Nick Davies

Nick Davies is the author of Flat Earth News, a book in which he exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.

“Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession,” he says. As, when he decided to break Fleet Street’s unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.

Davies names names and exposes the national news 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 impact of this on a world where media 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 weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, tainting government policy, perverting popular belief.

Nick Davies himself has been named ‘Journalist of the Year’, ‘Reporter of the Year’ and ‘Feature Writer of the Year’ for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. He writes regularly for the Guardian and also makes TV documentaries; he was formerly an on-screen reporter for World in Action. His four books include White Lies (about a racist miscarriage of justice in Texas) and Dark Heart (about poverty in Britain). He was the first winner of the Martha Gellhorn award for investigative reporting for his work on failing schools and recently won the award for European Journalism for his work on drugs policy.