(Not a transport post)
I’ve long been fascinated by TV news, and sometimes when I’m at home at lunchtime, I switch on SBS – from midday they show BBC News At Ten followed by ABC America’s World News Tonight.
These are both different to Australian TV news services, and couldn’t be more different from each other.
News At Ten feels calm, considered, goes into depth on some stories, often with analysis from specialised reporters in the studio.
And cultured. I’m not sure any Australian news service would ever cross live during their evening bulletin to the Booker Prize (or equivalent) winner just after the prize was awarded. Winner Samantha Harvey said she’d use the prize money to buy a new bicycle!
All in all, the bulletin leaves me feeling more informed than I was before.
They don’t put News At Ten bulletins online, but you can get a taste of their stories from this Youtube playlist. And by the way, the international version of the BBC News channel was recently made available for free viewing online in Australia.
ABC America
In contrast, World News Tonight is frantic. Host David Muir barely takes a breath.
He introduces the story headlines at the top of the program, then repeats each one again with video highlights, before they play the title sequence (about 2 minutes in!) and then actually presenting the stories.
Almost everything is labelled “Breaking News” even when it clearly isn’t. Maybe this has a different meaning Stateside, but in my book if they’ve had time to put together a package (an edited story), and it shows footage and interviews evidently filmed across many hours, then it’s not “Breaking”.
In fact all the language seems deliberately geared to try and make you watch it live, and not to change the channel. It’s got lots of phrases like “several developing stories as we come on the air”, “images coming in tonight”, “a busy Wednesday night”, and lots of extraneous uses of “tonight” and “at this hour”.
They even seem to have worked out the verbal choreography of the journo giving the live update throwing back to the studio, such that barely a millisecond is wasted.
Have a watch. Don’t let the Hero preview image fool you. The pace is unrelenting until the warm fuzzy story at the end. It leaves me a little exhausted. Even the theme music seems a little too fast.
If you watch all the way through, you’ll also notice they do a bunch of stories at the start, then have several commercial breaks in very quick succession.
I don’t know if this is typical for American evening news bulletins, but I’m glad Australian TV news (even the commercial stations) doesn’t work like this.
…but if you want a glimpse of another “foreign country” try this, showing Brisbane’s TV news from 1975, courtesy of the very entertaining “VHS Revue” Youtube channel.
Those white jackets are quite something.
3 replies on “Here is the news”
US resident here, I haven’t watched the “ News “ in decades. Too much divisiveness and little real information.
I get a better spread of news online where I can pick different sources and check background and opposing opinions.
I still have the screenshot of the notification that made me uninstall the BBC News app:
“WATCH: David Beckham turns to crisps and doughnuts to keep him going in his wait to see the Queen lying in state”
@B P Moffit, yes clearly there’s a trend away from mainstream media – newspapers, radio, TV. My view is I still like to dip into them; having more options to go looking for details is very good, but the MSM can give me a good overview of what’s happening.
@Benjamin, yes, the BBC News web site and other outlets certainly aren’t above reporting trivia. I do find their TV news bulletins a bit better – they mostly don’t have time for that.