Watching the main BBC TV news bulletins in recent weeks has been a truly informative experience. Viewers have been treated to lengthy feature-style reports that have cast extra light on arenas of conflict around the world.
Tuesday night’s 10pm bulletin was a fine example because of two segments in particular, one by special correspondent Fergal Keane and another by Middle East correspondent Jim Muir.*
They were like mini-documentaries, telling the news behind the news so to speak, and offered valuable insights into running stories.
Keane’s report from Turkey, which ran for more than five minutes, highlighted the activities of the people-smuggling mafia who charge Syrian and Iraqi refugees large sums to put them aboard small dinghies bound for Greece,
We are used to seeing the end of this perilous seaborne journey but not its beginning. Here was a chilling report, with secret filming of a man enticing the refugees to part with their money followed by that fateful moment when they are cast off into the Mediterranean.
Muir’s report, from Fallujah and Ramadi as Iraqi troops fight to free the cities from Isis, was a little more straightforward in news terms, but its length and the fact he was filmed at two locations illustrated the BBC’s willingness to allow the item to “breathe.”
Recent reports from inside Yemen were somewhat similar, as have been items on China by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, notably about the people abducted from theHong Kong bookshop and the construction of islands in the South China Sea.
This change of direction is not the result of a whim. The decision to devote valued airtime in news bulletins to such items has not occurred by accident. So what is the reasoning?
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