The Newswipe Manifesto

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newswipe

by philf • 17 years ago

28 14 17 years ago

mixmax• 17 years ago

I've sometimes stumbled across newscasts from the 70's that are available on the publicly run Danish broadcast station (it's like the BBC) and really noticed the difference. The news would contain maybe 4 or 5 stories spread across an hour. The anchor would spend 10 minutes explaining the current political situation in Russia, and have a 10 minute interview with the foreign minister about how this would impact the country. The people interviewed actually got to tell us their opinion instead of speaking in soundbites. Very different to todays news.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

"NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is the only current U.S. news show I can think of that is something like that. Charlie Rose goes even more in depth, spending a half hour or more with a single guest, with the guest doing the lion's share of the talking.

Tellingly, both of these shows are on PBS (the public TV network).

biohacker424• 17 years ago

Jim Lehrer scares me. He takes that bizarre US cultural tradition of neutrality at all costs to an extreme. It doesn't matter how much one side spins and how true the other is. Lehrer must be found in the exact middle betwen the sides, and there he has those cold eyes.

I am not kidding, it's scary watching someone be that devoted to this inane idea of journalistic neutrality. The objective truth is absolutely disregarded. Middle of of the road, no matter where the middle happens to fall. I prefer the daily show.

krschultz• 17 years ago

The big newspapers haven't changed much. I read the New York Times, and the Metro (free local NYC paper) everyday during my commute.

TV is hopeless, and most internet news is watered down. CNN.com is perhaps the fastest declining of all news outlets, the amount of entertainment stories right now is unbelievable.

amalcon• 17 years ago

Reuters is the best I've found on the internet. The op-eds are a low percentage, and clearly marked. Save for the business and tech sections, they're notoriously hard to get PR into. They cover international news very well. Their stories are typically very matter-of-fact. If you just want the facts, they're a decent place to look.

And yet, what's this? The headline right now? "Bernanke still has his job." Yes, the headline is "Nothing happened". Following that? "The stock market liked nothing happening." At least I can't call it infotainment.

andyking• 17 years ago

The programme as shown is here (with this speech in its original context about 1'30'' in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm4GiyyVKQQ

danw• 17 years ago

With the BBC metadata here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jhp50

biohacker424• 17 years ago

I think that's more of a US news thing. I still remember getting my first broken tiny TV in the US, which only got one channel. I had been out of the news loop for a few weeks at the time, literally just a few weeks of the plane. So I park myself in front of the TV to get some news.

First the local news, OK they do call it local so I'm not too surprised there's no world news, they do keep adverting this "nightly news" that's coming up. OK the nightly news... hmmm... doesn't seem like news more like infotainment, aaand it' over. I still have no idea what happened in the world today. But hey adds for another news block at 10pm, I guess I'll stay up for that. Oh but it's local again and I get a "world news minute".

Bizarrely not only do I have no idea what happened in the world today, but I didn't even hear much about US issues, certainly almost nothing about US foreign policy. Shockingly I got A LOT more information on the news behind the iron curtain when it was still up!

So yeah, there's no such thing as TV news in the US. But other places in the world have news. The Irish Times is a good paper for people who can only read English.

halo• 17 years ago

The quote comes from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, which is a British TV show made by the BBC for BBC4.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

News as a concept doesn't make a lot of sense for educational purposes. It represents only a thin time slice of the most recent events - dust on the microfilm of history. It is far more informative to study the past, all the events that brought the world (or some part of it) to its current state. This will provide a more complete understanding, even if you are ignorant of the events of the last few months.

The Newswipe Manifesto

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