Since this blog is essentially news-driven, it feels appropriate for me to start it off with an article I first wrote in the late 90′s and revised last year.

Last November saw the start of a new comedy series on BBC2, Broken News, presenting a sardonic parody of modern 24-hour rolling news channels. Throughout, the programme satirises a number of different formats, including BBC local and national news, British satellite news, entertainment news, and US news programmes, following in the tradition most famously shown by Chris Morris with his The Day Today and Brass Eye series.

With comedies such as these, and more explicitly with current affairs comedy quizzes such as The News Quiz and Have I Got News For You, the news is transformed into something entertaining. For a while now I’ve been wondering if the news itself is seen more as entertainment – both by the people who publish it, and by us the public who consume it.

I first began to think about this about 6 years ago, during the NATO war against Kosovo. During that time I, perhaps to an obsessive level, received the news most of the time. Merely having a television in another corner of the room wasn’t good enough for me – the 24 hour news feed came direct in a window to one of the monitors of my computer whilst I was at home, and whilst at work I had the BBC desktop ticker running so I could see instantly whenever a new story broke.

But how necessary actually is the news anyway, & to what extent is it ‘mere’ entertainment? For an editor, compiling the news is no less an art than it is for the potter assembling a piece of clay in just the right manner. Editors are never short of raw material with which to fill a paper or a programme – even on a slow news day. If you’ve ever seen a Press Association or a Reuters ticker in action, you’ll know that the news is happening all the time & never recycles as it does on our 24 hour news channels! So often, the decisions as to what will be in ‘the news’ are governed less by what is important or essential for us to know, & more by how interesting the viewers will find the item, or by how many copies of the newspaper it is likely to sell. At http://www.star-one.org.uk/opinion/news.rm you can see a video clip of a newspaper picture editor going through the week’s photographs, picking them out not on their news value, but on their dramatic impact.

I remember a couple of years ago when the tragedy in Soham was unfolding, when even the comparitively restrained Radio 4 news turned the event into a true-life soap opera – “tune in to our next bulletin to hear the latest gripping episode”. More recently on News 24 there was the sight of correspondents stood outside the Vatican getting visibly irritated as they waited for the Pope to die so they could say something new.

Then the next step, after choosing the articles, is the trimming and spinning of them to present the opinion of the organisation publishing. An rabidly anti-Catholic acquaintance I had once sent me an article published by the Protestant Truth Society, claiming the Pope was allegedly calling on the people of Mexico to persecute the evangelical Christians there. To the casual or uncritical reader, this was irrefutable proof of the evils of a satanic-inspired heresy. However, to the more careful reader it became clear the power of selective editing & wilful misquoting was being used to its utmost. Similarly the television advert for the Guardian a few years ago depicted the same scene shot from two very different camera angles – the first angle showed a young black man apparently mugging a respectable-looking business man on a street corner, whereas the second scene showed the true picture of the young man rushing into the business man in order to save him from the large heavy falling object that would otherwise have seriously injured him.

But are we really personally any better off for knowing all the evils in the world the news tells us about? Is the world a better place for our knowledge of the good which goes on? Was my friend who, six years ago, was only just barely aware our country was at war really disadvantaged by not knowing the things I did? To what extent was my desire to see the news a necessary part of living In The World, and to what extent was I just replacing an interest in being entertained by Eastenders with being entertained by the news? To what extent do we all, whether we care to admit to it or not, truly see the news as our voyeuristic view into the lives of others (and maybe tut-tut to ourselves about how terrible the world is without actually taking the next step of doing something to improve it), as just another piece in our jigsaw of daily entertainment?