Being a Capper I watch an awful lot of news reports and two of the things that really annoy me are the lack of accuracy in the information in news reports and the way the information is presented to the viewer. These are the most fundamental parts of news reporting and some of the reports produced are downright awful and the people involved in their creation should hang their heads in shame or maybe consider a career change.
Instead of having accurate reports the emphasis seems to be on producing news reports that show off what fancy camera tricks the crew can come up with that day and having the reporter wander around while giving us the story rather than concentrating on the story itself. TV reporters how about you stop messing around trying to look flash and concentrate on some actual journalism for once?
What’s with all this wandering around? You are supposed to be talking to the viewers through the camera do you walk around the room when you talk to a real person? Of course you don’t you stand in front of them and look them in the eye. Wandering around in the middle of a conversation is disrespectful to the person you are talking to. Why can’t you treat your viewers with the same respect you treat a real person with?
On to the content of the reports now. Without all that messing around you could spend some time researching the content for your reports and then checking to make sure all the information you have is correct. Most of the information reporters get wrong can be checked up with a 10 second Google search why isn’t this done?
Here are some examples of the sort of errors I’ve seen/heard in the last year or so.
On BBC London a reporter said the buildings trains are kept in were called warehouses! Not exactly something that needs any research to get right.
Anglia News reported that a man had fallen out of an RAF Tornado aircraft from a height of 5000 miles! Pretty good going considering its service ceiling of said aircraft is about 12 miles and 5000 miles up would be out in space somewhere. I’m guessing this happened as someone put 5000m down and it got interpreted as miles instead of metres. Basic fact checking and common sense would have prevented that one.
Anglia News also reported that Bluntisham was “around 100 miles from the coast” anyone with some basic Geography knowledge knows that the furthest distance to the coast from any point in the country is just over 70 miles so how can someone come up with 100 and have it go unchecked and uncorrected?
One of the most common again now another Geography one. London Tonight and Anglia both covered the same story (stupid I know) and this is what they produced
They each have Manuden in a different county! Anglia got it right it is in Essex pretty easy to get right when the report was from a school with a large Essex County Council logo on the school sign.
Sky News now and the snow from last winter one reporter live at Heathrow told us “the emergency services” were helping to clear the snow! Did anyone spot any Firemen, Police or Ambulance staff helping? No me neither. And while on the subject of snow at airports it was reported elsewhere that 150000 tons of snow had been cleared from Gatwick! Really lets put that into perspective with something heavy. The HMS Ark Royal (R07) weighs 22000 tons so we are being told that about 7 times that weight has been moved. 10 seconds mental arithmetic based on snow quantities elsewhere gives the true amount of about 1500 tons! big difference.
How not to use the English language now with Peter Lugg in this video
He asks if “potholing” should be one of the council’s priorities. The report is about potholes in the road potholing is a name for caving nothing to do with holes in the road. If you are going to use words please know what they mean before you use them.
Another Video for you to watch now.
Now I’m not going to bash Martin because his mistakes were slips of the tongue he did the one important thing when you make a mistake. He realised he made it (the biggest one of the 2 that is) and corrected himself later on in his report Credit to him unlike a lot of other reporters who just carry on pretending the mistake(s) never happened or don’t even know what is coming out of their mouths to begin with.
It may sound like ITV Anglia are rubbish which I can assure you they aren’t. The reason they are used so much here is because Anglia News is my local news which I watch every day so I spot the most mistakes there. They employ many fine people (and a few not so) and are far better than many other regional news shows.
It’s blatantly obvious that a lot of reporters don’t have the slightest clue about the subjects they report on. I know it’s impossible to know about everything but if you know you are going to report on something different spend a little time reading up on it that way hopefully you won’t sound like your talking out of your backside when it comes to doing your report.
Perhaps there should be time set aside on the news each day where a list of mistakes from the previous day are read out rectified and apologised for then maybe more effort would go in to getting everything right the first time.
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