The Reporter's Tale

The Reporter’s Tale is an adventure story about Tom Davies, a young Welsh writer who travels the world looking for the truth and, in a few days of blistering revelation in Malaya, finds it in a series of visions. Thereafter, he takes his new insights on a journey through the media, becoming a reporter for top Sunday newspapers – and later an award-winning author of many books – and realising he has a fresh understanding of the causes of the violence which is so blighting the modern world. His odyssey of discovery begins in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles where he finds that the media – with its persistent pursuit of violence – is the cause of much of the disorder there. The global media, which specialises in reporting the worst of everything from everywhere, has become the mother and father of modern terrorism, he says, giving the IRA disproportionate power and importance merely because they offer violence. Television in particular is the catalyst for the growing disorder in our streets: becoming the very leader of street riot while also giving motive and reward to suicide bombers. The many revolutions of the Arab Spring are fully explained by his visions, he shows. Here the world’s media first began feeding on the self-immolation of a Tunisian trader before spawning revolution after revolution in neighbouring countries. They all wanted freedom and democracy, we were told, but all that seemed to be happening was that they were deranged by watching too much television news as each service, particularly Al Jazeera, spooled out violent imagery on an almost twenty four hour loop mostly from footage downloaded from their viewers’ mobile phones. All outlets of the media have come together and conspired to set loose a tide of evil which is turning violence into the very oxygen we are all now breathing, Davies shows in this book which may well be the most powerful and trenchant attack ever mounted on the tyranny of the modern media.

The Reporter’s Tale is an adventure story about Tom Davies, a young Welsh writer who travels the world looking for the truth and, in a few days of blistering revelation in Malaya, finds it in a series of visions. Thereafter, he takes his new insights on a journey through the media, becoming a reporter for top Sunday newspapers – and later an award-winning author of many books – and realising he has a fresh understanding of the causes of the violence which is so blighting the modern world. His odyssey of discovery begins in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles where he finds that the media – with its persistent pursuit of violence – is the cause of much of the disorder there. The global media, which specialises in reporting the worst of everything from everywhere, has become the mother and father of modern terrorism, he says, giving the IRA disproportionate power and importance merely because they offer violence. Television in particular is the catalyst for the growing disorder in our streets: becoming the very leader of street riot while also giving motive and reward to suicide bombers. The many revolutions of the Arab Spring are fully explained by his visions, he shows. Here the world’s media first began feeding on the self-immolation of a Tunisian trader before spawning revolution after revolution in neighbouring countries. They all wanted freedom and democracy, we were told, but all that seemed to be happening was that they were deranged by watching too much television news as each service, particularly Al Jazeera, spooled out violent imagery on an almost twenty four hour loop mostly from footage downloaded from their viewers’ mobile phones. All outlets of the media have come together and conspired to set loose a tide of evil which is turning violence into the very oxygen we are all now breathing, Davies shows in this book which may well be the most powerful and trenchant attack ever mounted on the tyranny of the modern media.

Tom Davies, a Welshman born and bred, was a state scholar at University College Cardiff where he graduated with honours in philosophy. He has been a seaman on ships around Australia and Africa, a social worker in the Lower East Side of New York and was the first graduate to be sent to Indonesia by Voluntary Service Overseas. He later trained as a journalist with the Western Mail, the national newspaper of Wales, and went on to work on the Sunday Times as Atticus, the Sunday Telegraph as a feature writer and the Observer where, for three years, he was their diarist Pendennis. He became a full-time writer in 1983 and has since written sixteen books which include Merlyn the Magician and the Pacific Coast Highway, which was short-listed for the Thomas Cook travel prize and recently acclaimed by Bono, the front man of U2, as being the one book that changed his life. Black Sunlight, his best-selling novel, was set in the 1984 miners’ strike and Stained Glass Hours, his pilgrimage narrative, won the Winifred Mary Stanford Prize for the best book with a religious theme. He has written five books about various pilgrimages including those to Compostela and Rome and his latest novel is The Tyranny of Ghosts. Married with three sons, he lives in Bala in North Wales.