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.