I have been interested in 'news’ for as long as I can remember. As far back as the early days of broadcasting in the late 1920s. Not long after it started, in fact - the first radio bulletin was in November 1922, by the then British Broadcasting Company.
With no reporters of its own, it used the press agency wires. To avoid competition with the powerful newspapers it was not allowed to broadcast news before 7pm.
It was not until 1934 that the British Broadcasting Corporation set up its own news department, taking on its first reporters. Today it has over 2,000 and the biggest ‘live’ news room in Europe.
Television news bulletins began in 1954, by which time I had been doing radio work as a freelance for BBC Wales for two years with a brief foray into television reporting some years later.
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| Richard Baker |
Richard Baker was the first television reader/presenter, followed by Robert Dougall, Alvar Liddell (who had made his name as a wartime radio newsreader) and other fondly remembered pioneers.
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| Nan Winton |
It was not until 1960 that we saw the first woman TV presenter, Nan Winton, and the 10 o’clock evening bulletin.
Throughout those near 90 years of news making, news breaking, I have been an avid follower, an addict almost. But not any more.
As an old fashioned journalist - I started in 1942 ~ I view the nonstop, 24 hours-a-day torrent of news, unnecessary and harmful.
It is such a mishmash of the important and the trivia that it dulls our senses.
In the longest running story for decades - the pandemic - we are in danger of becoming inured to the human tragedies and suffering by the incessant broadcasting of horrific details, often ‘live’ from hospital intense care units.
The BBC even boasts about these being ‘exclusive’- in my day the term was scoops.
Television is making desperate, real life drama, into ‘soap opera’.
I look back on those earlier, more humane days of news reporting as infinitely better than today’s minute-by-minute deluge.
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