IN forty years of broadcasting I only ever lost my temper twice, both times on Radio 4’s innocuous Moral Maze. The first outburst was provoked by David Starkey and could have happened to anyone. The second, less understandable, was when the mild-mannered Ian Hargreaves, journalist and professor of journalism, questioned the value of having an Independent MP in the House of Commons. My response was unusually discourteous.

Now I can make amends. Hargreaves has written a timely and disturbing account of journalism in peril. He is well equipped for the task, for his career has taken him across the waterfront of news except for the raffish taverns at the tabloid end of it. He spent 15 years on The Financial Times, was selected by John Birt (a dubious distinction) to head the BBC’s revamped news division, edited The Independent and New Statesman, and then became Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University. Although he escaped the tabloids he is well informed about them, about the tyranny of press barons old and new, and about the obsession with celebrity masquerading as news. He quotes the example of a red-top whose only American office was in Hollywood. On September 11, 2001, its correspondent had to drive 3,000 miles to get to the story.

Hargreaves identifies some disturbing trends: the blurring of the boundaries between advertising and editorial, and indeed between fact and fiction; the redefinition of news as whatever sells newspapers; the concentration of ownership in the hands of great corporations and multinationals; even the phenomenon of the journalist-as-celebrity, with its striking ill-effects: “Fly-in fly-away presenters are no substitute for reporters who know the terrain.”

If he ever wished to expand on the theme, and his lawyers were feeling bold enough, I could supply him with chapter and verse, from mainstream British TV news, of stories which were fabrications from start to finish. One of them was honoured with a Royal Television Society award.

Some of the earlier chapters seem to be led by their footnotes, but that is a vice almost as old as academia itself. How many trees are felled and pulped to feed the academics’ tiresome habit of using footnotes to salute each other? Ian Hargreaves tends towards the professorial too in attributing anxieties to others which he clearly shares himself. He hopes that the crassness and down-market stampede of the news industry, both print and broadcast, will somehow be balanced by the new media, self-publishing and the liberating effect of universal internet access.

Don’t count on it. I cannot remember a time when we needed to be better informed about the world around us but were in fact worse informed. The “dumbing down” of the news media, even of parts of the BBC’s output, is something that he leaves characteristically in inverted commas, as if it were the concern of others which he may or may not share; but it is reality that can be verified nightly on the BBC’s lamentable News at Six O’Clock.

This book has more than enough evidence of decline and fall to justify its gently polemical conclusion, that people will note the unreliability of the news they get and will switch off, settling for a quiet life away from the information storm: “This is the great peril, the way free societies might indeed perish; lost in media space, with no direction home.”

There’s enough rolling news around these days — indeed rolling news is a part of the problem. With its frenzy to be first and fastest it is fatally flawed and fallible. It shows us more than it tells us and it tells us more than it knows. I hope that Hargreaves will respond with rolling commentary.

The next edition should include the media lessons of the forthcoming conflict in the Gulf. This will be a test of the courage of the reporters on the ground, although I suspect that its initial phase will be “secret even in success”, as President Bush described the war in Afghanistan. It will certainly be a test of the seriousness of our journalism.

We need Hargreaves to measure it for us with his cool impartial eye.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Jane Bussman's Top 10 journalism tips
• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads