It’s snowing!!!
How many times have you seen that on Facebook these past few
weeks? While you’ve probably focused all of your energy into getting excited
about the possibility of school being closed (us too), I hope you’ve taken a
little time to think, like the constantly critical Media students that you are,
about the media coverage of the white stuff and its trail of chaos.
When the snow became particularly heavy I arrived home to
find Sky News covering the Algerian hostage story. I was shocked. It was
snowing for goodness sake! Where were the live reports from gritting depots,
the images of children frolicking in snow, the frozen reporters standing on the
side of an airport runway shouting about ‘TRAVEL CHAOS!’ in a very serious
voice?
Well, that came shortly after wards. BBC1 devoted a whole
half hour news show to snow as well as large sections of The One Show all week,
including a piece where adults admitted on camera that they skiving off work.
24 hour news channels pulled out all the stops, with endless footage of live
reporters all over the country, looking absolutely freezing and generally
disgruntled as they told us what we already knew: it’s snowing and as a result
the country has, basically, broken.
Charlie Brooker, as
always, has summed the coverage up nicely. Sorry about the language. Try not to
laugh too much at the people falling over:
So here’s the media bit…why? Why do a few snowflakes send
the media into such a frenzy? Some misinformed people who don’t do media
studies might think the news is there to tell us about important things going
on in the world. How wrong they are. Snow is a Godsend for any 24 hour news
channel with airtime to fill. Snow provides a pretty much constant source of
material – images of cars getting stuck on hills, pensioners sliding around on
pavements, planes being grounded, children playing in it, as well as constant
weather reports and little discussion pieces where people rant about how
Britain is so useless .Most of the coverage is negative, which fits with the
theory that negative stories are more likely to reported than positive ones (news value - negativity). It
also has a predictability factor - we
know when snow’s coming, so the news teams can get ready. Conflict will be
created – lazy teachers vs parents with childcare issues, drivers vs
incompetent gritting lorries – and this always makes a good story. It doesn’t
happen very often, so there’s a novelty factor (unexpectedness).
The value of a story is shown through the order stories are reported in and the amount of time given over to coverage. Most news broadcasts did at
least have the sensitivity to give the Algerian hostage situation top billing
in their bulletins, but they didn’t actually spend as much time on the story. They skirted over it, and got onto the real story: it’s
snowing!
This could only happen in England…
And the heading proves my point – Live Snow! There seems to
be a fashion for everything going ‘live’ at the moment, from stargazing to
TOWIE, and snow is obviously no different. This type of reporting is
called ‘sensationalist’ because it
exaggerates. And it may seem harmless, but it’s just another lesson in how the
media like to tell us what’s important through the way it reports the news. And
it works – the general public became frenzied about what was, in most parts of
the country, just a bit of snow after all.
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