The most thorough examination of bias in the mainstream media remains Nick Davies' book Flat-Earth News, 2008, along with his sister publication Hack Attack, 2014. In the latter book, Davies describes his own experience in uncovering the phone-hacking scandal that started in the last century and generated mass awareness with the Milly Dowler revelations in 2011.  We refer you to the Wikipedia entries for these two books and encourage you to read them - read here and here. For a thorough review of Flat-Earth News, see London Review of Books.

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We also suggest reading Alan Rusbridger's book Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, 2018. Rusbridger was Editor-in-Chief at the Guardian between 1995 and 2015, a period when technological change, notably the development of the internet, was upending the fundamentals of journalism. It was also a time when the Guardian supported a series of ground-breaking investigations, notably: David Leigh’s reporting on the British Aerospace Al Yamamah bribery scandal involving Saudi Arabia; Nick Davies’ exposure of the hacking scandal from 2006 to 2014; reporting on torture and rendition, and; the publication of Wikileaks and of Edward Snowden's revelations. However, the latter placed it odds with Britain's security state, and led to a period of greater oversight from which, arguably, the Guardian has not fully recovered.  This review of Rusbridger’s book may prove informative.

 

Below left there is a link to Jonathan Coulter's article on the Media Reform Coalition's conference on 200 Years of the Guardian, May 2021. Coulter sought to understand why this high-minded newspaper, functioning under the non-profit Scott Trust, had (apparently) betrayed its core principles. It had, on the one hand, accepted a regulatory status quo that, for a time, it had previously denounced as intolerable. And by campaigning against the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn on the grounds of his tolerating antisemitism, it had undermined its commitment to the sanctity of facts.

 

Media bias and misreporting have been particularly evident as regards Israel and Palestine. Below we present a powerful analysis of bias in reporting of the Gaza War from the Centre for Media Monitoring (March 2024), a compendium of information on BBC bias since the beginning of the 21st century, and an article on the topic.