I SAW THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [525]

ITV News, with newscaster Lucrezia Millarini

When I previously discussed how BBC radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930, I clarified how specific the circumstances were: allowed only to report from newspapers and news agencies, the public holiday meant no newspapers were published that day, no wire services were running, and no other news was physically reported in time.

 

Today we, the audience, are like the BBC were then, primed to be on tenterhooks. The gap in time between the reception and dissemination of information has almost entirely been closed. Continuous, unedited live audio and video from anywhere can instigated at a moment’s notice by most people, ready to be picked up by anyone else. 

 

All technological and practical constraints that shaped TV and radio news have been removed. Instead of five-minute summaries or half-hour bulletins, the news is as long as you want it to be. Therefore, only you can shape what those limits are.

 

Because I will look at my phone an untold number of times per day – I don’t wish to know that number either – I can call myself up to date with the news, having looked at various reputable resources through the day, from the BBC, various UK newspapers including “The Guardian” and “The Times”, and American sites like CNN, “The New Yorker”, “The Atlantic”, “The New Yorker” and “The New York Times”. For this reason, once I arrive home from work, the last thing I want to watch is more news – a quick cursory glance through the evening will confirm if anything else has happened outside of business hours.

 

Our family, however, continues a tradition of watching the news from ITV in the evening. A half-hour regional news magazine has been anchored at 6pm longer than I have been alive, but the national ITV Evening News has become so long that, as a family, we consciously break away from it to watch something else. ITV’s evening news originally preceded the original news for fifteen minutes until 1998, when it was decided to make it ITV’s main news of the day, doubling the length to give more time to each story. From March 2022, it doubled again to an hour, adding the occasional longer investigation, but having more stories overall. The consequence, for us at least, is fatigue – there are only so many ways you can hear how human beings can be killed. Fortunately, we are relieved when “The One Show” begins.

 

Replicating daytime radio, hourly daytime news and weather summaries began appearing in 1986 on BBC One, with ITV following two years later. Largely made redundant by TV news channels and the internet, mornings on UK television are filled with people talking about the news: BBC One has “Breakfast”, “Morning Live” and an hour-long lunchtime news; ITV has topical shows “Good Morning Britain”, “Lorraine”, “This Morning” and “Loose Women”; BBC Two rebroadcasts the corporation’s global news channel, plus “Politics Live”; and Channel 5 has a succession of discussion shows from 9.15am to 3pm. Everything is up for discussion from various commentators, some appearing multiple times across these shows, some becoming identified with certain shows, like Sonia Sodha and Nick Ferrari on “This Morning”, or Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce on “Good Morning Britain” – all of these people also have regular newspaper columns. If you think one show is going on about the same subject for too long, or you want to hear what someone else thinks about the same subject, you have a choice of viewing. Only “Breakfast” and “Good Morning Britain” maintain news bulletins separated from commentators. Meanwhile, Channel 4 broadcasts American sitcom repeats in the morning.

 

This cacophony of news commentary is what led me to cancel my subscription to “The New York Times” once I realised I was only reading its comment section, and to complete the word puzzles. In truth, I cannot work out which of these was driving me most to the paper, but even if I agreed with what I was reading, too much of a good thing is still too much, and I haven’t played Wordle since.

 

I was planning this article just as the United States announced tariffs on countries that did not support its intention to take over the Danish territory of Greenland. Such a discombobulating story led me to constantly check my phone for updates, whether they would come or not, until I had enough of a context and grasp on the story. But “flooding the zone” of public discourse with announcements and edicts to keep politicians and countries on edge, dutifully repeated by news channels to keep us informed, only puts everyone on edge – it is an inevitably parasitic capture of the news cycle.

 

I think the only answer is to create your own bulletin – create times when you can update yourself, leave time to think, and see if there are any updates later. It may sound odd to compare it to the Muzak Corporation’s system of background music, known as “Stimulus Progression”, but it worked on the basis that motivational music be followed by periods of silence to limit fatigue.

 

I can only say this has worked for me – I have cut my phone usage by over an hour a day since 2026 began, but again, word puzzles form part of that time.

EACH MORNING OUR KEY TO THE WORLD [447]

I only buy one physical newspaper each week...

Should I remain someone that consumes as much news as I do? I certainly read, watch and listen to enough news to ask that question, but I have started feeling like I need an answer.

My average weekday begins by turning on my phone as soon as I wake up – I have a separate alarm clock – to read the front pages of a list of news and social media websites: in order, BBC News, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, the LGBT+ sites PinkNews (UK) and The Advocate (US), CNN, The Times (of London), The Telegraph, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The New York Times. Having completed Wordle on the last of these sites, about twenty minutes will have passed, and I am now ready to get out of bed and face the day.

This choice of sites is deliberately meant to be a broad range, including places that don’t fit my own politics. The objective is to see what truly the most important stories are, which stories are more important to each site, notice any trends and, importantly for me, read anything interesting – I am always looking for subjects to talk about, and you can’t expect these to come to you. The only reason I don’t look at the “Daily Mail” website, apparently the most-read news website in English, is because their front page has too many stories on it to discern what is meant to be important.

Once out of bed, I will put on the television to watch “Breakfast” on BBC One while I get ready for work, and once I have left the house, the news bulletins interrupting Lauren Laverne’s breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music will be the next source of news, unless I am looking at other stories on my phone while listening. This will continue at various points throughout the day even after I get home – a house tradition is to watch the ITV Evening News after the regional stories have played, but upon its doubling in length to an hour in March 2022, the television is consciously switched to another channel at the half-hour mark, ending my news for the day, provided I have put my phone down.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have a problem if I didn’t feel the need to check my phone so much, but having realised it has become my main source of news, it has become unavoidable. Short hourly news bulletins have evaporated from the main television channels, and I avoid opinion-led discussions of the news on TV, preferring to make my own mind up.

The issue that means I consume too much news is defining what it means to be “informed”. Requiring a broad range of sources for news means my own requirements are very high. I wouldn’t choose one channel, site or bulletin to serve as my single source, but if I was to reduce the number of places I search for news, it would feel like reducing my horizons, or not challenging my opinions enough. It may well be that I am thinking about this now because I am reaching my upper limit.

I STARTED A JOKE [41]

Last week, planning my article about a possible “bias against understanding” in 1970s TV journalism – still much more engaging than it sounds – I did what I usually do, talking about what I had in mind with a couple of people at work. Going through the bits of information I had, I was surprised when one section, later deemed superfluous to the rest of the article, got a laugh at the end. Thinking about it afterwards, I had introduced an idea of something, presented it in the right order, and added a punchline to it.

I am not someone who thinks of themselves as someone who can tell a joke, and have never gone out of my way to write one. However, recognising a skill to be developed, here is that excised section from last week, plus two other observations from the last week.

1) When the BBC merged its News and Current Affairs departments together, Current Affairs moved out of its centre, based in another part of London. Formerly the Gaumont-British Studios, where Alfred Hitchcock made “The 39 Steps” (1935) and “The Lady Vanishes” (1938), Lime Grove was bought by the BBC in 1949. However, Lime Grove is also the name of the residential street in which the studios were based - when the BBC ran out of office space, they started buying up the terraced houses next door, meaning episodes of “Panorama” were being planned in someone’s old front room. The studios were demolished when the BBC moved out, with the rubble being used as hardcore for widening the M25 motorway – you can no longer visit it, but you may have driven over it.

2) On Monday 6^th February, Bauer Media relaunched their local radio network, which includes Key 103 in Manchester and Radio City in Liverpool, with a refined station sound and playlist. However, others focussed on the style guide given to presenters, tightly restricting the subjects and time they could speak, some links needing to be signed off by their “content controller.” Bauer later issued a statement that described parts of the radio industry as having “indulged itself in hyperbole,” [http://radiotoday.co.uk/2017/02/bauer-hits-back-at-style-guide-reactions/] but it didn’t stop me from thinking they could do with hiring Siri, Cortana, Alexa or Google Assistant for their mid-morning shows. So, I wrote on Twitter: “@bauerradio How come @wave105radio, one of your stations, can do perfectly well without all these rules?” Wave 105, “The South’s Best Variety of Hits,” liked the Tweet in return – I should have asked why, but if they answered, they could become Magic 105 by the next time I tuned in.

3) So, that Donald Trump, eh? That President of the United States that needs members of his staff to clarify what he says on Twitter? When Steven Poole decodified “Trumpspeak” – all the “dishonest,” “failing,” and “bad” stuff - for the “Guardian” newspaper, [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/07/bad-dudes-dumb-deals-trumpspeak-decoded-donald-trump-language] I realised how darkly funny this could be. George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” gave us the idea of “Newspeak” as a way of restricting the population’s ability to articulate itself, allowing the rulers to control them more easily – but what if the head of state does it to themselves first?