Go. READ. THIS. BOOK!!!

Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to be cheap, meaning ‘quick to cover’, ‘safe to publish’; they need to ‘select safe facts’ preferably from official sources; they need to ‘avoid the electric fence’, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on ‘safe ideas’ and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ‘give both sides of the story’ (‘balance means never having to say you’re sorry – because you haven’t said anything’). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic. That’s the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of the newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler effects too. There is more space to fill – in the British papers, three times as much – but no equivalent expansion of the resources to do the work. Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In 1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign correspondents to cover the whole world.