Media Lens on Flat Earth News

[Nick] Davies’s book [Flat Earth News] presented a superficial, holier than Swiss cheese analysis, as you would expect, which meant it was widely hailed as profound and strikingly honest (as a rule, genuinely radical media analysis is ignored). ‘Churnalism’, of course, is a problem – journalists are under pressure to write expanded versions of corporate and government press releases, and so on. But we’re more interested in the churn itself – who made it? What are their motives?

The answer is that the mainstream media churn is made up of profit-seeking corporations all owned by even larger corporations and/or very wealthy people. These elite interests benefit from the public being fed superficial pap that leaves them ignorant and confused. So churnalism is not just an accidental, neutral product of a neutral system, as Davies suggests; it is a required product of a system that has evolved to deceive and bewilder people. And the churn doesn’t dump neutral material, it consistently favours the world view of powerful interests. So, for example, corporate journalists don’t churn out our media alerts, or news from Democracy Now! or The Real News Network. Power-friendly press releases are churned and rechurned – honest material is simply ignored.

Absolutely spot on.