Fears that British television has become less intelligent or informative over the past few years have been growing recently. Many TV pundits have criticised the rise of populist television and, in particular, the number of so-called ‘docusoaps’ which threatened to replace the renowned and revered British tradition of in-depth documentary making by people such as Nick Broomfield.
It is certainly easy to blame the rise in dumbing down on technical advances such as the Internet. Many people now get their daily news from online sites such as the BBC and Sky. With online journalism it is necessary to write in a more readable style, those who use the internet have so much information at their fingertips that they will skip on if a story doesn’t grab their attention immediately. Comparisons with dumbing down on television news can be easily made with red top papers such as The Sun.
The Sun has always aimed at giving the reader the bare “facts” in a sensationalist style, and with sensationalist stories becoming more popular with the “masses”, it is only natural for broadcasters to follow a similar path.
It is certainly easy to blame the rise in dumbing down on technical advances such as the Internet. Many people now get their daily news from online sites such as the BBC and Sky. With online journalism it is necessary to write in a more readable style, those who use the internet have so much information at their fingertips that they will skip on if a story doesn’t grab their attention immediately. Comparisons with dumbing down on television news can be easily made with red top papers such as The Sun.
The Sun has always aimed at giving the reader the bare “facts” in a sensationalist style, and with sensationalist stories becoming more popular with the “masses”, it is only natural for broadcasters to follow a similar path.
1 comment:
There was a really interetsing programme on Channel 4 yesterday about technology and TV - "Is TV Dead?"
The title made me wonder where this was going because the average of 25hours a week TV viewing we all fit in hasn't changed apparently, even since we've been able to access the millions of Sky channels.
So why might TV be dead? The answer was technology. Namely choosing what you watch or, more importantly choosing not to watch.
The technological advances that mean we can access the internet all the time and chat on things like MSN whenever we want means we're watching less TV. Plus there's the fact we can SkyPlus stuff now or watch it online so we don't have to watch anything we don't want to. Did you know the main thing we SkyPlus is drama? Why's that? Well people might be going out and so they record the drama to watch another time.
News doesn't work like this. If we're going to miss the 6 o'clock SkyPlussing it won't help cos by 7 something's probably changed anyway so you're going to be behind. So technological advances are meaning we've got to make news more easily accessible and quicker to digest so people will take the time out to press the play button instead of the fast forward.
Technology isn't always a good thing.
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