Dumbing down the news... For starters I find this topic particularly interesting as the first thing I noticed about British news output was out intellectually stimulating it was (compared to Australian news bulletins). To be munching over my cornflakes in the morning and watching a report on C-Difficile on BBC Breakfast (while slightly unsettling for my stomach) was good for the brain and entirely foreign to the calibre of breakfast programming I am used to. The most taxing breakfast debate I would get back home would probably the jovial banter between some glamazon presenter and the weatherman about what brand of tooth-whitener gets the best results.
That was the second thing which struck me about British broadcasting - the presenters don't all appear to have osmosised from the pages of Harper's and Vogue. This is refreshing and, on a superficial level, goes some way to convincing me that (in Britain, at least) dumbing down the news is not quite so extreme.