If the journalist and author Nick Davies is to be believed, the news investigations that appear in today’s British newspapers represent nothing but a smelly sewer of malpractice. His recently published polemic, Flat Earth News (Chatto & Windus, £17.99), depicts a media universe rife with data rape, bribery, and wilful distortion. He speaks feelingly of “the mass-production of ignorance”, and goes on to name so many of his former media colleagues in a disobliging context that, if he’s a wise man, he won’t go out after dark for a long, long time.

The charges are levelled in most detail against The Sunday Times, The Observer and Daily Mail, with a passing karate-chop at The Sunday Telegraph for enthusiastically purchasing a phone bill which listed the family and friends of defence ministry weapons scientist Dr David Kelly when, at the time, his body was barely cold. Davies’s allegations break down into two categories. The first is that once-respectable newspapers are now using more-or-less illegal, tabloid-style “dark arts” to get hold of material. Those arts range from the hiring of scuzzy private detectives to the use of elaborate snares and “honey traps”. It all makes the traditional complaints about chequebook journalism look trivial and, indeed, naive. What is going on here, if accurately described, is dismayingly reminiscent of the behaviour of the secret police in some grubby Soviet outpost. The difference, of course, is that secret-police officers say they do their work to preserve the State. The journalists do it, as often as not, merely to shift a few papers off the stands in the course of a Sunday morning. The second set of allegations made by Davies is different in character. He says many purported newspaper investigations nowadays are in fact a load of old rubbish: the re-cycling, unchecked, of claims made by governments, intelligence agencies and a swelling army of public relations people. It’s a chapter he could well have titled “Tell me lies about Iraq”.

The broad history of the decline of Murdoch’s Sunday Times from its non- Murdoch glory days is reasonably well known. A reputation that started with Philby and Thalidomide finished down in the gutter with the fake Hitler Diaries, the attempted smearing of the ITV This Week programme “Death on the Rock”, and the contemptibly nonsensical claim that Labour leader Michael Foot was a KGB agent. But Davies tells some frightening new stories about the current dwarfish inheritors of the famous Insight team tradition. They did deals with a bent accountant, he says, to try to entrap the incorruptible Frank Dobson with dodgy donations when he was running for Mayor of London. They paid private-eyes to rifle dustbins. They used a trainee journalist to temp at an agency and filch whatever government documents she could find. They pretended the deputy editor of Insight was a freelance so his use of the “dark arts” could be deniable. The Sunday Times is, says Davies, “embroiled in corruption”. Yet all of this low conduct leads to very few worthwhile exposés.

Bullying and spite

The most damaging attack by Davies is on the purported investigations run in recent years by The Observer. It was once a brave liberal paper, and remained so to a degree in the 1980s even though under the temporary control of an international criminal in the person of millionaire businessman Tiny Rowland. But the run-up to the invasion of Iraq saw The Observer lose its moral compass. Davies details a sad series of stories, published Sunday after Sunday, claiming to have discovered that Saddam Hussein in Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda and that he possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. As we all now know, this was tosh, recklessly hyped-up by the U.S. and UK governments to provide cover for a violent military assault that soon proved to be both a crime and a blunder. Lies were swallowed whole by the paper that had once earned its reputation by standing out against Suez.

Roger Alton, the editor under whom all this occurred, is depicted in the book as an erratic political ignoramus. Those who had his ear, it is said, included his political editor Kamal Ahmed and his star reporter and climbing companion, David Rose. Ahmed, an ambitious former media correspondent described as even less politically experienced than his editor, is accused of allowing himself to be used as a tool by Downing Street. Naturally, Ahmed resents this portrait of himself as Alastair Campbell’s urinal. He denies allegations that he used to read out his paper’s newslist to Downing Street on Saturday afternoons. But he did decide to bale out of journalism proper in advance of this book coming out. He has gone off to become a public relations man for Trevor Phillips at the Equality Commission.

Alton himself said, belligerently: “Kamal is one of the best journalists that I have ever worked with and of the highest integrity, so if anyone impinges [sic] his integrity I’ll go and punch his fucking face in.” But Alton, too, resigned as editor pre-publication of the book, citing the many issues about integration of Observer jobs with the website. His departure was greeted with praise from the rest of Fleet Street for his achievement in bringing “readability” to the loss-making paper. Little mention was made of the allegations of false reporting.

David Rose appears to be the only one of The Observer trio to have expressed remorse (in the New Statesman). He now says he was duped by both a CIA man and an MI6 officer, who unattributably confirmed to him the stories being extruded from expatriate Ahmed Chalabi’s “Iraqi National Congress”. This was a U.S.-financed fake grassroots group of the variety that PR people have wittily christened “Astroturf ”. Rose states: “I feel nauseated, angry and ashamed.” He told me recently he had seriously considered giving up journalism, but did not because he has four children to feed. Davies’s verdict on him in this book is stern: “He has all the self-confidence of great reporters, but less of the judgment.”

I’ve said that Davies’s book is alarming if it is to be believed. Is his overall picture fair? Is the investigative trade in which I myself have spent more than 30 years, a “corrupted profession”, as he alleges? It’s not easy for me to be rude about The Observer situation, because I still work for its sister paper The Guardian, and I have personal relationships with too many of the players. I do know that Nick Davies sorely embarrassed Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who originally promised to serialise his book but had to withdraw the offer when he realised Davies had written about The Observer. That withdrawal added to Davies’s headaches, which included trouble finding a publisher. And I can add, from what I know of the history and track record of all the individuals concerned, that Davies’s pen portraits are not – shall we say? – wholly unrecognisable.

Stream of deceit

A couple of years ago, I was offered documents by an employee of armsgiant BAE, who wanted £20,000 for them. The story was that BAE were running “dirty tricks” against the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT). I wouldn’t pay – partly because I thought it was a ridiculous amount of money for such a tale, and partly because an allegation that BAE were spying on CAAT seemed to sit in the same category of unsurprising headlines as “Dog bites man” and “Pope is Catholic”. The main reasons why I wouldn’t buy the story were, however, ethical. The Guardian doesn’t pay mercenary employees to make betrayals, unless there’s a really strong public interest. And we never pay huge sums, even if it might be worth it in circulation terms, because it tempts sources to make things up.

My BAE source then went to The Sunday Times, which appeared to have no such scruples, and the story appeared on its front page. And it had some interesting consequences. The widow of an intelligence officer and a friend of a Tory front-bencher were eventually revealed to be running BAE’s espionage ring, and their mole proved to be the protest group’s own top events coordinator. So the uncomfortable fact for me – and perhaps for Nick Davies – is that the public interest was certainly served by publishing the original story. If The Sunday Times hadn’t bought it from a sleazy source, the facts might never have come out. And similarly, although The Observer misled its public over the Iraq war, it did also, in the end, publish a dramatic and potentially dangerous story from a GCHQ staffer, revealing that the UK and the U.S. were intercepting telephone calls and emails in order to spy on members of the UN Security Council who were reluctant to vote for the Iraq invasion. That exposure was a public service, however belated, as Davies is indeed scrupulous enough to point out.

This situation leaves those of us in the trade with a dilemma. The waters of British investigative journalism in 2008 certainly appear to be heavily polluted. But along with the tide of dead dogs, used condoms and toxic waste, there do seem to be nutritious public-interest fish still to be caught. Liberty is indivisible, as the saying goes. And a free press is better than any of the alternatives. So while one has to agree with much of Davies’s courageous attack on some of the most cynical institutions of the Western world, I don’t think we should entirely despair. But we should definitely campaign for a bit of a clean-up.