HERE IS THE NEWS (IN MY OUR OPINION)

30-01-2008

The much-vaunted re-launch of News At Ten hasn’t won ITV the extra millions of viewers it hoped for – and Richard Nevin detects a disturbing trend in the battle for ratings.

ITN’s much heralded return of News at Ten caught my attention this week. Despite being back on our screens at the sacred time of 10pm I hadn’t managed to catch it until Thursday last week.

While idly channel hopping I happened across a report at the head of the bulletin regarding “child trafficking”, where the reporter tailed a police raid on proerty where young children were being groomed as pickpockets and thieves.

The raid and subsequent report were obviously pre-arranged as was the following “special” report from eastern Europe regarding the plight of these poor children. A more worthy and important piece of journalism you would be hard pressed to find, but this was the lead piece on the days flagship news programme on ITV.

A quick scan of the headlines on Teletext and the internet revealed that this had not been reported anywhere else that day, so why was it placed at the head of the running order on news at ten?

Indeed the presence of Sir Trevor McDonald made the similarity to the long running “Tonight” programme uncanny.

The lead story that day had been the unsurprising and rather dull resignation of Peter Hain from the cabinet, so the editor had decided to run with the pre-prepared “special investigation”.

But isn’t this the preserve of current affairs and documentary shows such as BBC’s Panorama and the aforementioned Tonight programme? Even if it is to form part of a daily news programme, surely it should be slotted in later on, rather than masquerading as the day’s most important story?

It would appear in the absence of more exciting and glamorous stories, News at Ten is attempting to “set the agenda”, an editorial policy that has many hidden dangers and is open to abuse and exploitation. A few minutes viewing Fox News from the US would tell you this.

A daily news programme should be reactive rather than pro-active, maybe ITN have lost this principle in the race with the BBC for bigger ratings. When I tune in to the news, I aim to find out what has occurred during that day, not what some faceless editor thinks I need to know.

Do you agree with Richard?

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