Please forgive the shameless self-promotion but Can You Trust The Media? picked up a review at the Guardian.

Phone-in voting scams, dodgy trailer editing, silly-season reports of great white sharks cruising off English beaches – the media apparently has a problem with trust. How to win it back?

Wrong question, says Adrian Monck: trust is something that obtains between individuals, and no one should be so silly as to “trust” a large newstertainment organisation, which is mainly in the business of gathering people in one place to be advertised at. Consumers ought to be sceptical.

“The media is not in the information supply business,” writes Monck, himself a TV and newspaper journalist. “It’s in the distraction business.”

In his amusingly blunt style, he scores a lot of hits against naivety and wishful thinking on both sides of the argument, with colourful topical and historical anecdotes (there was no golden age of media reliability).

He nicely skewers the idea that bloggers can replace reporters; and notes the surprising truth, discovered during the second world war, that bad news from the front is better for citizens’ morale than good news.

We expect too much from the media, he argues in an expansive conclusion, because it has replaced religion for so many people.

Instead, we should be demanding greater freedom of official information, for instance the online provision of court transcripts. An excellent idea.