This is a moderately heavyweight and academic account of the development of news media in Europe over the 15th to 18th centuries, but it is not dry or sterile. It describes the changes in spoken, written and printed transmission of ‘news’, illustrated with reference to the major and some minor historic events of the times.

At the start of the 15th century, and for a long time before then, secular and religious rulers and merchants relied on messengers, envoys and travellers for reports of what was happening outside their domains. For most people who could not afford access to such networks news spread slowly by word of mouth, proclamation in town squares and marketplaces, gossip and songs in taverns. Travellers were avidly quizzed – “What news?” The status of the messenger was important in judging the reliability of the news he brought.

Around this time or a little earlier the rich and powerful in some parts of Europe could subscribe to manuscript newssheets, ‘avvisi’, duplicated by copying by hand and distributed via the vagaries of messengers taking their chances on the roads. In one form or another avvisi lasted into the eighteenth century before finally giving way to the emerging dominant media, the newspaper.

The arrival of printing in the mid-15th century gave an easier and cheaper way of duplicating newssheets and over the next hundred years more and more people could afford either the terse unembellished reporting of received news of the manuscript or printed newssheets, or the more lurid and illustrated broadsheets sold for a few coins to the general public.

The first printed newspapers appeared in Germany and the Low Countries in the early 16th century. Their spread was closely tied to the growth of postal networks across Europe, which Pettegree documents in detail. The Thirty Years War and the English Civil War were the catalysts of a swift growth of the early newspapers in the first half of the 17th century, and the American War of Independence and the French Revolution similarly boosted the development of this medium at the end of the 18th century.

Throughout the period the printed press was heavily regulated, and publishing was an occupation which could easily land the publisher in trouble. Governments and rulers only wanted good news stories, and the canny printer would practise a fair degree of self-censorship in return for a lucrative monopoly granted by the state. The varying degree and nature of regulation in different parts of Europe, together with the different pace at which postal services (also regulated) grew meant that new media spread at remarkably different rates in different countries.

By the end of the period Pettegree covers, the periodic newspaper – daily or twice/thrice weekly – was establishing itself as the dominant medium for the dissemination of news. It was to hold this position for at least a century and a half before newer technologies – the telegraph, railways, radio, television – challenged its supremacy. Our appetite for ‘news’ is a great as ever but how we get it is changing, just as it has always done.

David Edwards and David Cromwell are the founders of campaigning journalism team Media Lens. Their mission is to respond to "the unwillingness, or inability, of the mainstream media to tell the truth about the real causes and extent of many of the problems facing us, such as human rights abuses, poverty, pollution and climate change".

They argue that mainstream news media in the West are owned and run by large corporations whose aims are solely to maximise profit for shareholders – indeed, their directors are legally obliged to do so. This means they cannot afford to antagonise their chief sources of income, specifically the large corporations who take advertising space, sponsor ‘advertorial’ articles, and so on. The journalists who work for these organisations inevitably share these corporate values – after all, any successful high-flyer works for the well-being of his/her organisation. They internalise the beliefs and values of their employers: anyone who doesn’t simply won’t succeed in the organisation. The result is that the news reported in the mainstream media is one-sided, with the view presented being the view of the politically and economically powerful: the ‘Establishment’ if you like. Stories that go against these interests (climate change, post-invasion Iraqi deaths, American involvement in Haiti or Nicaragua) just don’t get mentioned.

Edwards and Cromwell make it clear that they don’t believe in a journalists’ conspiracy. The failure to report alternative versions of events comes about, in their view, through the inevitability of the forces affecting the media and those who work in them. The embedded reporter in Afghanistan relies on the military machine to protect him and give him access to senior officers, which in turn gives the reporter status and authority. A reporter filing critical reports will soon find himself isolated and with no stories to tell.

The book is an uncomfortable read. The temptation is to dismiss their case as grossly exaggerated, but they plug away with evidence and analysis of the media coverage of a series of case studies which show how one-sided the mainstream reporting is. They recount the reactions of journalists and broadcasters to their (always polite) challenges: responses range from the lame (“Well, we did mention it once”) through straightforward disagreement to the abusive.

Media Lens would like things to change. They see hope in the rise of new media and social networking which perhaps have a genuine potential to put ‘news’ in the hands of everyone. Indeed since the book was written, and as I write this review, the removal of Egypt’s President Mubarak after popular protests has been dubbed the "Twitter Revolution". Anyone with a twitter or Facebook account can read first-hand reports and see real-time pictures from breaking news stories without the editorial intervention of the mainstream news media. Of course this means one has to work harder to filter out the valuable information from the noise, and these media are themselves open to malicious manipulation. In my more optimistic moments I’m tempted to think Edwards and Cromwell may be right, or at least that here we have the seeds of change. In my more normal state of weary cynicism I remember how many times hoped-for dawns of a new era have faltered and failed.

You can keep up with Media Lens’ work on the Media Lens website where you can also sign up to receive email alerts of their latest articles. And you can follow them on twitter and like them and be their friend on Facebook.

I’d like to review this book but the cover blurbs say it all:

• ‘An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media’ – Front cover.
• ‘Powerful and timely . . his analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating’ – The Observer.
• ‘If you read newspapers, you must read this book’ – John Humphreys.
• ‘Flat Earth News is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry’ – London Review of Books.

This is a compelling, exhaustively researched, essential and profoundly depressing book. Read it and free up all the time you spend watching the news on TV or reading newspapers, because you’ll realise that if you want to know what’s really happening in the world you’re wasting your time.

Or just read it and weep.