I'm ambivalent about the availability of 24 hour news channels.
I happen to like it at work, when it's possible to wander walk purposefully round the building catching BBC News 24 with subtitles.
In theory it's useful to have TV news at a time that's convenient for the viewer, not simply dictated by the other scheduling demands of the terrestrial stations. I would say that when a big story breaks it's important to have access to coverage as it happens - but if the story is big enough, the Terrestrial channels go to rolling news anyway. And with the existence of teletext, and the internet, and the radio, there isn't any reason to miss a breaking story just because it happens in the down hours between scheduled bulletins
It would be good if the rolling news channels took the opportunity to present the big stories, or the non-headline stories, in greater depth, but on the whole, they don't - there again, that contradicts my liking for having instant access when I'm at work. They are very arbitrary in that they provide regular capsuled Sport and Business bulletins, often covering matters that sports and business fans would regard as peripheral or unimportant. Yet they don't have such capsules for eg science and technology, culture, public services. Arbitrary.
I much prefer an editorialised bulletin; it's slicker and sharper. The comedy show Broken News is excellent at parodying the irritating nature of Rolling News.
Yesterday was an interesting study in rolling news. The Hemel explosion is big news, but, unlike say, 7 July, it lacks an emotional pull. I'm not trivialising the injuries suffered by those involved, but industrial injuries and deaths are frequent occurrences that rarely make the news. Most of us were able to monitor the fire at Hemel with little or no emotional involvement.
Both qB and Jae have blogged on this.
It's the empty speculation that irritates me. There used to be a reluctance to break news until there was some confirmation of the facts from a reliable source. Broken News did it brilliantly last week, with a suspected terrorist incident on a plane midway across the Atlantic. Scrolling headlines speculated that terrorists had boarded the plane in mid-air etc etc etc. It turned out that the pilot had come out of the cabin to go for a pee and and had minor difficulties in re-opening the cabin door because it was slightly stiff. Meanwhile, the reporter on the ground at Schipol was so concerned with asking the mood in the studio he failed to notice that the plane had landed, normally and without any cause for concern yards from where he was standing.
That is comedy, but it embraces a larger truth. Still, the best ever was Fox News just after the 21 July averted bombings. An anti-terrorist expert sat pontificating in the studio about whys and wherefores. I knew that Scotland Yard had given a Press Conference an hour earlier, reported by, amongst others, Fox's sister station, Sky News. Without going into discussion about the accuracy of what Scotland Yard put out, which is subject to an IPCC enquiry, the Fox News 'expert' was even more wildly inaccurate than the Met, despite the 'sources' he had spoken to. Amongst his pearls of wisdom was this was the first time that police had been armed in London; July 7 had been the first terrorist attack on London; and that England should introduce the US Patriot Act - no further explanation, just an order from someone who probably knows little about UK legislation, which, in any case, is none of his business.
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