Yet more examples of dumbing down by TV news

Editor’s note: If you would like to submit a letter for possible publication, please email it to editor@rationalist.com.au. See our Publishing Guideline   Dear Editor, Ian Robinson wrote an excellent piece about how we are subjected to dumbing-down by TV news and current-affairs programs (‘The poverty of current affairs TV’, Rationale Magazine, 24 June 2026). Here are a few observations of my own on the same and similar themes. Reports about increasing levels of obesity are always accompanied by carefully-blurred footage of overweight people walking along a city street. Outside courts, waiting for defendants to appear, hordes of journalists with microphones waiting to pounce with carefully thought-out questions such as: "How are you feeling today?" or "Would you like to apologise for what you did?" Any report of a person being admitted to hospital will show a reporter standing outside with the hospital sign clearly visible over their shoulder.  Similarly, where someone has been arrested we are shown a reporter standing outside the clearly identified police station. In neither of these situations is there any indication that the reporter has obtained fresh information by actually going into the hospital or police station. Whenever there's a tragic incident in a small town or remote area, an outside-broadcast unit is dispatched to the area, even if there's absolutely nothing to see, and we are told about the challenge facing this "tight-knit community". I often wonder what...