{"id":920,"date":"2008-05-05T02:29:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-05T08:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=920"},"modified":"2008-05-05T07:10:44","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T13:10:44","slug":"the-bumpy-world-of-flat-earth-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2008\/05\/the-bumpy-world-of-flat-earth-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The bumpy world of Flat Earth News"},"content":{"rendered":"

N<\/span>ick Davies<\/span> has a nice telling<\/a> of the saga of the Haut de Garenne<\/a> \u201cbody\u201d hunt. But he can\u2019t resist using it to bang the drum for his claim that PR <\/span>now shapes journalism<\/span>, falling into the trap of – in his words – \u201cfitting facts into fictional templates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike so many false and distorted stories,\u201d he says, \u201cthis one was driven by PR, here from the police.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is just plain wrong.
\n
\nPolice statements on the investigation weren\u2019t PR – except by the most tortured and misleading of definitions.<\/span><\/p>\n

What the media did at Haut de Garenne was take actual police statements<\/a> and package them up in the most attention-grabbing manner possible. They were marketing the information, in a manner that would have been familiar to the 19C penny press.<\/p>\n

When the facts and the statements ceased to be attention-grabbing, the media dropped the story from front pages. Nothing to do with public relations or PR, everything to do with journalism\u2019s modus operandi<\/span>, which is being rapidly superseded by search.<\/p>\n

Nick isn\u2019t really helping his argument or our understanding of the case by flattening the story to fit his own PR argument – unless he thinks the police should remain silent during investigations (and if so let\u2019s hear that argument…).<\/p>\n

So, for anyone who wanted to follow the police statements on the skull at the centre of Nick\u2019s story directly, let me introduce internet novelty – the link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Davies has a nice telling of the saga of the Haut de Garenne \u201cbody\u201d hunt. But he can\u2019t resist using it to bang the drum for his claim that PR now shapes journalism, falling into the trap of – in his words – \u201cfitting facts into fictional templates.\u201d \u201cLike so many false and distorted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}