News and Technology

This week’s lecture studied news and technology. The lecture looked into the ways that news and technology have developed over years. For example runners or beacons where ways of spreading news. In more recent times satellites have enabled us to transmit news across the world and this has lead to 24hour news programmes. However there are problems with 24 hour news and in this blog I will be answering the question, what are the dangers of 24 hour news?


This is a link to the BBC’s 24 hour news channel http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7459669.stm

There are of course benefits of having 24 hour news programmes. For example it’s a good way of catching up with the latest headlines throughout the day as opposed to waiting until specific times of day. However there are problems with 24 hour news programmes. One of the dangers is that as breaking news occurs the programmes can be misleading. This was the case in the 2000 US presidential election where the media ‘called’ the wrong result prior to the official announcement. A second problem with 24 hour news is the cost to run it. There are only a few agencies such as the BBC which can afford the cost of a worldwide news gathering enterprise. Another danger is media peer pressure and conformity, this could mean that there are dupe tapes, in which bits of video are put together from unknown sources. This brings into question how reliable the news actually is.

The Mail on Sunday travel editor Frank Barrett criticises 24 hour news programmes in his online blog. He is frustrated with the way in which channels represent news. In his blog Barrett talks about the issue of swine flu and how 24 hour news channels have a lack of perspective when there are people in the world suffering from malaria.
This is Frank Barrett’s Blog:
http://travelblog.dailymail.co.uk/2009/05/24-hour-news-simply-helps-the-swine-flu-media-bandwagon.html

To conclude this blog I feel that 24 hour news programmes are important to society. However the channels broadcasting them need to be certain that what their broadcasting is actually hard facts and therefore not news which is misleading.