The peril of 24 hour news

The internet has been responsible for some remarkable advances in our way of life and the immediacy of communication is one of those things that have revolutionised the way we receive news. As we started to expect faster delivery of news the TV channels stepped up creating 24 hour News channels. Now we have access to images and information around the world and news delivered fast.

But this also brings with it a very large down side. There is often not enough news and when it is there it doesn't develop fast enough to fill a schedule.

So what does this mean? Well simply that these news channels have to fill the gaps and the ways that they do this are not necessarily beneficial. One of the methods used is what I call rolling speculation. This is where a news story breaks and only a limited amount of information about the event is available. So of course you want to maintain momentum with a story and you can't really keep repeating the very scant facts afforded to you so what do you do? Take what you know and create scenarios about what could have happened/could be happening. Of course as more details are released this speculation is adjusted. The problem is that this supplemental information is used to modify the expectations of the speculation rather than to supplement available fact. Soon the entire news is based around a channel's speculation rather than what is actually happening.

Another problem is where a story doesn't quite fit the political/corporate stance on the situation. The newsreaders (who in themselves are a problem but we'll come to that) force questions that try to subvert the facts to the position they want to espouse. For instance many of the experts in the e-Coli and petting zoo situation said that closing petting zoos is not necessary but the newsreader questions were always attempting to elicit the response that they SHOULD be closed. This is opinion and not news.

And on to Newsreaders. Yes that was a deliberate capitalisation. Many of the screen pundits seem to think that their presence alone lends weight to the story. That they themselves are the news story rather than the method by which the facts are conveyed. In certain cases such as Kate Adey they became the news simply because they were so good at telling you the news in such a way that their delivery was respected. But they themselves were not the news, just that they were very good in delivering it.

But in this narcissistic self-obsessed world, the 'me' generation obviously require their own self-obsessed purveyors of opinion masquerading as fact and that is what the news has become. Sadly the majority of this is delivered by the state organ, the BBC.