I 'M reading a book so good I try to bully everyone I know into buying it: Flat Earth News, by investigative journalist Nick Davies, is an expose of the failings of the press. In his analysis of how much news and commentary is sloppy or unresearched regurgitation, he doesn't so much bite the hand that feeds as gnaw it off to the wrist.

Davies spent time in Nottingham for his previous title about poverty, Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain, and as you might infer, he didn't find our city was all hugs and puppies.

Then what should ping into my inbox but an article by another journalist who'd paid us a visit, and the results had more in common with the kind of "churnalism" described in Flat Earth than the rigour of Dark Heart.

Robert Beaumont, writing in The Spectator – slogan: "champagne for the brain" – finds Nottingham bleak and melancholy. Yesterday, my colleague Erik Petersen correctly identified that the piece was conspicuously low on identifiable research or up-to-date information.

It was even hard to tell whether Mr Beaumont had in fact visited. He referred to one dark, windy trip to Goose Gate, and depicted a street with restaurants, boutiques and bars in the "Bohemian quarter" of the city, round the corner from a major arts cinema, as deserted. He bemoaned that the "Shottingham" label has stuck. Has it? When did you last hear the word used? This is what Nick Davies calls the media's "echo chamber" effect, unthinking repetition with no effort expended in checking whether the original assertion had any merit.

It would be easy to launch into a "and two fingers to you, sir" rejoinder to The Spectator and yet, what with it being Christmas and all, I'm going to be more conciliatory.

It's inevitable if you offer an outsider's perspective and find things wanting, there are going to be hurt feelings. When I did a tourist's eye view on Skegness a few years back, I discovered this firsthand. There are still parts of Lincolnshire where it's not safe for me to travel.

And Nottingham's hardly perfect. Plenty of Post readers weighed in to say as much on the website.

So this should go some way to convincing Mr Beaumont that this isn't a howl of knee-jerk provincial loyalty.

But we need to have a word about the London superiority complex, and the supreme annoyance it causes in the rest of the country. There's a special form of critique that metropolitan journalists are happy to deploy on regional cities but would never dream of inflicting on the place they call home.

It works by assembling a list of perceived negatives – no matter how out of date, or vague, or stereotypical, or ill-supported by evidence, or crucially, how common to the rest of Britain – and then defining the city by it, with little reference or interest in any positives.

It's satisfied with stoking the prejudices of those who think life north of Watford is still lived in Arthur Seaton's black-and-white. It's snobbery.

Well, London is teeming with negatives. Those who love it – usually the lucky minority who can afford it – feel the good outweighs the bad.

That's all we're saying, too, and just because we're in a smaller and less important conurbation doesn't mean we don't deserve the same respect.

I can't imagine The Spectator commissioning a hatchet job on London from someone who mentions Julie Burchill's gone off it, says Carnaby Street last swung in the sixties and is now full of cheap souvenir stalls, generalises on the basis of the Damilola Taylor murder, and watches someone drop chewing gum on the northern line – concluding the capital's a right old hole and its glory days are behind it.

Try another visit, Mr B, and get a better guide.