Flat Earth News: Falsehood, Distortion, Propaganda in Global Media

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Audio Books : MP3/64Kbps : English

Nick Davies - Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media (Unabridged)(2009)

"Meticulous, fair-minded and utterly gripping..." (Daily Telegraph)

"I don't think I will ever quite be the same after reading this ground breaking book. Mr Davies has written an entirely original work which is good to read, intellectually rigorous, and meticulously balanced. Thoroughly recommended..." (Amazon Review)

"This is a book that everyone should read - particularly if you ever read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch television..." (Amazon Review)

Publisher's Homepage: http://www.wfhowes.co.uk/catalogue/titles.php?&t=3816

Amazon Reviews: http://tinyurl.com/ko8n8m

Audio Sample: http://www.wfhowes.co.uk/catalogue/sample.php?&t=3816

Duration: 17hrs 45mins

Narrator: Steven Crossley

This is my own 64 kbps rip of the 17 CD Clipper Audio retail version - not the Audible.com poor quality download.

All my bandwidth is dedicated to this torrent but speeds are likely to be very poor until around midnight GMT, sorry - ISP "traffic-shaping".

Enjoy!

Product Description

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"Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession."

When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.

Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious "Sunday" newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives.

Davies names names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.

He shows the effect of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief.

With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.

Amazon Reviews

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Brave Man...

Nick Davies must be a brave man... He has launched a devastating attack on not only the state of modern journalism, but also on the basic integrity of many of those involved in the profession. And this from a major paper journalist who must now have made a lot of enemies within his industry.

I'm sure you have noticed how very similar versions of the same stories are posted online by apparently independent and well funded news organisations - especially in America for news outside the US.

This book explains why, and how the facts of these clone stories are often unchecked by the trusted organisations putting them into the public domain.

The book also covers the pernicious effects and influence of PR and also, perhaps most depressingly, the outright lying of major newspapers who are left barely challenged by the Press Complaints Commission and whom average people cannot afford to defend themselves against.

All of it seems to root back to money. Selling more papers through sensationalism, pandering to racism and lying; cost cutting exercises that have reduced the number of journalists available to cover an ever increasing number of stories, leaving them without the time to check their sources properly.

Very depressing, but a fantastic inoculation against the effects of this 'disease'.

The book will help you take a more critical view of what you read, see and hear and understand the motivations that lie behind much of the news we are fed.

The final summary provides some ideas about where good journalism can still be found - basically it exists where advertising does not - or where reporting is guided (or protected) by highly ethical 'old school' editorial policies.

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Required Reading...

I don't think I will ever quite be the same after reading this ground breaking book.

Mr Davies has written an entirely original work which is good to read, intellectually rigorous, and meticulously balanced.

As Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile says: "I guess I stopped believing in the early morning news".

Now I have read Flat Earth News I know why. The most telling aspect, in my opinion is that one learns that journalism, like so many other aspects of modern day working life, has been degraded entirely by the so-called good of unbridled and counter-productive capitalism.

Thoroughly recommended.

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