Developing Stories

I was going to get back to the schlock movies today and even started writing up a piece about Curse of the Crimson Altar, but found that my heart just wasn't in it, so I shelved it for another day.  Instead, I thought that I'd return to the business of the news, after yesterday's excursion into the origins of so called 'fake news'.  Aside from 'fake news', the other news phenomena of the modern age is the 'developing story'.  A function of the advent of rolling TV news channels, an example of a 'developing story' was witnessed on Sunday, as the hostage situation in Nuneaton unfolded.  I was watching the BBC News Channel s it broke.  I say 'broke', nut initially it was just a report of the police descending on a leisure park in Nuneaton, evacuating it and sealing it off.  At this point the studio anchor hadn't a clue what was going on, just citing 'reports' of a gunman.  The fact is that at this point, the story could have 'developed' in a number of directions.  Personally, my money was on it turning out that aliens had landed at the leisure park.  Either that or a strange drill-like machine had emerged from beneath the ground, right in the middle of the crown green bowling pitch, disgorging a number of subterranean 'mole men'.  Based on the lack of concrete 'facts', these two possibilities seemed as likely as any others.

Which brings me to the crux of the problem: by their very nature rolling news channels have twenty four hours of air time to fill every day, hence the emergence of the 'developing story', where some incident is seized upon in the hope that it might turn into a major story. Which means, in practice, constantly cutting their reporter 'on the scene'(actually well away from the incident for safety reasons) who just repeats the fat that the authorities aren't telling them what is happening, but they have spoken to some people who claim to have seen something, but they aren't sure what.  The story is then further 'developed' by going back to the studio to report on stuff people have posted on social media (usually highly sensationalised and without any corroborating evidence), even though they can't confirm that these actually are eyewitness accounts.  If there still isn't any hard and fast information from the authorities, they might try to fill more time by bringing in some 'experts' to peddle some wild speculation passed off as fact.  Now, I can remember the 'good old days' before dedicated news channels when TV news was only available in scheduled bulletins, which meant that the viewer was presented with actual news stories based around verified facts.  Facts which came from credible sources.  Unlike today when postings on social media are treated as reliable sources. In reality, of course, such postings are usually nothing more than rumour and uninformed speculation.

In the end, of course, Sunday's Nuneaton story eventually 'developed' into a fairly mundane small scale armed siege (traumatic for those directly involved, but with no repurcussions outside of the local area).  Despite all the build up on the news channels, by Monday it had pretty much vanished from the news schedules.  But it had served its purpose: it filled several hours of air time on a slow news day.