24 Hour News: Is round-the-clock TV journalism killing journalism?
Yesterday, the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby boy. The announcement of her labour gave birth to a media circus at both the hospital she was at and Buckingham Palace. TV news outlets from around the world crowded outside St Mary's Hospital in London waiting for the smallest snippets of information to come out.
The news however, did not come from the hospital. Instead it came from both an emailed press release and via the traditional easel at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Veteran BBC reporter Simon McCoy let slip the truth of this during the earlier hours of the coverage: “Plenty more to come from here of course, none of it news, because that'll come from Buckingham Palace."
No-one was there because they should have been but rather because they felt they should be. Where they should have been is in the role of Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 concerning the real news of the day.
This of course is the announcement that by the end of 2014 filters which block pornographic content will in the UK be on by default for new internet subscribers and current internet subscribers who haven't declared that they want to keep access (I wrote about this and the issues it presents for the wider public here). This is a topic that deserved wider discussion and airtime than it got, despite the fact that 24 hour news is supposed to exist to cover as wide a topic as possible.
Jeremy Vine got straight in with the task of doing real journalism by asking real questions about the real issues, and his interview is definitely worth a listen (the interview starts at about 1 hour & 6 minutes in).
In the era of 24 hour news there should not be such a thing as a good day to bury bad news; there are enough hours in the day to seriously question these serious issues as Vine did and also cover the birth of the royal baby in a respectful and tasteful way. And yet some of the most controversial measures made by a UK government in the past decade have been given, at best, second billing to reporters standing outside of a hospital for no real journalistic reason endlessly and pointlessly speculating.
