Here is the News...

What constitutes news? Sometimes I wonder. There was a time, just a few weeks ago, that you couldn’t watch the news on TV, listen to it on the radio, or open a newspaper without being bombarded with news on Syria; now if you want to find out what is happening there you have to search for it. I assume, from what I have read on various websites, that the whole thing has not yet been resolved (irony), but watching the BBC news, one could be forgiven for thinking that it had. Certainly as far as the TV news on the BBC is concerned it is old hat; they have moved on to other matters.

Now I accept that the way we consume news has changed significantly in recent years and that may have an effect.  When I was young it was limited to a few TV and radio broadcasts and the newspapers of course, and I can remember watching the news in the ‘60s and every night there were high profile reports from Vietnam; I remember the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia that dominated bulletins for ages. There have been other significant events that have taken over broadcasts for periods and I guess that they have similarly been overtaken by other events, but in these days of twenty four hour rolling news and the internet, it still surprises me that major events suddenly disappear off the news makers' radar, at least to the point that one has to make an effort to find out the latest on a story that yesterday was in every newspaper and on every news programme.

Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s the general public’s access to news was much more limited than it is today. Newspapers had far fewer pages; TV news broadcasts were shorter and radio had no stations dedicated to the news (at least not in the UK). Now we have the internet, newspapers have so many more pages and on TV there is any number of channels broadcasting news 24/7. And yet sometimes I think we are less well informed than we were thirty or forty years ago. When John Kennedy was assassinated, when Russian tanks rolled into Prague and when Apollo 11 landed on the moon we relied on limited news sources yet we could scarcely have been less well informed. While even then TV news favoured stories for which they had filmed footage, there were so many major stories that no cameraman could access or if they could, it would not be possible to transmit it as immediately as it is today; if the story was significant enough they were still reported on though. Now it seems that unless a story has some accompanying (and preferably evocative) footage, it will be relegated to some sort of news ghetto.

The rolling news channels package stuff into fifteen or twenty minute segments, repeating the same stories over and again, with footage from on the spot reporters (or nowadays, from amateur, mobile phone pictures and videos), while other stories go unreported because they don’t have some nice sexy pictures. Remember last year when Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard of the United States? The BBC despatched reporters to New York to give us in depth reports on the effects of the storm; seventy three people died in the US as a result and we should never minimise the impact the storm had there, but people were killed in countries like Haiti, Dominion Republic and Cuba, yet watching coverage in this country, one could be forgiven for thinking that these countries had not been impacted at all. Presumably the broadcasters had no reporters on the ground in those other countries.

And then there are the newspapers. In the days when I regularly bought one (and since I ceased commuting I admit that those days are over), I would be constantly frustrated by the fact that a single story would dominate the papers so much. Perhaps the most outstanding was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. Understandably the story was the lead everywhere for a day or two, but after buying newspapers a week later the fact that were still devoting half of their pages to the matter made one start to wonder if the rest of the world had stopped doing anything. Major story that it was, the number of column inches given over to it was entirely disproportionate. Even today it seems that hardly a month passes without some new Diana story appearing, usually on the front page of The Daily Express on days that they are not predicting the worst winter or hottest summer since time began, or how drinking two cups of coffee can prevent a stroke; followed a week later by the news that the same coffee consumption can cause cancer – doh!

The ultimate Express front page; a health story AND Diana!

Meanwhile The Daily Mail can be relied upon to give prominence to items about “the loony left” or “health and safety gone mad” with regular scare stories about immigration, and the red top tabloids will be dominated by stories about Katie Price or the stars of some reality TV programme you don’t watch, but at least with the newspapers you know what you are likely to get; you pay your money, you take your choice. If a left wing slant is to your taste there are The Mirror and The Guardian. Supposedly for a more balanced, neutral point of view we should be able to look to the visual and audio media in the form of the BBC, although Auntie Beeb has undoubtedly veered leftwards over the years. But even then the more perceptive viewer or listener should be able to filter out any partiality and take from their reportage the facts and make up one’s own mind on them.

The cult of "celebrity;" is that news?

The Sport never pretended to be a newspaper.

I like to think that I am astute enough to make up my own mind on stories that the Beeb may report, but again they have the tendency to allow a story to dominate their broadcasts for a while and then, as though it had never happened, never refer to it again. TV news broadcasts on the BBC have also increasingly appeared to be mere trailers for other stories on many occasions. Often they will report, as though it was a recent story, on some matter that occurred months (or years) ago but is really only being shown now to trail an episode of Panorama  or some other documentary special, or as recently, plug a non news show. Last week Dr Who was fifty years old (the first broadcast was on 23^rd November 2013) and the BBC marked the occasion with a special episode, broadcast simultaneously in ninety four countries, earning it a Guinness World Record as "the world's largest ever simulcast of a TV drama.” It was watched by over ten million people in the UK alone. Not an insignificant event I agree, but did it warrant the amount of TV coverage, on the news, in prime time, with reports that were little more than plugs for a TV drama? Is that news? Well if it is, it deserves little more than to be consigned to the “and finally” segment of any bulletin.

As an aside I watched The Day of The Doctor (after the event, on iPlayer) and have to say that I am probably not enough of a Whovian to have got the best out of it; it was frankly a bit of a mess, albeit with a couple of goodish jokes. OK, having read some reviews I may be in a small minority that didn’t go into raptures over it, but as I have rarely watched Dr Who since I was about six and then spent most of the programme behind the sofa or watching through my fingers, I may not be the best judge. Bear in mind that I loved Gormenghast on the BBC but imagine that a lot of people hated it.

But finally, back to the news and with such a plethora of news media to choose from, why do I feel so ill informed these days? It is probably my own fault, I really should read a decent newspaper; any suggestions?