusion

There is much that Davies' and Edwards and Cromwell's books share: both view the media as essentially a corporate media; both dismiss the idea of objective journalism as a nonsense and agree that journalists must, and do, take sides; and both regard the media's reporting as an unreliable guide to what is really happening in the world. But on the issue of the causes of this wholesale failure, a gulf separates them.

One day we may not need newspapers - certainly we may not need ones tied to corporate interests that depend on advertising and our ever-greater reliance on air flights and luxury cars that are destroying the planet. In an era of profound economic and ideological crisis, our media's inability properly to address these problems makes Davies' book begin to look like an excessively indulgent excuse for this failure. Edwards and Cromwell's book, by contrast, seems to have much greater power to explain the strangely consistent blind-spots from which our media suffer.

I was once a journalist of the Davies' school, believing that our media enjoyed an inalienable freedom both to get it right and, as often, to get it wrong. The disturbing conclusions reached by Edwards and Cromwell are easier for me to accept today in part because I have spent so long in Israel, an overtly ideological and ruthlessly colonial society whose leaders have so transparently co-opted their own media. Israeli journalists, even of the most liberal variety, have been recruited to the task of mobilising local Jewish public opinion in the pursuit of racial goals, such as maintaining Israel's ethnic purity, that are shocking to an outsider but go unquestioned by the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews. Israeli journalists are as blind to the idea that they are manufacturing consent for an aggressive ethnic state as journalists like Davies are to the idea that their role is to prop up a political and economic system that benefits corporate
power.

It is precisely Davies' intimate familiarity with the British media that makes him a fascinating but ultimately unreliable companion as he surveys the media's role. In this case, outsiders like Edwards and Cromwell prove the more useful guides."