Here’s something which has been getting on my nerves for a long time, but I’m fast approaching screaming point.
Now that there are 24-hour news channels, you might think you should have access to a greater range and variety of news and a professional approach to delivery and presentation? Well, maybe you should, but you don’t. What you get is the same amount of news spread very thinly by presenters rehashing the same old headline stories hour after hour, and reporters who surely must have been told ‘Try to spin it out as long as you can, Bob, me old mate. We’ve got five minutes to fill here, and only three sentences for you to say’.
Bob comes on and he stands before the bloody camera and it soon becomes apparent that he is pathologically incapable of completing a singe sentence without saying ‘er’ several times. Tonight, listening to a report on the conflict in Georgia, I counted eight ‘er’s in one short sentence! I tell you what, if those guys were fined £100 each time they said ‘er’ we could shore up the National Health service within a week – and be able to fund those kidney cancer drugs that NICE won’t let the doctors prescribe!
Sometimes it seems they become conscious of what they’re doing to the delicate sensibilites of those used to a better conversational style, and they’ll just start to pause between each word. I don’t know which is worse, actually, sprinkling every sentence liberally with ‘er’ as if it’s the verbal equivalent of chocolate chips on ice cream, or those deadly little short pauses between words. It sounds as if the guy is having an asthma attack and it certainly doesn’t make for comfortable listening.
Someone needs to tell them that the combination of the staccato delivery and the over-use of the phonemes ‘um’, ‘er’, and ‘ah’ makes the news extremely irritating to listen to. If anyone ever opens a 24-hour news station that not only delivers more varied and broader-based news items but does it with decent presentation, I for one will be hooked, and I suspect that many other people will, too.
As it is, I’m ready to throw something heavy at the TV.
Listen up guys. Some of us would like to hear articulate presenters who use proper sentence construction and know how to speak publicly and keep our attention. We’d also like to know what else is going on in the world apart from that big headline story – especially when you’ve run out of things to bloody say about it!!
BTW, that reporter in the picture is ‘Richard – Er – Galpin’. I kid you not, that’s what the presenter said.
It could be worse. Here in the States, we’ve had weeks–literally weeks–about whether a football star was going to come out of retirement, and if he did would his old team take him back and break their promise to start the new guy, and if the team didn’t want him, what new team would he end up playing for. (Since I’m sure you won’t be able to bear the suspense–he did, they didn’t, and he went to New York.)
We have a great sense of priorities in this country.
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Ruth – I hate to spoil your illusions about British TV, but we had the whole sorry saga of Brett Favre here too! Admittedly that was on sports news, though, not the 24-hour news channel, and not weeks’ worth – they save that for soccer coverage.
Ah….the great God ‘Market Share’! Ack!
gemmaks last blog post..The Olympics……..1972!
You know the worst that I find happening with these news channels is that every second news is a breaking news. I mean sometimes I feel like writing an email to them and telling them how the F*** can they call every news a breaking news, but them I stop myself thinking about the number of emails I would have to write. If a player fell down while playing cricket, it’s a breaking news; if a star buys flowers for his girl-friend ,it’s another one. And it’s more annoying if a news presenter is not articulate out of all the people. I mean don’t they take interviews before selecting candidates or they don’t have so-called-training before putting their candidates infront of the national television? Sigh! I can really go on on this one.:p
Btw someone landed on my site today with keywords’ Jay blog procrastination exam’ . I wonder what the person was looking for?
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All these rolling news channels are just the media equivalent of Groundhog Day but not as funny. More news definitely doesn’t mean better presented news; quite the reverse. I gave up watching them earlier this year, even though (or perhaps because) I’m a bona fide journalist, you know, with a proper press card and all that, so a bit of a news junkie I certainly didn’t suffer any withdrawal symptoms. For instant information, I either listen to the hourly news bulletins on BBC R4 or look at BBC online but, on the whole, even though there’s a time lag, I’d sooner read a well-written news report and a comment piece in a UK broadsheet than watch Sky News et al any day.
60 Going On 16s last blog post..Tales of the riverbank
Gemma – *Sigh* Be nice to have some choice though, wouldn’t it?
Scratch – Exactly. Get some articulate presenters and journos and keep the ‘breaking news!’ for news which is actually breaking. Not for every new story!!
‘Jay blog procrastination exam’? Uh, not me, though I’ll happily procrastinate about exams. LOL! I have some weird search terms, too!
60/16 – It’s so nice to have an actual journalist agree with me! I imagine you learned your craft in the era before ‘media studies’ – which, with no disrespect to media students (my son being one) – sometimes seems to be the new sociology. Both valid disciplines in their own right, but the genre tends to get devalued by too many lacklustre courses and students.
This is a pet peeve of mine, too. Every channel has the same story over and over again, and they show it for hours…but nothing is new or different that they report…
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This is why I can hardly bear to watch cable news for more than a few minutes. On a slow news day it is nearly unbearable the way the talking heads repeat themselves. It’s as if they are near-catatonic from boredom or sheer lack of interest! But then on a fast news day — when there is some disaster or other in the world — they do the very same thing! It never changes.
Maddening. Make them stop.
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My complaint about the news has always been how they relish all the bad news they can do – with a perky smile and the open body language that says “I know you are just dying to hear this!”That has always bothered me, and I’ve always wondered why they can’t do the filler with some good news – a charity received a huge donation, someone who should have died survived all odds, the general kindness that good people do for others.
a definite amen sk
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Chelle – Yep. I don’t understand it. What an opportunity they passed up! They could have covered huge numbers of smaller stories for the effort they put into the big ones!
Jenny – I hardly ever actually put the news on for myself, but OH watches it every single day. Most of the time I can let it run in the background without it worrying me too much, but sometimes the ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ just get to me, and the lack of variey, too.
JT – Yes to this too! Why??? We so seldom get any upbeat news at all, and yet we all know that there are people doing good things every single day, and people of enormous courage doing amazing things, too. And I’d like to see some of the stories followed up, too, and find out how people are doing now – people who were in the news a while back. You know what I mean?
24 News channels! You must have cable. I’m old fashioned free to air myself but lately only watch the equivalent of the BBC. My gripe . . 10 minutes of news and 20 minutes of sport every news half hour. Seriously! And it’s a sport that nobody else plays, usuall NRL (Rugby League) and some boofhead who’s got pissed and thumped a bouncer in a bar! GAH! Although we have a very good multicultural channel SBS that actually lets people know what’s going on in the rest of the world! Surprisingly, their presenters are always of non Australian background and there’s not an ‘er’ to be heard!
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Baino – We have satellite TV, I don’t know how many news channels there are, there may be 24, but what I meant was 24-hour news, as in, it’s on 24 hours a day, every day. Sorry that wasn’t clear! Don’t you have them down there? Actually it sounds as if you have a better deal on news than we do – not an ‘er’ to be heard? Makes me feel like emigrating!
Hey, Sandy – I missed you. I must’ve been posting at the same time you were! Another nod in agreement? Excellent.
I agree with your post, and over here we have a new porblem because they’ve tried to replace ‘err’ and ‘umm’on the tv with the word ‘now’. They start the first (and almost all other sentences) with ‘now’ and then say it again when they get run down and aren’t sure what to say next. This even happens with the newer presenters on the travel and lifestyle shows. So, I suspect everyone on tv is being sent to the same “TV Presenters School” and are all coming out saying “Now… now… now…”. It surely is irritating.
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Jay:
Great story. It reminded my of when I was a kid. I had a dog named Sandy, and we went everywhere together. And, since we lived on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Sandy brought home a few surprises now and then. Dogs will be dogs. So I can understand about your little rabbit story.
Happy trails.
Aussie – Nooooooo!!!! I’d want to kill them, I think!
Swubird – I’d be a little worried if my dogs could bring home rattlesnakes and scorpions, I must admit. Did Sandy ever do that?
The thing about those news guys is that unless it is coming off a teleprompter, or some other script, they don’t know how to speak extemporaneously, hence the constant, “er, uhm.”
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Mr N – Exactly. And I do realise that some of them are being asked unscripted questions and having to give us the news without much preparation – or indeed the teleprompter – but why put them in the position of having to try to make something out of nothing? Sometimes they’ve clearly run out of useful things to say, and the presenter is still trying to wring more out of them. And so you get the ‘um’s and ‘er’s etc, plus repetition!
Some of them can do it. So why not choose people who can? Is it politically incorrect these days to actually employ people who are good at the job you’re trying to fill?