On re reading “Flat Earth News” after a gap of ten years

Flat Earth News
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I first read this book when it came out in 2008. 
In March 2019 I am reeling from the power of propaganda. 
I see people I know and respect accepting the propaganda that the British government, the most incompetent in my memory, puts out. They are keeping people diverted by the catastrophe that is Brexit, a catastrophe totally of the making of their own making, to divert British people from the shame that is the poverty and deprivation suffered by so many people in Britain.  So much so that the UN has complied a report on poverty in Britain. It details the number of children living in poverty. In Britain, one of the richest countries in the world, in 2019. 
And also In March 2019, in Spain,  I see people I know and respect accepting the idea that the Catalans are the enemy and that the government of Mariano Rajoy, one of the most corrupt in living memory, was correct to ban a referendum about independence and to encourage violence from the police drafted into Cataluña from other parts of Spain to prevent voting.  
And that while members of the political class walk free despite the evidence of their corruption, Catalna politicians were imprisoned for over a year without trial.
In Spain they have been accused of treason and sedition, crimes that do not exist on the statute books of many counties. For organising a referendum. And the Spanish press goes along. 
Ten years later I can see how the changes in media ownership and practice that Nick Evans described so vividly have worked to the disadvantage of independent journalism. 
Nevertheless, I am shocked at how much from the past I have forgotten and I how much bad stuff I take for granted now.
Do I remember that the press conspired with the government of the time to hide the full impact of the defection of Kim Philby?  I did not. But the defections of Burgess, Maclean and then Philby were before my time.
Do I remember the way the press covered up the conspiracy to persuade the public in so many countries that there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq? Yes I do but not quite how eagerly the press agreed to be muzzled by Alistair Campbell, the master of spin to divert the press from government misdeeds.   Or how much evidence there was that lies were being told
"Media outlets pick easy stories with safe facts and safe ideas, clustering around official sources for protection, reducing everything they touch to simplicity without understanding, recycling consensus facts and ideas regardless of their validity because that is what the punters expect, joining any passing moral panic, obsessively covering the same stories as their competitors. Arbitrary, unreliable and conservative . . . this flow of falsehood and distortion through the news factory is clearly being manipulated, by the overt world of PR and the covert world of intelligence and strategic communications . . . the boundaries of acceptability have slowly slipped backward . . . what was scandalous is now merely normal. Somewhere out there, the truth is dying." (pp. 255-256)
What shocked me utterly, particularly after the attack on the mosques in Christchurch and the murder of so many people, was the analysis of the Daily Mail in Flat Earth News. 
Warranting a chapter to itself, his analysis of Daily mail stories explains so much about the racism that became overt during and after the referendum to leave the European Union. The hatred and prejudice against refugees and immigrants generally, and particularly against people with dark skins who can be conveniently grouped together as Muslims, whether they are or are not, did not just  happen during the disgusting referendum campaign, it has been around for  more than ten years. In fact it has always been so. Only the victims of their campaigns of hatred change. During the 1930s, their target was Jewish people in European countries where fascists had taken control.  How many lives might have been spared if British people had not read that their country was in danger of being swamped? By Jewish people.
 Sigmund Freud was saved because he was sponsored to come to live in London. His sisters died in Nazi concentration camps. 
I cannot help thinking that the dire warning of the dangers of false news circulating on the internet come at a very convenient time for the Mainstream Media. The ability to use different news sources and to verify information is one of the biggest changes in my lifetime. Living in a small town in Spain, with a very limited public library, I have the means to access information that was only available to academics ten years or so ago. 
Investigative journalists are no longer silenced because none of the conventional papers will publish their stories.  Friends in other countries can send links to coverage that it wold be impossible for access otherwise. I find it so refreshing to see the world through other eyes, in different languages. 
But it is clear to me that this freedom is under threat. How much more difficult now for countries to launch illegal wars and invasions when there are reports from the countries in question telling a completely different story.
But so many people my age fear this freedom to find out for themselves, and prefer to have their story written for them.
And so we must continue to analyse the information being put out through conventional media, and challenge lies and misinformation and lack of information each time we encounter it.  They are still extremely influential, as the referendum campaign in Britain demonstrated. 
And there are still investigative journalists like Nick Davies and academic media departments like those at LSE, Cardiff and UAE, among others. We must support them.
I thoroughly recommend reading this book to get motivated. 
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2799233-flat-earth-news

Nina Davies 
21 March 2019

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