Bad news at breakfast

When you travel across the world, you seem to spend a lot of time lounging around in-between places - airport lounges, hotels, railway stations. When you are there, you watch people, read, and look at a lot of television. It doesn’t matter that you don’t always speak the language - most of the programmes are remarkably understandable, following formats that vary little from country to country. One of these is breakfast television. This almost always includes a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman. The man has the reassuring but bland look of the chair of the members’ committee in the local golf club. The woman is always attractive and wears different clothes each day (no-one notices whether the man wears a different suit from day to day). Much of the programme consists of a friendly chit-chat between these two, interspersed with reading the news from the Teleprompter. When they report some disaster, war, or human interest story with associated suffering, they both assume serious or even troubled expressions. They often read alternate sentences. When the man reads, the woman will either look at him or make a range of appropriate expressions for the camera. Generally, however, the mood is jolly. Any troubling news is rapidly followed by celebrity gossip, entertainment chit-chat, or some amusing story. What you don’t get much of is news.

When you do get the news, there is almost never any explanation. Why are people in Bangkok wearing red shirts and rioting? Why do the people in Gaza seem so angry? How come so many Southern European countries are in financial difficulties. Do not look at breakfast television for any understanding. What news exists is dominated by pictures. A disaster which kills two people in the USA (with film) is far more ‘newsworthy’ than one which kills a thousand (without film) in Bangladesh. Terminology is slack. Alabama is apparently in ‘Southern America’, while Japan is one of the ‘Western’ nations. The vast diverse continent of Africa is spoken of as an undifferentiated entity. Breakfast television exists in a kind of collective Korsakoff’s Syndrome, with no memory, no awareness of context, and complete lack of insight. The ambition of its presenters is not to overcome these deficiencies by becoming real journalists, but to star in one of the many televised talent shows (Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice etc).

Every so often, real journalists do break into breakfast television, in cases where the talents of the presenters prove insufficient. Then we hear the political correspondents, the economic experts, and so on. These do know what they are talking about, seek out stories, and write interesting books in their spare time. However, they do lack the good looks of the breakfast television presenters - expertise, it seems, does not always coincide with a pretty face.