Can we trust the news?

Andrew Peake writes in to say:

‘I read Simon Willis’ interview with Gordon Burn and was particularly interested in what Burn had to say about narrative as opposed to plot. I have worked in television news for some thirty years and have witnessed what I can only describe as a fundamental change in news output. TV news used to narrate events of public interest and debate. The limits of film were in one respect also its strong point: film had to be physically transported, developed and edited, and this gave the correspondent and producer time to research and explore the complexities of a story.

‘Digital and satellite technology have changed all this. For example, given the availability of feed points and satellites, a foreign story that (in the days of film) might have taken twenty-four hours to make before it could be aired, can now be broadcast almost as it happens. Add to this a multiplicity of channels competing for a smaller and smaller audience share, and the pressure is on for news gathering outfits to shift from narrative to plot.

‘TV news had to become more immediate, dramatic and entertaining. (I believe this change was never consciously considered even by the most thoughtful of TV journalists – it was more a case of evolution.) Plot meant imposing shape on a story, and not, as it were, allowing the story to “narrate itself”.

‘We have now reached a stage where TV news is imitating Hollywood film. Unlike life, where motivation is complex and often contradictory, TV news
stories (at their worst) portray events where complexities are simplified for the sake of plot, namely getting a short version of a Hollywood movie on
the air. Real events distorted by plot become a lie when presented as news.’

Andrew, thanks for your letter. I agree that the modern television marketplace can be an enemy of the credible news story. In so much of today’s news, texture has been replaced by tawdriness, scrutiny by speculation. In ‘The Trial’, Gordon Burn notes that the coverage of the 1994 O.J. Simpson trial tipped once-reputable news into tabloid trashiness.

It doesn’t help that, in America, the mega-corporations that own the big news channels (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and all the national networks) also own the big movie studios (Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal, respectively), so it’s a short trip between a sensationalistic TV news story and its movie adaptation. And it’s sometimes difficult to tell which one you’re watching. Some people call this synergy – I call it bad news.

Email comments to rrobins@granta.com