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As all people around the world are aware, London has been the scene of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings on their public transport system over the last 3 weeks. The 1st attack cost over 50 lives and injured several others. The 2nd bombing harmed 1 person if that.
This brings me onto media coverage of such events. Ever since 9/11 the war on terrorism is a favourite item of investigation by news outlets both on Free-To-Air TV and on digital and satellite services. Generally, Australian TV takes live feeds of overseas news outlets when anything major related to terrorism is breaking. It’s not that Australian news outlets don’t care about what happened in areas that are attacked. It’s in fact quite the opposite when it comes to blanket coverage.
Take for example the bombs that supposedly were detonated yesterday (Thursday, 21/7/2005). When the story broke, naturally the Australian news outlets were all over the story. Of the 5 Free-To-Air stations, there were 3 channels telecasting the latest feeds from overseas channels. Surprisingly the ABC was not taking any coverage when normally there are the 1st to switch to the BBC or CNN, while SBS was a little busy with another event happening in London at the same time. Channel 10 returned from their half hour sports news bulletin to give coverage for another 2 hours before running paid advertisements. Channels 7 and 9 continued with the coverage until I logged onto FFUK, which was about 3:45 AM Australian time.
The point of the previous paragraph is this. As a person, I don’t care about what I was told 20 minutes ago. This is where the news becomes severely overrated. Repetition is something that you can depend on when it comes to the likes of Sky News and CNN. It gets boring to watch some dodo who claims to be an expert babble on about the same old shit over and over ad-bloody-nausea. The same thing happened on the tsunami in Indonesia (although this was warranted given local interest), the bombings in London 2 weeks previous, the Bali bombings and of course, 9/11. Radio is not much better, particularly with the cricket on at the same time.
By all means, they can keep us informed on what is going on. After all, that’s what they’re paid to do and paid very well I am sure. But please, there would be less than 10 people in this country interested in listening to dickheads acting as insomnia cures tell us what other people have told us. Couch potatoes would be better people if blanket coverage was not shoved down our throats.
Short but sweet, but I had to get it off my chest. And in case you didn’t notice, this should be perceived to be a message of sorts to major news outlets around the world.
YOU KNOW I’M A GOOD BLOKE
MOOKS