A lot of people think that British journalism is corrupted. I agree with them. Our job as journalists is to tell the truth, but repeatedly we fail. From the great global falsehoods on weapons of mass destruction and millennium bugs to the daily dribble of routine disinformation and distortion, we serve up stories which are no better than the idea that the Earth is flat.

The tricky thing is to work out why and, in particular, to go beyond the easy assumption of outsiders that we fail because we couldn’t care less, or because we are all the obedient puppets of interfering proprietors and heavy-handed corporate advertisers.

In Flat Earth News, I’ve turned over the detail of three particular newsrooms: