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1-Page Summary of Flat Earth News

Overview

Do you sometimes feel like you’re missing out on the most relevant news? It’s fun to read about that cute cat who attacks postmen, but is it really worth your time to hear such trivial stories? Shouldn’t we be learning about other things in the news, like a chemical plant being built near your home or a pension fund bill that will affect your generation?

Relevance is no longer a priority in the media. It’s now owned by corporations, and they only care about public interest stories that will make money, not necessarily the truth. So how do journalists work when journalism has gone corporate?

In addition, you will learn why we know so much about Hurricane Katrina and little about Hurricane Stan. You’ll also find out that balanced articles aren’t as helpful as they seem to be, and your weird neighbor isn’t all that paranoid after all.

Big Idea #1: Today’s journalists are forced to churn out stories without time to check facts or verify sources.

When you think of a journalist, you might get an image of someone rushing to the site of an event. However, these days journalists rarely work like this.

Fewer and fewer journalists are investigating their own stories. Instead, they tend to rehash stories from large wire agencies or press releases issued by companies.

When Cardiff University studied 2,207 media stories in the most respected British newspapers and magazines, they found that 60 percent of those stories were simply rehashes of wire-agency reports. Only 12 percent of them were based on reporters’ personal research.

Journalists in national media don’t have the time to do proper investigations. This is because of cost cutting and layoffs by larger companies, which leaves journalists with less time to spend on each story. They typically write around ten stories per day, which adds up to less than one hour per story on an average workday!

Reporters have less time to investigate stories because of budget cuts. This is even more so for regional reporters who are laid off by corporations that buy out local newspapers.

Due to budget cuts, newsrooms don’t have the resources they used to. They can’t send reporters out into the field for stories anymore and must rely on wire agencies for information.

Big Idea #2: While the media rely heavily on wire agencies, these sources are not always objective or reliable.

If you’re a journalist and you come up with an amazing story, but your boss doesn’t want to publish it, there’s still hope. You can hand it over to a wire agency and wait for them to put it out so that when the story gets published, they’ll assign the credit to you.

Media outlets have a lot of trust in wire agencies because they’re usually accurate. The BBC’s guidelines state that journalists shouldn’t report on stories unless they have at least two sources, except when the source is Press Association (PA), which can be used without question. This strategy has been adopted internationally as well with AP and Reuters being the leading newswire agencies around the world.

However, this can be a problem because these wire agencies aren’t doing thorough research on stories. They are under the same corporate pressures as other media outlets and don’t have time to do in-depth reporting.

So, when we look at AP and Reuters, we see that their coverage of international events is heavily reliant on a few journalists working out of local offices around the world. Since they have few people in these offices, they rely primarily on press releases from organizations and governments. They can also fall back on local media sources but those are often just reposting press releases as well.