What to do with the news?
From their creations the BBC and the ITV set out to provide impartial news coverage. The advent of satellite technology enabled world events to be beamed into people's homes. However, the news is constructed, just as any television programme is, in that news editors and presenters must make a selection of all the possible items to report in any one day or programme, and can only present a selection of information about any one item. On the whole, people believe that what is shown is an honest and true representation of reality.
However, increasingly the focus of news coverage has come under scrutiny from media students. Circulating worldwide images has a political effect. There is a view that large-scale political unrest or natural disasters are the only news item coverage Western audiences get of Third World countries. Others analyse local UK news coverage to show a disproportionate amount of news stories coming from the USA compared with Europe or Asia.
While the coverage of the Tsunami earthquake on Boxing Day, 2004, and Hurricane Katrina in Missouri and Louisiana, USA, in the summer, 2005, appeared to genuinely unite the world in a collective display of horror and compassion, some commentators argue that the news is often used as a political propaganda tool. They cite the coverage of the conflict in Iraq. At the beginning of the war, audiences were shown the bombing of Baghdad, with very few images of death and destruction. When American troops reached Baghdad viewers saw a crowd bring down a statute of Saddam Hussein (signifying the end of the war) and finally, later coverage showed people in Iraq voting in elections (without the usual shots of overturned smoking cars). If viewers had access to the Middle Eastern television broadcaster, Al Jazeera, they might have got a very different impression of the war.
The danger with news manipulation is that eventually audiences will cease to believe what they see on TV or in the PSB mission of news programmes. Some commentators worry that news broadcasts will eventually become just another reality TV show where the audience decides on the issues to be aired, potentially further trivialising the news.
