TriumphAnt

I’ve long had a beef with the whole concept of “24-7” news coverage. There’s just so much that is wrong with it, I still am not convinced that anything good about it overturns all the reasons I believe it needs to be re-tooled – in a major way – as a means of communicating news.

To me, two recent examples of its inherent flaws have only served to reinforce my opinion. The tragedy of the Newfoundland oil rig helicopter crash in the North Atlantic began on CBC-TV Newsworld – the channel on which I was watching news at the time – as a “Breaking News” story, a typical soundburst for the all-news channels. At that moment, clearly the only thing the news reader had was “helicopter crash”. But instead of limiting herself to leaving it at that, she immediately went on to start conveying all sorts of speculation about how many people were on board (“because we know some of these flights are carrying workers to and from the rigs, but sometimes there’s only a maintenance crew carrying equipment”); about whether the helicopter had managed a controlled ditching or had experienced a more catastrophic crash (“we all remember the recent crash off Scotland where the chopper landed upright and everyone was saved just minutes afterwards”). In point of fact (which, to me, should be the lead driver in determining what comes out of a newsreader’s mouth), at the time she revealed the “breaking news” she knew only that coast guard helicopters were en route to the scene.

A few minutes later, in what I thought was the most appalling piece of misinformation to make it to air on this “news” channel, we were told that the helicopter had been spotted on the surface; two people had already been “plucked” from the water, and CBC further reported that two life rafts had been seen and the downed helicopter’s entire crew and passenger group (!) had been accounted for in the rafts. For several momentous minutes, we had another good news air crash story on our hands – our own “Miracle on the Hudson”. All conveyed to us by a newsreader from the comfort of her Toronto studio, with a telephone link to “someone” at the helicopter’s air base who may or may not have been actually speaking to one of the rescue pilots or who simply might have embellished what he or she thought had been overheard in a crackly air-to-shore communication as the coast guard helicopters arrived on the scene. (A radio operator’s “Can you see people in the rafts? Crew? Passengers?” might have been heard simply as a statement rather than a question and suddenly the message gets flashed back to the Toronto CBC studio where the newsreader smilingly conveys the news that the crew and all the passengers have been accounted for in the two life rafts.)

Well as we now know, the rafts were empty; the helicopter on the surface was upside down and sank in seconds after being “seen”, or possibly even before that and what had actually been seen was debris; two people were indeed pulled from the water but one, a young woman, was dead. And the sole survivor was fighting for his life in a St John’s hospital. The remaining 16 souls were missing.

Put yourself in the place of the families watching all this unfold, if indeed they were following CBC-TV Newsworld’s coverage. (If the helicopter company had been merciful, perhaps they had had the foresight to escort the worried family members to a comfortable waiting room with no television, and kept them up to date only with what they knew absolutely to be the case. Not what they had “heard” from hither and yon.) It gives tragic, real meaning to the often-used phrase, “emotional rollercoaster”. Your son’s helicopter has just crashed! Good news, he’s alive and well! No, wait, he’s missing and presumed drowned! Our thoughts and prayers are with you!

The second story concerns the even more recent “breaking news” that a trio of Médecins sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders aid workers, including a young Canadian woman, had been kidnapped in Sudan and God only knows who did it, where the hostages are being taken, and what is happening to them. But by the time we all went to bed on Friday night, we had been told by our newsreaders that all was well, they’d all been released and were “somewhere safe”. Fast forward to Saturday morning and the news is that whoops, they haven’t been released and that negotiations to secure their freedom are still going on with the kidnappers.

Well pardon me but how the [obscenity] did “news” of their release actually make it to air if it wasn’t fact?

When I was a wanna-be Edward R Murrow in Carleton University’s School of Journalism, one thing that was drilled into our heads was the importance of verifying your facts – double verifying in fact. (In fact, the process was called “fact checking”. Until it had been checked, you see, it wasn’t a fact. And until it was a fact, it stayed out of our “news” reports, whether written for print or broadcast.) One of our professors, a local legend named Phyllis S Wilson, even went so far as to inform us that anything we handed in with so much as a misspelled name would earn an automatic F. No appeal. Needless to say, we checked our name spelling carefully.

The biggest problem I see with 24-7 news is that from the outset, “breaking news” coverage of an event immediately jumbles both fact and speculation into such a hash that the listener / viewer doesn’t have a clue what has actually happened / is happening. Frequently, all we get is on-air description from someone in a studio who is watching the same images we are – broadcast from an overhead circling helicopter, for example – while their reporter “on the ground” (another phrase I really, really, really hate) is still en route to the scene. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a regularly scheduled “news conference” interrupted by “breaking news” as we are carried away to live coverage of huge, billowing clouds of black smoke from what eventually turns out to be a tire dump fire at a storage yard in some obscure suburb of Tuscaloosa – simply because the black clouds suggested that a huge disaster “could be unfolding”. No one knows anything, but hey! We don’t want to miss a second of what could be another 9-11 in the making, do we?

Or how many times have we seen another scheduled event interrupted by a cutaway to some other previously-unheard-of subdivision where “We’ve just heard that police have surrounded a home on a quiet residential street in Oak Glade, California where one or possibly two gunmen are holding as many as six family members hostage.” [Cut to a live shot (“Breaking News”, of course) from a circling helicopter over a scene where about eight police cars with flashing red lights can be seen parked on a street outside the house in question. The house itself is pretty much obscured by overhanging tree branches in the front yard, but hey! Look at all those flashing lights! So something is happening and we don’t want to miss a second of what could be another Charles Manson in the making, do we?] “CNN has a reporter on the ground in nearby [big city name], who is en route to the scene. CBC News will bring you more information just as soon as we can.” [In other words, we have someone here in the studio who is watching CNN’s coverage.] “For now, let’s go back to Sudbury where the Prime Minister is announcing a major new government initiative that will be good news for nickel miners who have been unable to find work for the past eleven years.”

In those same days when I was a J-school undergrad, national and international television news was a 20-minute newcast at 11pm every night. Teams of writers and reporters had spent the entire day writing, checking their sources, adding to what they knew, checking those sources, and preparing a meticulous script for the anchor. A major news item might get five minutes; most were 30 to 60 seconds. They were tightly written, but utterly packed with facts – the W5 commandments of the news. (Sometimes just the W4 – the “Why?” might be left to the print journalists to flesh out in the next day’s press.) Local news was a half-hour typically at suppertime and it bundled local weather and sports into the package, as well. You got “live” coverage if something was “live” as the newscast went to air – assuming it was important enough and that was damned rare.

If I were king of the forest, much of that would return to the news channels. The news would air when it had been determined by competent senior editors to be news. Does the public really need to live a disaster as it unfolds? Do “news” people even need to be there until someone determines that what is unfolding is sufficiently newsworthy to justify coverage? And does speculation in the absence of fact contribute anything worthwhile to the news of an event? Despite the Bachelor of Journalism I hold, I’m afraid I answer a resounding no to all three of those questions.

That’s why I whine about it; because no news organization on the planet today would accept me on their staff. I’m not unhappy about that. I’m unhappy about what my one-time-might-have-been profession has become.

PS... Breaking News: I see the very latest on the kidnapped MSF workers is – again – that they have been released. The source? The Sudanese government. Run “Government of Sudan” by Google and spend a couple minutes browsing to see how many words pass before “rape” and “genocide” appears in what you’re reading.(“Couple minutes” is probably way too generous as a descriptor of the time required for this to happen.) So to my might-have-been colleagues, how about you please just shut the [obscenity] up until you have images of these people smiling from the window of a van labelled “UN”, preferably in a location other than Sudan. Is that too much to ask? I also see the young Canadian is being described as the “closest thing to an angel” that MSF has among their volunteers. God, one hopes not.

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To the 16:

"Eternal Father, strong to save
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave.
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed their raging at Thy word
Who walked'st on the foaming deep
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep.
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease
And give, for wild confusion, peace
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

O Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour
From rock and tempest, fire and foe
Protect them wheresoe'er they go.
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea."/em>

(For Those in Peril on the Sea, by William Whiting)