Reportage

Thursday, 28th August, 2008

I’m getting more and more pissed off with the news reporting that we’re forced to endure these days. A particular bugbear of mine is the BBC. Their television reporting is awful, but their online stuff isn’t any better.

Take these two articles for example.

As I read these articles (particularly the second one) it jumped out to me how much irrelevant padding material is used in order to reach the required word count, and I’m seeing it all over the place now.

I read news reports to get facts. I don’t need anything else, just the facts. Tell me what happened, when it happened, where it happened, and if possible why it happened.

In both of these news ‘reports’ there’s a mention of the victim’s impending GCSE results. I can’t see what relevance this fact has in any of these two stories. The first story is about a young girl that got knocked down by a lorry and died. The second story is about a teenage boy who fell from some flats and died.

The fact that both of these youths were due to receive their GCSE results adds nothing to the stories; it is there simply to pad out the story, so that the ‘journalist’ meets their required word count. The only other reason to put non-facts like this in a story is for the shock factor: they want the reader to feel that extra pang of guilt about what they’re reading.

It really annoys me.

And don’t get me started on Mihir Bose.

28

Aug

Reportage

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