Davos Newbies

John Lanchester reviews Flat Earth News:

So this is Davies’s ultra-bleak portrait. The British news media are crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed, corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality.

Nick Davies’s book is about the British media. But I increasingly wonder whether you could substitute US for British in that second sentence.

I yield to no one in my boundless admiration for the Financial Times. But they really need to do something about their US political coverage.

Today’s paper has this headline: Clinton scorns Obama as running mate. Edward Luce reports, “Pouring cold water on the ‘dream ticket’ that a number of Democratic lawmakers have put forward, Clinton campaign officials reiterated charges that Mr Obama’s national security credentials derived solely from a speech he gave in 2002 opposing the war.”

But wait! Who were those Democratic lawmakers? Well, Hillary Clinton for one in several interviews over the weekend. Bill Clinton for two, who said it would be “unstoppable”. And yesterday, Clinton’s chief spokesman, Howard Wolfson, stumbled through a response on how Obama may not have passed the “threshold” to be commander-in-chief now, but it could be different by August, by which time he might well be ready to be one heartbeat away from the presidency as Hillary’s VP.

I think Edward Luce and the editors who wrote that headline have been having too many late nights because of campaign coverage. Today’s article is misleading and, in many ways, exactly the wrong way around. And to make matters worse, Obama himself yesterday amusingly flattened the speculation about a Clinton-Obama ticket rendering the whole discussion moot. A truly mystifying choice by my beloved FT.