Saturday 30 January 2010
Bad news
I am a bit of a news junkie. The TV channel I watch most is BBC News 24 (is it still called that?). I've become increasingly concerned over the years at the quality of news on offer in the UK, so I only watch the BBC. Even so, news bulletins seem to be mostly taken up with who's murdered whom, who's in court, that sort of thing. The only useful news bulletins seem to be on the BBC World Service, on the radio, which I listen to at 4 or 5 a.m. Yesterday I watched a bit of the coverage on BBC News 24 of Tony Blair's evidence at the Chilcot inquiry, but was staggered to see a "breaking news" item which interrupted the sports bulletin to show Blair returning to his house. This is news?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
When I used to work for a major financial services information provider (now swallowed up by an even larger one),the Editorial Director made it clear to all the journos that their job was not just to report the news but also to create it by 'digging around' among contacts as traditional 'newshounds' are/were supposed to. Unfortunately now with 24 hour news the problem is that limited funds mean that you have to fill the 168 hours with the presentation padding as you describe. The actual 'breaking news' could of course be easily condensed into a four minute Radio 4 summary (ideally read by Charlotte Green....
ReplyDelete;-)). IMHO the only TV journos who still seem to do real 'digging' are the remarkable Robert Peston who almost (sorry, arguably, trying to keep things libel-free here!) destroyed Northern Rock single-handed and the sceptical but literate Garry Gibbon on Channel 4 News.
...and what with BBC newsreaders regularly dancing with Pudsey Bear or similar, it's not surprising that my daughter is convinced that BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson is actually Harry Hill but without the pens in his top pocket...
ReplyDeletePerhaps the solution is to replace live news broadcasting with written reports that stay on the screen till driven off by subsequent reports -- like they do with the football score updates on Saturday afternoons.
ReplyDeleteThere is something very similar to this at Bloomberg TV (FreeSat Ch. 208) - the news-bimbo only gets a quarter of the screen to herself while the rest is dedicated to financial tickers and various text scroller bars...
ReplyDelete