News and non-news on TV

Our TV stations pride themselves in the news and public affairs programs they produce to inform the viewing public about the “breaking news” of the day and night. With so many shows airing, local viewers would be up-to-date about events that most significantly affect their day-to-day lives, right?

Uh, not quite. On point of actual significance and relevance, things took a turn for the worse when, not content with the profit they made from out-and-out entertainment shows like dramas, variety shows and sitcoms, TV outfits watered down the hard news content of their newscasts to include “softer” and more diverting items that viewers would find easier to take and enjoy.

They even thought up a name for it, infotainment, and that’s what proliferates on TV these days. Viewers still feel that they’re being informed, but they’re also “enjoying” themselves, so the shows rate better and generate more commercial load and profits. Everybody happy!

Everybody, that is, except viewers who want to be informed about the significant events and issues of the day. Based on that key requirement for legit news programs, many local newscasts get a failing mark.

The first distinction: Not all events are news! Local newscasts spend the majority of their telecasting minutes on crimes, show biz, barangay “news” items, disasters and other melodramatic and emotional events, which are played up for all of the attention-calling and heart-tugging drama they can generate.

Disasters are legit news events, because up-to-the-minute information can help keep people safe. But, even floods and earthquakes are played up too much, with news programs focusing too long on them, leaving other significant but less emotionally charged events and issues unreported on.

As for crimes, fires, barangay incidents, show biz reports, oddities, etc., they are not news in the significant sense of the term.

Compare the local newscast to the front page of a broadsheet and you’ll clearly see the disparity in the coverage of actual news events. Compare local newscasts to their counterparts in Europe and the United States, and the disparity yawns even more widely – and tellingly.

If an hour-and-a-half newscast has 40 or 45 minutes for actual content and devotes 30 of those minutes to less than significant and relevant events that leaves only 10 or 15 minutes to real news coverage. That’s the minority “info” part, while the bulk of the so-called newscast goes to the “tainment” portion.

To make things worse, our newscasts don’t significantly report on international news, ostensibly because viewers here can’t really relate to it. In this age of the so-called Global Pinoy, that’s a woefully shortsighted (and again popularity-driven) view of a news program’s responsibility to inform the viewer and serve him in the totality of his relevant concerns.

Also deficient is newscasts’ coverage of the arts (not show biz or “society”) scene. If the arts are the heart and soul of the nation, (which they are), we shouldn’t be surprised to see so many of us behaving in such warped, unconnected and unenlightened ways.

Can TV news programs do a better job of informing the viewing public? Only if viewers join in the clarion call for real news reportage – not the “infotainment” facsimile thereof.