News and non-news on TV
TV newscasts are supposed to provide viewers with the latest reports on the significant events happening in the country and in the world that affect their lives. Like the front pages of newspapers, they help make sense of, and provide a clarifying context to, the most confounding events that take place every single day.
That’s the ideal. If you watch actual newscasts, however, you realize with a sinking feeling that reality falls woefully short of that goal.
Due to the current trendiness of “infotainment,” today’s newscasts are often an unfocused montage of “interesting” and “exciting” bits that are chosen not for their importance or significance, but for their “diversionary” appeal—anything to keep the viewers from switching to other channels out of diminished interest.
Too deep, irrelevant
Compare local newscasts to some of their foreign counterparts, and you’ll immediately see the difference. “They” are strong on analysis and foreign news, while “we” favor crime stories, disasters, show biz “news,” political skulduggery, rumormongering, etc.
These “exciting” reports take up too much TV time, so little is left for analyses and foreign news items, which are regarded as too “deep” and “irrelevant” to keep the “least common denominator” viewer hooked.
Yes, it isn’t enough to simply report on what’s important and significant, you have to have that “hook.” No wonder, when we watch local news reports, we sometimes feel like fish out of water!
What is the significance we can derive from watching yet another car or bus crash, accident, homicide, fire, squabble at the police precinct, or bickering at the barangay hall? Yes, reports about some crimes can “warn” and teach us, but how many daily “warnings” are needed to do that?
No, the real reason that those “interesting” events are constantly featured is because they’re “entertaining” in their weird kind of way.
What about show biz “news,” which is now one of the main components of local newscasts? Alas, very few of those “exciting” items deserve to be called news at all, because they’re mostly rumors, or not-so-veiled plugs for productions or tie-ups to products being endorsed by the “stars” being talked about.
Valuable TV time is also taken up by weird reports about people with arms and legs that look like crab claws, goats with two heads, a dugong that is mistaken for a mermaid, etc… plus, superstitious beliefs and features that slavishly celebrate extreme displays of conspicuous consumption like designer bags that cost a million bucks each… and news anchors who don’t only report but also opine, in the smug, self-centered view that we’re interested in what they think (we’re not).
Put all of these excesses, conundrums and contradictions together, and you get the local TV newscast that viewers struggle to contend with these days.
Portrait of the broadcast journalist, not as an objective reporter of significant news events, but as gung-ho entertainer, who always has one gimlet eye cocked for top ratings numbers—and the financial bottom line.
