The bloody news

[ardcarp]

I've no idea whether this has been aired before. But why do we need 'news' bulletins at 15 min intervals during Breakfast? In order to drip subliminally some albeit hackneyed classics into the brains of my g-kids, I often have R3 chuntering away to obligato cornflakes. But do we really want to choke on world affairs...well no, actually tabloid UK affairs (mainly sex abuse)...every few mouthfuls? The so-called news is there on pretty much every other channel. Can we not have just music on R3?

[french frank]

This regular, more or less running commentary, came in with the last set of changes - obviously as a deliberate attempt to make R3's breakfast programme more familiar in format to every other station so that it wouldn't seem strange and off-putting to the new arrivals. Short pieces of music between the usual topical chatter. Radio 3's Facebook and Twitter have been total flops as far as listener participation is concerned. I think they're planning something new - not sure what it is.

[DracoM]

Well, whatever, and for whatever bizarre planning imperative, it's making Breakfast even more unlistenable to than it was before. And curiously, MORE interrupted even than CFM. Not even the NYC breakfast programme WQXR does this.

What on earth dividend they hope to reap out of this simply beats me.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

if they would just desist

[Nick Armstrong]

If I may join this somewhat hostly gathering, I so agree, ardcarp... And as you say, uncomfortable more often than not - hearing the Trelawney/Mohr-Pietsch axis trying to segue between trite chit-chat, saccharine morsels of music and generally pretty sickening gobbets of sexual abuse, paedophilia and violent death is incongruous and totally unnecessary.

[Frances_iom]

...I think they're planning something new - not sure what it is.

My own preferred option is an auto-da-fé with RW as the chief penitent but happy to include a few others as well - maybe then they could openly transfer their allegiance to CFm

[teamsaint]

We really ought to be very wary about what "The News" is, how it is disseminated, and what its purpose is.
Being informed, and being bombarded by somebody else's idea of what the news is, are two rather different things.

[kernelbogey]

Well said, TS. Apart from their selectivity - see also Pab's thread about Cleveland - the Meeja are news organisations selling news. I'm sure that if I were exiled to a particularly dark and newsless bit of the planet, I'd be glued to my little short wave radio hoovering up the World Service. But here the news is available regularly on Radios 2 and 4 and it is quite unnecessary to impose it on Breakfast listeners to this extent. Three minutes once an hour would be adequate. As it used to be.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

We really ought to be very wary about what "The News" is, how it is disseminated, and what its purpose is.
Being informed, and being bombarded by somebody else's idea of what the news is, are two rather different things.

Well said, TS. Apart from their selectivity - see also Pab's thread about Cleveland - the Meeja are news organisations selling news. I'm sure that if I were exiled to a particularly dark and newsless bit of the planet, I'd be glued to my little short wave radio hoovering up the World Service. But here the news is available regularly on Radios 2 and 4 and it is quite unnecessary to impose it on Breakfast listeners to this extent. Three minutes once an hour would be adequate. As it used to be.

[Flay]

Three minutes once an hour would be adequate. As it used to be.

I can't see the need for any news at all on R3 when there us so much availability elsewhere.

[amateur51]

Everyone's talking a lot of sense today

Which is very worrying

Are we all get to that stage in life?!

[french frank]

I can't see the need for any news at all on R3 when there us so much availability elsewhere.

As usual , I try to take a compromise course in the hope of winning a consensus. The early morning programme has always had news bulletins: looking at April 3 1978, for example, there were news bulletins at 7am, 8am and 9am. But apart from those, the programmes were the uninterrupted playing of musical works, concisely introduced. (Therefore, as pro quo, no constant stream of extraneous matter: news, weather, listener comments, press snippets, trails &c.). I could take that with the breaks at predictable times.

Currently, it seems the music is merely there to break up the time between other announcements. But we do know that the programme has a completely different target audience.

[vinteuil]

... there was a very sane chappie on one of the Radio 4 health programmes - perhaps 'All in the mind'? - who demonstrated how listening to the News is harmful to the health. He had given up on listening to the News for other reasons - basically to save time for better things - but had found this giving up noticeably beneficial to stress levels and general well-being. It's all to do with your glucocorticoids, if I remember aright. The sort of thing that gets primal man to run away from tigers. But in our contemporary sedate society, the stresses set up by bad news lead to a build up of these glucocorticoids, which are not dissipated (as they would be in primitive man once he or she had run away from the tiger) but remain - and have long lasting deleterious effects.

Perhaps we should be petitioning the Secretary of State for Health to suppress the Radio 3 News Trash - on health grounds...

[teamsaint]

... there was a very sane chappie on one of the Radio 4 health programmes - perhaps 'All in the mind'? - who demonstrated how listening to the News is harmful to the health. He had given up on listening to the News for other reasons - basically to save time for better things - but had found this giving up noticeably beneficial to stress levels and general well-being. It's all to do with your glucocorticoids, if I remember aright. The sort of thing that gets primal man to run away from tigers. But in our contemporary sedate society, the stresses set up by bad news lead to a build up of these glucocorticoids, which are not dissipated (as they would be in primitive man once he or she had run away from the tiger) but remain - and have long lasting deleterious effects.

Perhaps we should be petitioning the Secretary of State for Health to suppress the Radio 3 News Trash - on health grounds...

Excellent points Vinny.
I gave up reading newspapers on any sort of a regular basis around 20 years ago. I really liked reading the "Serious" press, but I made a decision that the time could, for me, be better spent on other activities. I have pretty much given up watching news on the telemachine, and rely for my news sources on an occasional bulletin on the radio, and a brief skim through Google news most days, picking out the stories I might be interested in, and then researching elswhere on the web.

However we access news though, I do think that its really vital to do so in an active manner. There is a lot of manipulation going on, as Pabmusic for one has pointed out this very morn....

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'm sure it's true that the news can be bad for general well-being. But not being politically aware can be much worse in the long run, allowing corrupt politicians to do exactly as they please.