Flat Earth News
By Nick Davies
Chatto and Windus £17.99, 416 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

Flat Earth News’s claim to importance is that it puts flesh on the bones of two trends often invoked, but never so powerfully expressed. One, that public relations, the craft of making news for the benefit of a client, is now entirely pervasive in constructing the world of the media. And second, that the present power of PR stems in large part from the enfeebled nature of the British news media, particularly newspapers at local, regional and national levels. Reporters and editors are increasingly caught in a system which demands what Nick Davies calls a “churn” (hence his fine neologism, “churnalism”) of barely researched “news” which often depends on material fed from different sorts of PR machines.