Give me a bit and the second part of World HorrorCon will get discussed, but first there’s something I’ve noticed on both this and the two previous trips which still perplexes me. Every morning on BBC Breakfast, the hosts hold up copies of the morning’s newspapers, showing the headlines.

Here’s the front of the “Times”, with a big photograph on it this morning!

Yes, it is big, Charlie. Here’s the “Independent”, which seems more restrained than the “Times” does; it’s not got a picture on the front at all today.

No, but here’s a really large photo, right next to a large headline; but it’s the “Daily Mail”, so that’s not really surprising is it?

Granted, they’re not called “hosts” here, they’re “presenters”, which is exactly what they’re doing: presenting you with the morning’s newspapers. They’ve been doing this since my first trip in 2007, and don’t seem to have stopped once. Why do they do this, is the question.

Perhaps they feel the need to remind people that – despite the fact they’re watching television – there still are newspapers out there, and are holding them up as some sort of historical curiosity akin to coverage of the Staffordshire Horde?

Here’s something they sent to us from the collection of the British Museum: it’s a little egg made by a French feller called Fabergé, and which was once owned by a Russian Czar! Isn’t it pretty? Look at those red parts; they’re made of rock crystal! There’s only a few of these eggs left, because a lot of them have been lost over the years. This one is over a hundred years old now!

Yes, that’s quite nice, isn’t it? There are many things from the past that are quite pretty that aren’t made anymore. Here’s something else with a lot of red on it, and someone also made-it-up, it’s called “The Sun”, and it’s got both a picture and words on the front! Lots of them, see?

Gosh! Those are a lot of words, Susanna! Now here’s something that hasn’t any red in: it’s a picture our editor Alison got from her daughter yesterday: it’s a picture of a house, with a bird on the roof!

Is it a [slowly, for the dimmer viewers] ‘bird house’, Bill?

No, just a house. There only happens to be a bird on the roof. Life’s funny like that eh?

So it is, Bill… so it is…

[THEY look at the camera with expressions of “golly, it’s all a bit too much sometimes, eh?”]

The actual use of this ‘newspaper displaying’ is – while not professed, it is certainly implied – presumably a way of taking the temperature of the people, or at least the things people will be babbling about during the day at work, and later at the pub. ‘Did you hear what the PM says he’s going to do?’ ‘Yeah, saw the front of The Standard on the way here… makes you sick, innit?’ To my mind, it does seem a bit more than that, however, with news being made of the front pages of newspapers. Soon, perhaps, we’ll see coverage on the front pages of what papers weren’t held up during the broadcast: “What the BBC Won’t Show You!” and it’ll all go around again until people are fed-up and have thrown their televisions at ‘the grocers’ newsman: Rupert Murdoch.

Answers on a postcard, please.

Continuing in the pattern of “lemme tell you what I think about this”, here’s the book that was finished earlier this week. Once you’ve read it, you probably will read newspapers more carefully; no matter how carefully you thought you read them before.

First, however, let’s have one thing clear from the outset: this is not about how some minority group or secret committee is controlling the world and/or the media. While there may be decisions made about things by groups we know nothing about (that’s why they’re ‘secret groups’ after all), it’s all too easy to shuffle off one’s responsibility for not doing anything to change things by blaming an anonymous ‘powerful individuals’. Here’s an H.L. Menken quote included in the book (p. 395) which goes some way to explain how this sort of thinking can be rubbish:

…the central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his rights and true deserts … [He] ascribes all his failures to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street or some other such den of infamy.

This book is specifically about how there are few, if any, people in control of the media. While many reporters and editors find all too frequently that they aren’t able to do the fact-checking they wish to – and are frustrated at the situation’s stasis – they aren’t the cause of it through lack of initiative; they simply haven’t the time. According to the staggeringly persuasive argument of author Nick Davies, the newspapers of the UK are essentially now all owned by people who have little interest in publishing newspapers containing journalism. What these individuals are principly concerned with is simply ‘selling copies of the paper each and every day, and the more the better.’ This ‘quantity over quality’ approach is why they are termed “the Grocers” by Mr. Davies.

Certainly, any business must be operated with an eye to profit v. loss. However, there is so much an avoidance of idealism towards the media’s content, that the readers are being under-served to the point of unconscionable delivery of falsity on the part of the various persons responsible for the media outlets’ content.

While the book focusses much of its time upon the newspapers of London – including entire chapters each devoted to the Sunday Times, the Observer, and both the Daily and Sunday Mail newspapers – the problems and trends can all be recognised as being world-wide in scope. The newspapers of North America are, thankfully, prevented from out-right lying about individuals in print, owing to a reversal of the onus of proof in legal arguments here, when compared to the UK. That said, the habit of reporting quickly and loudly, then correcting slowly and quietly, is one which no legal or regulatory procedure can effectively prevent.

The other worrisome trend is the one first identified in the book: things being simply repeated from the texts of Media Releases without any effort to confirm that there is any validity within them, or even if they contain amplified – or ‘sexed up’, to use the UK Government’s term about the Iraqi WMD reports – versions of the truth which is then responsible for a snowball effect of panic about the subject in question; which then is fed-back into (EG: Iranian Elections get dropped to cover Michael Jackson’s death) or someone is able to stop the thing by explaining that it’s simply not true in the slightest and we can all relax now (EG: the nullification of the principle of habeas corpus in the USA is only applied to the cases of those naughty terrorists).

The fact that this book doesn’t cover is the recent development of newspapers closing due to financial decisions by their owners, despite any budget restraints they may have imposed prior to the shut-down. It would be fascinating to know what Mr. Davies’s views of the ‘new media platform’ might do to return journalists to the forefront of the delivery of facts. He suggests late in the book that an over-haul of newspapers is required, with the probable method of delivery being some sort of display screen.

Read this book, not to begin seeing some Secret Star-Chamber Cabal controlling the World’s fate, but in order to see that there is an ordinary group of men frantically pulling levers behind the curtain so as to continue making the Great Oz of the Media just as impressive and seemingly required as ever before.

Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media by Nick Davies; PP 420 (including index), ISBN: 9780099512684; 2^nd Edition published in 2009 by Vintage, an imprint of Random House, London, SW1V