We live in worrying times. Everything is changing. The rules of the game are being rewritten. It feels as if we are adrift on the sea with the sharks beginning to circle.

We crave accurate, high quality information about what’s really going on to guide us and help us make wise choices and decisions.

But when we turn on the news, we notice something alarming.

There is a curious uniformity to the news supplied by the mainstream media. Official Journalism often seems to cover the same stories and report the same facts and opinions. It is as if there are a series of official narratives that all decent, well-meaning people should accept and which it is unethical to question.

However, there is also an entirely different information network, much of it available only online. Unofficial Journalism often reports different stories and appears to have a different agenda. When Official and Unofficial journalists do cover the same stories, they seem to report different facts and reach different conclusions. These two journalisms are at war. They bad-mouth and accuse each other of spreading fake news, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech. Increasingly, we hear calls from each side to silence or censor the other. Unless audiences make a conscious effort to listen to both Official and Unofficial Journalisms, they will only hear one set of facts and one side of the argument.

It’s a confusing and disturbing state of affairs. Who’s telling the truth? Who is lying? Who should we believe? Why are things like this?

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, journalists tried to be impartial and objective. Although they often failed to live up to their own high ideals, it was considered normal for journalists to attempt to present both sides of the argument. It was what audiences demanded and expected.

So when did things change? Who changed them and why? Who broke journalism?

Like a detective trying to solve a murder case, I wanted to reconstruct the crime and replay the sequence of events that led to the death of the old journalism. To do this, I carried out a great deal of original research, looking through many obscure, hard to find texts. As I did so, the full story began to come into focus. In Truthophobia I will take you on a historical journey and share with you what I discovered. It’s both a history of journalism, a journalism textbook and a whodunit!

I hope this book about journalism will help you understand where we are and how we got here. Truthophobia may even help you see where we might be going next and help you reflect on whether we ought to go there or not. In a rapidly changing world, it’s the only journalism book that asks, ‘do we have the journalism we really need for the world in which we live?’

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