Although he acknowledges that there never was a Golden Age when honest, truthful and objective journalists wrote fearlessly for the public good, he is too quick to assume that an information provider from another discipline is almost by definition up to mischief.

He believes that real stories have to be dug out by reporters applying ‘news values’ to the insights gained from a network of contacts and informants; it is self-evidently bad that most organisations now have PR departments, and he is particularly concerned that by Bob Franklin’s assertion that by 1994 90pc of councils had PRs. The result is that journalists routinely “find themselves processing stories that have been chosen for them by people whose job it is to shape news coverage in the service of powerful interests.”

Was the world really that much better when news was gleaned from a garrulous man (probably with a well-merited chip on his shoulder) holding forth to a reporter in a pub?

Good journalists challenge everything they are told. The first question they should ask is ‘Why I am being told this?’ Davies is right to be alarmed when modern staffing levels mean reporters don’t have the time to ask such questions, but on shakier gound when he implies that old fashioned ‘news values’ are the yardstick for truth and public interest.

As he himself writes, “The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces the truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale….”