Modern journalism: no time for the truth

Nervous, nervous. When you write a book about journalism, attempting to expose the scale of its falsehood and its indulgence in illegal activity, it makes other journalists nervous. Especially senior ones.

Off the record, working journalists have been sending me emails from all over the UK as well as North America, Western Europe, Hong Kong and New Zealand saying: "Thank God somebody is finally saying this". But in public, most have gone quiet and some senior people have gone crazy.

It was wonderful, for example, to read Peter Preston in Saturday's Guardian taking leave of his hinges to denounce Flat Earth News. He complained at length that I seemed to believe in some kind of golden age of journalism when we were all free to tell the truth. Here's what the book says: "There never was some kind of golden age when

all journalists were free to tell the truth."

He also suggested I was a hypocrite for denouncing the use of un-named sources and then using them myself. Never in my life on this planet have I denounced the use of un-named sources: I rely on them.

Peter went on to skip around the reality of the Observer's pre-war run of grossly false stories with all the balletic grace of a nymph in a tutu. He pranced past the detailed evidence that these were the product of sustained manipulation by intelligence agencies and Downing Street, embraced the phantom that I objected to its editorial line in favour of the Iraq war (I'm afraid I agreed with it) and, spinning fast, emerged with the dizzy idea that I'd failed to do basic investigative work.

Yet if he hade made any attempt to check with me, he would have learnt that that chapter is based on interviews with more than a dozen Observer staffers, some internal documents and a final run-through with a deputy editor.

What's wonderful, of course, is the irony of seeing senior journalists attacking