Once again I wake to the BBC News channel ‘Britain’s most watched news channel’ wondering why I bother. I can avoid buying the Daily Mail and it’s tittle tattle quite easily yet i find the BBC’s 24 hour news channel streamed into my home unavoidably disappointing.
I am forced to pay to have the BBC in my home, is it too much to ask for a news service to transmit what I class as ‘News’?
The order of the headlines this morning were Xfactor and Tiger Woods in the top slots, followed by a one minute clip of Tony Blair stating he would have invaded Iraq with or without evidence of weapons of mass distraction.
We listen to this and still carry on with our morning, downing another spoonful of the luke warm half-arsed media served to us for breakfast each day.
We are not nearly angry enough.
Who’s fault is this..? Who is responsible for our main stream news?
The journalists? The news agencies? The channels? The viewers? I think I know.
How about we start to celebrate International Journalist Day? We already have World Press Freedom Day on May the 3rd, but I propose for one day of the year we give all journalists on all the papers and TV stations free rein to report whatever stories they want to. This will give the journalists themselves the chance to tell us what they think is newsworthy. What they would like to tell the world.
Maybe then we could see who out there cares about what is reported and take note of their names. These are the journalists we will be sponsoring/enabling/supporting when the old news programming model goes through the drastic transformation it so desperately needs.
I am turning on the TV less and less for my news and this bothers me.
What is the majority of the population being told is news right now?
I know of places I can go for to be reliably informed. Like a shopper on the black market, I have certain corners of the internet I know I can visit to get news i trust. How about those that don’t? What are we being brought up to care about?
Currently I am reading The Nation, Aljazeera, The Guardian, Robert Fisk, The GNN, UK Indymedia, Press Display
Other resources: FactCheck.org, Under The Carpet
