Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media

Nick Davies — the investigative journalist who later broke the phone-hacking scandal — wrote this book as an autopsy of the British news media, exposing the systematic structural failures that cause newspapers and broadcasters to produce inaccurate, distorted, and PR-driven content not through malice but through the commercial pressures that have gutted journalism's capacity for genuine investigation. His central concept — 'churnalism', the production of content by recycling press releases and wire copy without verification — has entered the language and describes a phenomenon that has only intensified since the book's publication.

Flat Earth News is essential for the counter-disinformation field because it documents the structural vulnerabilities in the media ecosystem that influence operations exploit. State and commercial actors who plant stories, generate fake expertise, or flood the information space with misleading content are not creating media failures — they are exploiting failures that already exist. Understanding why newsrooms are structurally incapable of resisting much of what they receive from external sources is prerequisite to understanding why media-based influence operations work as well as they do. An important book that has aged better than its author might have hoped.