PRESENT TENSE:HERE'S SOMETHING you may have noticed on the nine o'clock news this week, or any week. After a report, the newsreader often crosses live to a reporter who is standing outdoors somewhere where nothing is happening, writes Shane Hegarty
It's common to see a journalist reporting live from outside the Four Courts, hours after the trial has ended and everyone involved has gone to their home/jail cell. It's not unusual to find a political reporter outside Government buildings, relaying details that went stale hours before.
Or, this week, we found George Lee in "Dublin city" well after office hours, answering questions that could easily have been answered in the warmth of the studio rather than against the starry backdrop of the financial district.
Ray D'Arcy began his Tuesday morning radio show by wondering just why Lee needed to hang around for no apparent reason when, according to D'Arcy, he lives on the southside of the city and could have popped into the studio on his way home. Interestingly, on Wednesday night, Lee was back under a roof, conducting his chat in person instead of requiring Eileen Dunne to address him on a big screen that's not really there.
Given the obsession with live reporting, television news is past the point at which it concerns itself with the accompanying absurdities. Last year, Lee reported live from one side of Government buildings, while his colleague David Davin-Power reported from the other. Two reporters and two cameramen, about 100m from each other, displayed on a split screen to a newsreader a few miles up the road. In a way, you had to admire RTÉ for embracing the ludicrous with such a straight face. It is not confined to RTÉ, nor, to be fair, is it the reporters' fault.
Perhaps Lee had good reason to be in the city centre this week but more often than not reporters are simply there as construction workers on the artifice of television news.
What makes it timely, though, is that RTÉ recently asked its staff to make savings by using public transport more, buying fewer newspapers and cutting down the free coffees. Yet, as productivity goes, hanging around late at night, a short distance from the studio, just to deliver information that could easily have been included in the packaged report could never be considered the best use of anybody's time. But it's my guess that, even in a recessionary era, the free Nescafé will go first.
OBVIOUSLY, POINTING out the absurdities of television news is as easy as hunting for a toe-curling moment on The Late Late Show. But they have sneaked in there so stealthily, and have become so commonplace, that once you do see them, you see hardly anything else.
In RTÉ's case, some are minor but peculiar to itself. For instance, were you to know nothing about the mechanisms of government except for what you see on the news, you would presume that a minister's job involves making notes and then answering the phone. But this is less about entertainment and more about padding out visually dull reports. It's when production values lead to sociological questions that things become slightly disconcerting.
Why is it, for instance, that the dynamic of the news studio is always one male and one female presenter? Clearly this is directed at, or a response to, some instinctive preference among viewers towards gender balance. Maybe, as children, we felt more comfortable when mummy and daddy were present to give us bad news. But it would be interesting to see what great tear would rip asunder the fabric of society if two men delivered the six o'clock news some night, finishing each other's sentences in the creepy way of newsreaders on the 24-hour news channels.
The dynamic usually involves an older male opposite a younger female. This deliberately targets how we see older men as credible and trustworthy, although what it says about our attitude towards the female half of that partnership may be a little more unnerving.
At least RTÉ has resisted the temptation to let its newsreaders roam a virtual set, or perch on the edge of a desk. ITV's news bulletins, on the other hand, look increasingly like deleted scenes from Tron.
All of this has been satirised at length. Next year it will be 15 years since Chris Morris's The Day Today first tore television news to pieces: the exaggerated graphics; the hyped news flashes; the forced banter between newsreader and sports guy; the live reports; the over-arching, brutal pomposity of TV news. That series hasn't aged a day in the interim. If anything, it looks increasingly tame, as if it gave television news ideas rather than a headache.
So, it'll all be there in most of the news bulletins you'll watch this week.
It would make a devastating drinking game. Unnecessary live broadcast: one beer. Newsreaders alternate sentences: one shot. Sports guy makes weak response to newsreader's jocular comment about financial crisis: two shots.
Of course, you'd be unconscious well before the sports bulletin.
shegarty@irish-times.ie
