Increasingly, with the ratings war between channels, the role of the evening news is to entertain rather than simply inform. Certainly these are the self evident goals of the programmes that directly follow the news, Close Up and Campbell Live.
A promo for Campbell Live on January 23, 2009 ran “Teenage comedians, too young to drink and vote but paid to make you laugh”. It is hard to follow the logic.
Close Up kicked off its 2009 campaign with an expose of a rest-home framed as a kind of detective narrative. With a display of appalling ethical standards they send someone (the producer) under false pretences (work experience) into the rest-home with a secret camera. In doing so they exhibited cavalier disregard for the clients whose home the rest-home was. Their claims, as a result of the “investigation," remain totally unsubstantiated and in one case utterly false but no doubt it was just the thing to help the ratings.
It was TV journalism at its very worst: unbalanced, unethical, and totally self-serving. In the name of defending the vulnerability of the elderly, they invaded the elderlys’ private and personal space even to the extent that the producer showered women under false pretences!
Ah, but why let the truth get in the way of a good news story!
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