Watching the various TV news channels this lunchtime, a radical idea for the format suddenly occurred to me – a simple change that would provide everyone with what they wanted.
It can be stated in two words: Death News.
It's that simple. A huge amount of the limited-time news programmes are taken up with what are, to my mind, pointless stories. And the thread running through almost every one of them is that it involves someone dying, or having died, or nearly dying. In the States, you can add About to Die.
Much of this news really isn't much more than the fact that someone has died, or have died etc. There is a coach crash in Italy in which one Brit is thought to be missing. That's all the information they have, but there is a strange desire to make every package last at least two minutes to justify kicking some other bit of news off the bulletin. So what could be fitted into a single sentence is dissected and expanded beyond any useful measure.
Likewise, we get ten minutes of coverage over a court case solely because someone died. The reporter has limited information, especially while the trial is ongoing, so the time is taken up in an often quite dull explanation of the lead up to the case. Every time I see a reporter outside the court waffling on, I always wonder whether there were more interesting cases being heard there that day but because they didn't include a death were ignored altogether.
The fact is that there is an enormous wealth of news out there, and the vast majority of it isn't covered. Really interesting, meaningful or touching news stories not even considered being given coverage because a girl died somewhere in Barnsley.
People used to complain incessantly about the amount of news space that football took up, but then came cable and satellitte and we have sports news channels that mean the slight reduction in sports news on the main news wasn't missed so much.
It seems obvious then that we have a special Death News channel, where people can simply tune in to find out who has died where, how, and who we can blame for it. This then leaves the main news bulletins free to covering actually real news – which is interesting things in our society.
Come on, you know it makes sense.