News and Current Affairs

I

Introduction

News and Current Affairs, reporting and analysis of events by radio and television programmes, and on the Internet. The two terms, “news” and “current affairs”, reflect old differences in the way that broadcasting used to treat topical matters, differences that barely survive in today’s advanced radio and television systems. In early radio, before television, news was plain, restricted to what newspeople call “hard fact”. Newsreaders gave carefully scripted accounts of main undisputed facts of politics, wars, accidents, and other significant events. Facts were not interpreted or analysed.

II

History

In traditionalist Europe that narrow concept of news satisfied the desires of governments to control the new radio medium in the public interest. They believed that without controls broadcasting could do as much harm as good. The United States, however, was different because broadcasting development was driven more by commercial considerations and by a stronger belief in the pre-eminence of freedom of expression. News broadcasting there soon developed a freer style than in Europe and its colonies.

Regardless of the degree of control, the inadequacy of news limited to plain fact became evident. A news bulletin told people the news but did not help them understand it. It did not adequately make them aware of the issues, of the “news behind the news”. To compensate, the concept of current affairs was invented. Though close to the news in subject area, it was separate from it. News continued to be strictly factual, while current affairs delivered a mix of fact, comment, opinion, analysis, and interpretation in interviews, commentaries by experts, and feature reports. The change advanced more in European “public service” broadcasting than in American commercial broadcasting.

An important factor in the free world that is still strong today was the belief that news broadcasting should be impartial. It should not take sides in matters of public dispute. It should, for instance, report industrial strikes without favouring the employers or strikers. Similarly, political reporting should not side with any party. Impartiality was encouraged by the dependence of broadcasting on a public resource—the frequencies, sound waves that carry signals from transmitters to radio sets. Frequencies are allocated to prevent a jumble of programmes from different stations on the same frequencies in the same areas at the same time. It was reasoned that as broadcasting used a public resource it should serve all of the public. To do so, it had to be impartial.

Such reasoning does not apply to newspapers, which do not depend on any public resource in the same way. Publication of one newspaper does not obstruct or prevent publication of another, although competition for readers might cause one to fail, in the same way as competition for listeners among radio stations. Thus, newspapers continued to be free to take sides while regulated broadcasting was not.

In the United States, the tradition of independent journalism encouraged its lightly regulated radio stations to standards of impartial reliability as strongly as heavier regulation achieved that end in European liberal democracies. Authoritarian regimes in Europe and elsewhere strictly controlled all the news media and used them for propaganda. Some other countries had a degree of newspaper freedom, while broadcasting was made to serve “the state”, which usually meant the purposes of government.

Over the years, broadcasters in freethinking countries developed more sophisticated ideas of news and current affairs. The two approaches moved closer together, overlapped, and finally intermingled. The new ways of news broadcasting aimed to make the news comprehensive and comprehensible. Broadcasters came to believe that a news programme should give the news, the meaning of the news, and relevant comment on the news in whatever ways programme-makers decided were best. A radio or television news programme might start with a bulletin of hard news reports on various events, in summary or at length. The same programme could then move to a sequence of interviews with people in the news and to reports that were more discursive than in the bulletin. A differently constructed news programme might tell the facts of one event, explain them in another report immediately following, perhaps by a specialist correspondent, and include leading comment from people involved in the event, before dealing in similar ways with the next most important or most interesting story. Many variations are possible. The length of programme and the nature of its parts depend on several factors: on the time of day, shorter news items being more convenient for audiences at busier times; on audience profile in terms of age, sex, and socio-economic group; on programme policy, a talk station favouring longer news than a station mainly for music; and on whatever news is available.

III

The Interview

Interviews became important. Broadly, they have two aims: to elicit facts and to seek comments—functions that often merge. Interviews for facts are prominent when newsworthy events have just occurred. Viewers and listeners hear police officers, for example, giving facts about newly committed crimes, or rescuers describing what has happened in accidents and disasters. Interviews for comments involve experts, public figures, and other people in the news. Their purpose is sometimes to explain the significance of events. With public figures fixing public policy, the purpose is to press them to justify their decisions. In early broadcasting, such interviews were usually deferential. Interviewers showed well-mannered respect for people in public office. Now, they are as likely to interrogate interviewees. This has caused politicians in democracies to complain that television and radio have supplanted parliament as the forum of national debate: “trial by media”, they say. In turn, broadcasters argue that experience and concern for public image make politicians evasive. In the United States, the sound bite—a cogent, very short comment, used repeatedly in news programmes—is held to have ousted thoughtful exposition, although public figures do explain themselves at length on prime time talk shows. National culture also influences interviewing style. Interviewing style can vary between nations, perhaps showing the influence of prevailing cultural trends.

IV

The Role of Technology

Technology assisted the transition from rigidly separated news and current affairs broadcasting to modern news programming that has abundant material. Difficult-to-use wax discs for recording interviews and reporters’ dispatches gave way on radio to manageable magnetic tape. On television, cheap, easily edited video tape replaced expensive film that had to be developed before viewers could see it. Improved telephones and land-line circuits from distant studios to the news transmission studio encouraged programmes to use their own reporters instead of standard news agency copy. Cumbersome, costly outside broadcast vehicles—mobile studios—sent to the scene of only the biggest stories were superseded by smaller news broadcast vehicles, saloon cars with radio transmission equipment. These can travel more readily, giving radio reporters more opportunities to beam their news directly into the news studio and, if necessary, live into homes and offices. Electronic news gathering (ENG) in television allowed its reporters to do the same with pictures and sound. Communications satellites also improved the quality of pictures and sound from distant places. More news was reported more quickly.

Portable telephones, lightweight video cameras, and portable satellite transponders (devices that both receive and send out signals) have further increased quantity and speed. Reporters send pictures and their account of the facts directly to satellite and on to studios in London, Washington, Paris, Sydney, and all points on the globe. Reporting the news from any location can now be instant.

As a result, editors of news programmes have many more stories to choose from and much more material to illustrate them. Editors first decide which events they would like covered so that reporters with cameras and sound equipment are allocated to them. Editors also receive material on events they did not know were happening or were going to happen. For their programmes, they decide what to use, in what form, how they are to be edited, to what length, in what order, and whether the reports should be live or recorded. They also decide which stories are most important or most interesting, and how their locality, their country, their region, and the world will be presented.

With more news to use, radio and television have many more news programmes than in days when news travelled slowly. Some stations have news all the time, 24 hours a day. The explosion of news will continue. Events in many parts of the world are under-reported or not reported at all, sometimes because they are too remote, sometimes because restrictive governments, eager to hide problems, suppress information and deter reporters. However, political change, the demand for news, and easy technology combine to break down barriers and to encourage programme producers to explore more and more events in more and more parts of the world.

Some critics say that television often uses pictures simply because they exist or because they are exciting, not because they are important. They argue that editors neglect more important events for which there are no pictures or where the pictures lack action. Others see the situation in a different light: the growth of news means that the world is better informed and, while many events reported are relatively trivial, there are many serious news programmes attending to many significant events.