In the last 20 years the BBC has slowly been dumbing down it’s news content, presumably in a bid to drive up ratings. The main news programmes (6, 10 o’clock) in particular are pretty vacuous these days. Newsnight is still very good, but even there the change is visible.
Channel 4 News is by far the best serious news programme available in the UK, and some of it’s other output is also excellent, such as Unreported World. It’s a shame they fill the rest of their schedule with risible shit like Big Brother (happily missed!) and Famous and Fearless really.
I’d agree to a certain extent. A lot of TV is dumbing down but I don’t think the BBC is the worst example of this, after all…it isn’t GMTV is it? And the big stories still do get reported “straight” with the heavier detailed covered by newsnight etc.
And yes, Channel 4 news is pretty good but I rarely catch it for the reasons you mention. I mostly DVR everything and don’t keep it on Channel 4 for fear of accidentally seeing “how to look good as a celebrity werewolf on ice” or similar cack.
Over time, I have noticed the BBC is shifting towards a superficial coverage of a story. It’s almost like a European AP or something. There is zero attempt at context or depth. Perhaps I’m overly picky, but I’d like a news story that is more informative than the intro paragraph to a wikipedia article.
As an example, this is a story on the front page of BBC news right now. Now tell me the answer to the following questions using only that article:
What is the fundamental dispute in the election, and why has the international community take the side it has?
What is Ecowas? Who are members in it? Why might it get involved to begin with?
Why is Ghana’s reaction to something not in Ghana even news anyway?
Why are there UN troops in the Ivory Coast?
The 2002 conflict was briefly mentioned, what is it and does it influence current events?
See what I mean about it being superficial now? If you don’t know what is going on, there’s not enough info in the article that you’ll learn anything. If you do know what’s going on, then there isn’t enough NEW information in the article that you’ll learn anything. Basically, no matter who reads the article, they’re going to come away with nothing from it. That is fairly typical of US news sources, but it’s increasingly becoming more true of the British sources too (not just the BBC, The Economist has gotten really bad recently as well).
The fact the BBC at least has links below the story that explain who the players are, what the situation is, etc is why I say it ‘occasionally’ does real news. Because, occasionally, it actually provides information if you look around the site enough.
Fairly true. Which still means that, from a US perspective, the BBC tilts left. I’m not saying it’s a horrible thing, nor am I saying it’s good. It just is. US readers should be aware of that.
Ugn, what a terrible article. It’s like they got 40 interns together and said ‘I want you all to come back in 10 minutes with a single sentence about the Ivory Coast crisis.’ and then just put the results into a sembalence of order and posted them.
At the very least reporters are biased toward the novel and unusual. They are magpies indiscriminately gathering shiny objects. That is if fine as long as actual unusual events happen every news cycle. I await the headline “Every one is fine today! Noting to worry about. Carry on.”
Fair criticism, you do have to dive into the links to gain the wider perspective (but at least it is there).
Maybe our expectations are too high now. How can a global news service hope to cover everything to that level of detail?
I think if we wind the clock back 30 years I’m not sure we would have heard anything at all at the Ghana situation, we certainly wouldn’t have had it at our fingertips and so wouldn’t have been in a position to criticise the lack of detail or article layout.
I’d suggest that today, it is far easier to gain a quick overview of what is happening in the world. And what is more…we expect it. The price to pay for that may well be a lack of depth.
Funding. News used to be not really considered part of the bottom line. It was done for the prestige it’d bring, not the money it’d bring. Over the last 20 years or so, it’s switched to where it must be profitable. Actual coverage costs money, it’s much easier to have some intern just grab a few facts from wikipedia and slap them together with a few easily found quotes from an interview (which is exactly what my example article was). These days, being a good reporter is less important than being a cheap reporter. The US is further along this trend than British media is, but British media is heading that way too.
I strongly suspect in the future, most news will be gotten from the web. And people will need REALLY good bias detection skills, because god knows most sites are proud of their bias. I’d absolutely love to find a political site that isn’t Daily Kos/Red State insane, or Politico trivial.
Of course merely deciding what is important to report and what is not is a function of bias, but bias is not the same as partisanship. Trying to spin the facts in order to promote a particular agenda is a different matter than failing to achieve the impossible standard of complete “objectivity”.
I am also however concerned over the errors made trying to be “fair”, especially in areas relating to science and policy: the immunization “controversy” has already been brought up as a case in point in the context of pandering to the sensationalism that the public will tune in to watch (although Wakefield does qualify as a villain) but it also illustrates this separate error. Trying to be “even-handed” media outlets will present the wacko idea presented by the starlet with no expertise, or the one out of a thousand doctor who shares the wacko belief, with at least equal time to the information provided by all the expert panels. When present thusly some in the public try to split the difference between the beliefs, since “the truth” must be somewhere between the two “poles” presented. And thus the middle gets moved towards the minority wacko.
That is a weird notion of what “liberal” journalism is.
Off hand Shirley Sherrod and ACORN come to mind as distinctly right-wing attempts at pulling down those they disagreed with.
I think you are conflating the notion that “truth has a liberal bias” with liberals wanting to dethrone the powerful.
As for the corporations that run the media being conservative they do tend to be but then they are generally happy if they are making money. If the thing making them money is an overtly liberal journal they’ll be fine with that.
Haha. Yeah. Their coverage of Israel is only one step above The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and not all that large of a step at that.
Where they really shine IMO is third world coverage. First world news sources sometimes cover those types of stories, but never as well or as often as Al Jazeera. Tou’ll see something about an African country daily there, while the western news sources generally won’t cover Africa until words like ‘genocide’ are applied.
Their coverage of issues affecting Muslims in the US and Europe is interesting as well. That’s where the different worldview thing is really noticable.