Yesterday’s Observer carried an interesting piece by Richard Ingrams – Ppp-Up TV. Ingram’s main point was that Stuart Murphy, BBC Three’s wunderkind controller, has been quoted as saying that BBC Three’s news directly targeted its 16-34 audience, and it did that by skewing its news towards stories that specifically interested them. These, he’s reported as claiming, include stories about mortgages and kids, since most have them.
Ingrams rightly berates Murphy’s news values since we shouldn’t just be interested or indeed told about things that just affect us directly. An earthquake in Indonesia killing maybe hundreds of thousands, is not ever going to affect me, unless I happen to know someone there on holiday. But does that mean that I shouldn’t be told about it. But that’s only part of what annoyed me.
Now I’m at home just now, and not sitting in front of one of work’s computer systems, but I’m reasonably sure that “most” 16-34s do NOT have mortgages, and certainly don’t have kids. I would guess that 35-44s are much more likely to have both. Murphy may well have both, but one should never mistake ones own peers for the population at large.
In any case, on that basis, all our news would be about mortgages and children since the vast majority of the whole population have one or the other or both. Fortunately the news editors of the Ten O’Clock News have a slightly broader outlook on news to present to us.