TELEVISION is delivering more news than ever before.
The amount of news per minute of airtime, however, has never been lower.
The past fortnight of frenzied political speculation, which culminated in Monday’s unsuccessful spill against Tony Abbott, was a classic example of how television is flat-out bringing us live, up-to-the-minute, 24-7 coverage of not very much at all.
In the 15 days between the incredible knighthood blunder and the non-spill, there were a handful of relevant TV events that added to the drama being played out behind closed doors in the nation’s capital.
For instance, Christopher Pyne’s mild and possibly misconstrued words on a morning show should have been forgotten almost as fast as they were spoken.
Instead, they were dissected over the following 24 hours on every television station across Australia. The reason – because there was vision of someone saying something about the spill.
Tony Abbott wasn’t saying anything interesting, Julie Bishop was toeing the party line and Malcolm Turnbull was keeping suspiciously quiet.
With the media, like nature, abhorring a vacuum, the many hours of news still had to be filled, even when nothing was happening in the year’s biggest story.
The empty space was filled with a stream of talking heads, offering contrasting opinions on the possible outcome of the spill and searching for meaning from politicians’ comments with the same level of accuracy as soothsayers looking through chicken entrails.
SBS Sunday night news opened up with a cross to their political correspondent who detailed the events of the day, rolled a package of vision and crossed back to the studio.
Later in the hour long bulletin, they crossed back to the same correspondent for an update on the events, even though nothing had changed in the 50 minutes since she last spoke.
In a television sense, the Martin Place siege was a condensed version of this political drama, with continual live coverage of an event in which almost nothing happened in the public eye for hours on end. With bloggers and news websites in a race to publish the latest crumb of relevant or irrelevant information, the TV stations feel they have little choice but to try and keep up or lose their audience to a different screen.
It seems a world away from the days when information would come via the morning paper and the evening news bulletin, giving journalists a 24-hour window to do their job and actually uncover something new and important.
Now the update is king and it’s all about who’s first, not who’s right.
– Danny Buttler
