Scoop

Name: Scoop
Author: Evelyn Waugh

by Evelyn Waugh

The news is made up, and the hacks know it.

For you if

you suspect the people reporting the war have never seen it.

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A mild nature columnist is mistaken for a famous war correspondent and sent to cover a civil war in an African country he cannot find on a map. Waugh's 1938 farce follows the rival newspapers, the press barons and the hacks who invent the news they cannot find, and the one honest man who stumbles into a story. It is a nasty, funny book about how the news gets made, and the answer is mostly guesswork, vanity and ad revenue.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: complicity propaganda satire

Pass with note. Waugh's satire hits the press barons and the reporters but is built on racist colonial caricatures of the African country and its people, and Waugh's own reactionary politics, including his support for Franco and Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, are documented; the seam is visible and explainable, and the book needs to be read as a target, not a guide. Close relatives: Manufacturing Consent, This Is Not Propaganda, Catch-22 and Our Man in Havana (suggested 10-21).

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

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