In case you can’t make it to Cam­bridge, here is an out­line of the argu­ments presen­ted in Can You Trust The Media? There will be a launch event at City Uni­ver­sity on 30 April at 6.30pm. More details later.

If you’d like to review the book online con­tact me for a pdf. But first what does CYTTM actu­ally say?

The first two chapters look in detail at the recent crises in trust – the what, who, when, where and why of the events that have brought this issue to dom­in­ate so much of the pub­lic head­space – from the eth­ics of the edit­ors of the Sun to the blatant fic­tions of the New York Times to the down­fall of a gen­er­a­tion of BBC bosses.

Chapter three looks at what I call the phe­nomenon of ‘media bulimia’, a com­puls­ive mod­ern pan­demic caused by the viral repro­duc­tion of media into our awake time, and even our dreams. Where does it all come from, this media, and how do we live in the world it creates?

In chapter four, we look at the impact of the inter­net on trust. Can tech­no­logy ‘solve’ trust? Or are we just get­ting new plat­forms that gen­er­ate their own issues?

In chapter five, we exam­ine that import­ant sub-set of the media: the news. News is how we frame our world, it is the glasses we put on when we try to read our cir­cum­stances. It occu­pies a spe­cial place in our lives and always has. The ques­tion is, what do we want from our news?

To under­stand that, we have to look at why it is pro­duced the way it is, and from there we can ask how news is likely to change over the next few years.

Through­out his­tory, the media has been accused of power brok­ing, of throw­ing its weight around in its own interests, of mak­ing and break­ing our demo­cracy. Well, maybe.
In chapter six, I also look at the source of these rumours and think a bit about how true they might be.

Chapters seven and eight break the his­tory of media trust into mod­ern and ancient – mod­ern his­tory begin­ning with the birth of the Amer­ican news­pa­per cul­ture at the start of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, and ancient with Gutenberg’s inven­tion of move­able type.

Con­clu­sions are hard to come by in this mor­ass, but there is one thing that I am con­vinced of and that is the more pub­lic inform­a­tion avail­able, the bet­ter. In chapter nine, using recent UK ter­ror­ism cases along with examples from the world of busi­ness and their treat­ment by the media, I put for­ward my argu­ment for a more trans­par­ent soci­ety. For me, trans­par­ency and inform­a­tion super­sede our need for trust.