Talked about
I’m in London watching a morning BBC show made up in great measure of four people sitting on a couch discussing stories in the Sunday papers. Every day here, TV news shows share what’s in the papers. Can you imagine this happening in the U.S.? It’s not just that there aren’t enough papers, it’s also that there’s less in them worth talking about. And TV news in the U.S. is too little about discussion.
These segments on British TV news are a proxy for the broader discussion that goes on not only on the internet but across breakfast tables and pub benches. How much are American papers worthy of that discussion?
Tags: newspapers
November 4th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Hmmm. I remember these slots as cheap weekend airtime filler! But they are a reminder of just how highly centralized Britain’s newspapers are…
November 4th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Ooooh, Jeff, please!
“It’s not just that there aren’t enough papers, it’s also that there’s less in them worth talking about.”
There are more newspapers in the US. Many more, a multiple, if not an order of magnitude. However, they are all local monopolies (well, most) still. So while there may be “news” in them there isn’t opinion (and that includes the slant on the actual news reporting). The UK papers have spent a century (all 14 nationals that turn up in a Cabinet Minister’s daily package….or at least it was 14 in the 90s) competing with each other on the basis of views, of prejudices, for we’ve had national distribution since before WWI.
I would link to an interesting essay at TCS Daily on the subject but modesty forbids. Essentially, looking at the UK newspaper market, its division on ideological, rather than geographic, grounds can be considered as a possible route map for the US newspapers now that the net has meant they are no longer protected by the country’s distances.
November 4th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I think C-SPAN’s Washington Journal does this on a regular basis.
November 4th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
When I was just a runt, I watched a local weatherman read the Sunday comics to a bunch of kids in the studio. It was great, one of my favorite things on television at that age.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Here in NY, Cablevision has a local news station called New York 1. Every day one of its features is a segment called “In the Papers” in which one of the newsreaders holds up the front pages of the local papers and describes the stories that interest him. So far as I know, there haven’t been any lawsuits. When the BBC first opened for business, in the last century, the newspapers raised all hell when BBC people read from the newspapers on the air. They complained that it was unfair competition and demanded compensation, if I remember corrrectly from that broadcasting history book that I read in college.
November 5th, 2007 at 9:54 am
I’m not sure that U.S. network TV would do it if there were interesting content in our papers. This morning the Today Show spent most of its time with Ann in Antarctica, Matt in the Arctic Circle and Al in Ecuador. Unless we have a missing white girl or a Britney implosion on our front pages, we’ll never get air time.
November 5th, 2007 at 11:20 am
[...] Talked about I’m in London watching a morning BBC show made up in great measure of four people sitting on a couch discussing stories in the Sunday papers. Every day here, TV news shows share what’s in the papers. Can you imagine this happening in the U.S.? [...]