A journalist or an entertainer?

It was Rupert Murdoch who said that: 'We are in the entertainment business'. Some stories are entertaining due to their content, others because of the style in which they are written i.e. by the use of antidotes or the injection of humour. Considering news items are called 'stories' due to the adoption of many of the practices of story-tellers, this should come as no surprise.

This is not a new role thrust upon journalists as depicted in the 19th verse by Engel 1997:17:

Tickle the public, make em' grin,

The more you tickle the more you'll win,

Teach the public, you'll never get rich,
You'll live like a beggar and die in a ditch

Even if one of the aims, is to inform, nobody will listen, watch or read the stories if they are quite simply too dull. Therefore, tension, excitement and interest need to be created. Journalism is non-existent without an audience, and so the need to entertain becomes just as vital as the need to inform.

News outlets can receive controversy for doing this at, what the public believe are sensitive times. The ITN replayed images of the hijacked planes going into the world trade centre in time with music. The news item, broadcast the day after the September 11th attacks was deeply criticised by the Independent Television Commission as 'a tasteless offence to public feeling' (Akbar 2001).

Wells (2001) reports that insiders believe that BBC news has become 'more Madonna than Macedonia'. Former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell agrees with this belief: ' I can think of no time in my life when we needed to be better informed about the world beyond our shores, and no time when we have, in fact, been worse informed...The Palme d'Or for the dumbing down of British television goes to ITN, which was once a proud name in journalism...In hock to the advertisers, ITN set the trend by its decision, early in the 1990s, to promote an agenda of crime, celebrity and miracle cures - and to downgrade foreign news to a couple of slots a week on Tuesdays and Thursday, unless anything more sellable happened closer to home. The judgements were not editorial, but commercial.'

Channel 4 News anchor, Jon Snow has accused the ITV news of letting down democracy by eliminating serious news items in favour of more lifestyle and entertainment news (Arlidge and Cole 2001).
ITN chief executive, Stewart Purvis, believes this is nonsense and that they still are what they were at their beginning in the 1950s: 'the equivalent of a mid-market newspaper - authority with accessibility'. This is backed up to a point by research into changing trends in TV news in the last quarter of the 20th century. Barnett and Seymour found that, although there has been a decline in political coverage and a shift towards a tabloid-focused agenda, the overall picture remained 'a healthy balance of serious, light and international coverage.' Researchers have, however warned that increasing commercial pressures would threaten this balanced approach in the future.

Bob Franklin was quoted as saying: 'The history of the British press, since the emergence of popular journalism...has been a history of newspapers increasingly shifting editorial emphasis towards entertainment'.
This has not escaped the broadsheet newspapers. Take for example page eleven of the Times on Tuesday February 26th 2002. Under a 'news strapline, is a lengthy report on Kylie Minogue being voted 'best pop act' by readers of the New Musical Express, illustrated by a large photo of Kylie and her cleavage (triumphant kylie adds the brats to her brits). The two other stories on the same page concern a record by the winner of TV talent show Pop Idol and the memoirs of the late Kurt Cobain.

Matthew Arnold, 1887, believed that 'New journalism...has much to recommend it; it is full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is feather-brained.'
In terms of entertainment values, a national survey of 25,000 adults found that, while just over a third said they relied on newspapers for information, one in five admitted they read a daily paper more for entertainment purposes (Powell 2001). The entertainment values of the public and so in turn adopted by the papers are humour, showbiz, sex, animals, crime and pictures. Holland believes that the concepts of news and entertainment are becoming more entwined: The relentless public push towards entertainment values has meant that the definition of what makes 'news' is itself constantly changing. The carefully established distinction between fact and opinion is now less easy to maintain. The need for accuracy has become dissolved into the excess of the headline, through a joke, an ironic exaggeration or an expression of outrage.
As Peter Hill, the Daily Star editor put it: 'readers are only really interested in people who are on television...And we like bottoms - because bottoms are fun.' Jeremy Gibson, the head of BBC features agrees with this: 'I would love to think that that type of documentary that didn't realise it had to entertain you as well as inform you is probably dead.' James Carey also believes that: 'Journalism can be destroyed by forces other than the totalitarian state; it can also be destroyed by the entertainment state'.

Nearly 70 years ago, FJ Mansfield recorded complaints about press sensationalism, distortion, invasion of privacy, and the reporting of sex 'beyond proper limits'. David Goodhart rejects the dumbing down idea of news items as simply elitism and romanticism: 'A combination of new media technology and social progress means, for good and ill, that common culture has gone forever. Welcome to what the critic Jason Cowley calls 'our crowded, fragmented, cultural market place'.

What the audience and journalist must remember is both the difference and presence of the informative and entertaining function concerning news items combined with the facts of a story, can be the most entertaining of all.