There's too much news out there. All the world's media organizations spew news out of their burbling mouths like demented children, repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating themselves. We don't need 24 hours a day news stations because all that they produce is over-analysis. Less is more, yet the powers that be have decided that every vaguely interesting story should have journalists or reporters standing watch over it all the time. Richard Hammond gets seriously injured in a high speed car crash filming for BBC TV's Top Gear, and for a while it is a big news story, justifiably so. When he makes a recovery in no time at all, that is also news, and welcome news at that. But when we end up with every single TV news station filing a ten minute report on what treatment he might be getting in a Bristol hospital, it is no longer news. It is waffle.
And then there are all the contributions from the public. The news stations know they don't have enough stories, but they also clamour desperately to assuage public opinion, so they plead and implore you to email, phone, fax or write to them. This is done, and the comments received are (to quote the great Chris Morris) "rabid, pig-ignorant, and stultifyingly ill-informed". The news reporters are supposed to be the people most skilled at reporting news and describing events, so to pass those tasks onto the public is to acknowledge implicitly that this is not the case. Or maybe it simply acknowledges that these programmes have so much time to kill and so much airtime to fill that they can only do it with the public's help. Why don't the TV stations save themselves some money and switch off the rolling news channels? It's not as if there are so many exciting TV shows being broadcast that there's no time for news bulletins on the main channels.
And then there are all the contributions from the public. The news stations know they don't have enough stories, but they also clamour desperately to assuage public opinion, so they plead and implore you to email, phone, fax or write to them. This is done, and the comments received are (to quote the great Chris Morris) "rabid, pig-ignorant, and stultifyingly ill-informed". The news reporters are supposed to be the people most skilled at reporting news and describing events, so to pass those tasks onto the public is to acknowledge implicitly that this is not the case. Or maybe it simply acknowledges that these programmes have so much time to kill and so much airtime to fill that they can only do it with the public's help. Why don't the TV stations save themselves some money and switch off the rolling news channels? It's not as if there are so many exciting TV shows being broadcast that there's no time for news bulletins on the main channels.
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