TV news bashes youth and incites ignorance

So it’s a triple whammy. If you run the lowest common denominator stories on a powerful medium and the content is unsubstantiated, one-sided and/or inflammatory, then one has a recipe for, as the Marxists used to say, false consciousness or more aptly, filling ones head with rubbish.

There’s a place for rubbish on TV. The Channel Ten News has almost cornered the market although its sports coverage is very good. The Bold and the Beautiful can be interpreted as an extended metaphor for Rudd’s cabinet meetings, although I’m not so sure about the Bold part. I’m all for eliminating ambiguity and shades of grey and there’s no better medium for delineating the heroes (us) from the villains (them).

Except when you want to know something important. For example, does anyone know whether house prices in the capital cities are rising, falling or remaining static? In Adelaide, for the past two months all the news services have run contradictory stories on house prices. Last month they were falling in some suburbs by as much as 10 per cent. Last week they were going up by 12 per cent. So they swung 22 per cent in the last two months? Bollocks.

It would take an enterprising journalist half a day and do some research on house prices, match the claims of the various Real Estate Institutes and see whether or not they’re correct. An easy story although the head line: “Real Estate Agents Lie” is hardly news.

Once upon a time there used to be seven values that reporters relied upon to determine whether a story was news (apart from the fact that it was new). They were: Impact, Conflict, Timeliness (it’s happening now), Proximity (close geographical or cultural association), Prominence, the Unusual (man bites dog) and Currency (for example, the rise of the green movement).

Now Conflict and the Unusual have buried the others.

Let’s turn our attention again to Australia’s much under reported and maligned youth. Can anyone remember the Oaktree Foundations Zero Seven campaign? About 700 young people including many under 16, traveled across the country telling people that the Government should lift its aid from 0.35 per cent of Gross National Income to 0.7 per cent. And when the ALP formed Government, that’s exactly what they did.

One would have thought that was worth some TV news. Alas, no. According to the 2006 Census of Population and Housing, there are about 2.9 million young people aged 15-24 years living in Australia, 14 per cent of the total Australian population. Think of the ratings! Alas, no.

According the TV news and current affairs, Australia’s youth has gone missing in action. They are certainly not watching the tripe dished up as news by the networks.

TV news and current affairs can’t descend much lower. Four years ago all of the nightly news networks ran pictures of a water skiing squirrel. The next story up was George Bush Jnr discussing the state of the war in Iraq. Once upon a time that would have been taken as tacit editorial comment. Now it’s part of the seamless product that fails to inform and serves to inflame the worst angels of our nature.

Make that squirrel Head of TV News and Current Affairs - at least he has got balance.