Whatever happened to news…

one of the few good anchors of our time

When I was a student of journalism, my late teacher helped me define news in a couple of sentences, he said, News is a report of a recent event; intelligence; information or the presentation of a report on recent and new events in a newspaper, radio or television.

Just going by my teacher’s definitions, I realized news is meant to cover the total unusual or something new and important.

I grew up watching people like Bbale Francis take news anchoring to a whole new level in Uganda, he inspired me to want to become a celebrity, (In fact I even practiced signing autographs) he personally made news interesting not mentioning the way he almost made his name sound like chocolate.

Today, I admit we have a massive hyped production with bits of news and well, a lot of pretty faces….yes I just said it. I usually watch news in awe these days; I can’t help but wonder what happened to it.

As we used to assume, news is meant to be new but apparently, that’s what you think, not Ugandan TVs, for our stations news is something uniform. Their definition is simple, when you watch news on one station; you shall have watched news on all stations, yes, same organization and for international stories, the same word arrangement.

Sometimes I think, its like creativity has died on a large scale and no one cares anymore. I know many of you may reason that even CNN, BBC or Aljazeera share many stories but hey, each of them have those different feature stories that actually keep us glued, our TVs have some but truth is they drag to the bone.

News these days is so bad that, very many of us these days subscribe to the news on the other channel; I hear topical news became too predictable that before it’s aired you actually know about 80% of it, mbu the other 20% being the anchor’s dress code. 
Imagine the sort of arrangement; First story is from Parliament, second story is a continuation of the first, and third story is about a political analyst commenting about the story from parliament...like really??? 

As I was writing this article, primary seven candidates were writing their first paper and I predicted that the news that night would be about that, in fact I watched to see my prediction come to pass and trust me; with Ugandan TV you rarely go wrong. The entire TV headlines were “PLE starts” (which i think we all knew) and then, faces of happy candidates reminding us they were ready because they’ve been reading simanyi some Newspaper pullout. Now isn’t that sheer PR in news?

Now if that isn’t enough there are these year to year stories of babies born on, say Christmas day, people that work on christmas, company end of year parties!!! Then this thing of holding your TV awards, which are obviously won by your own staff and publicizing it in news like it was a Grammy or an Oscar won, that’s very draining, and oh, for crying out loud, using some phrase like “Movers and Shakers” in news stopped being cool (am reaching out to the print media too).

If producers actually cared, in the name of Jesus (yes am calling out for him) they would know that watching a non subtitled Luganda story when you can’t get the language is painful.

And, when did journalists start being the news? I mean you seriously tune in to watch current affairs, and guess what makes the headlines; our very good reporter gives birth to a baby boy, our presenter loses car, your famous presenter is married…….really? how is that news, I mean people get married everyday!!

This syndrome has however been existing in print longer than it has on TV; I remember ranting about reporters who took pictures of them selves instead of the event. I know many of you have seen articles where there captions like; the writer standing next to David Obua’s shirt, the writer drinking Obua’s coffee, the writer in Obua’s corridor…what the hell is wrong with the world? The story is enough to prove you were actually with him.

Away from the TV news, what’s with the misleading adverts by their sponsors? There’s this one that baffles me a lot. Your phone gets stolen and guess what they say “don’t worry be happy” mbu you can regain your contacts…..screw the contacts, that’s an Iphone5 we are talking about, it had good music on it, Kanye West’s pirated album, very many pictures I don’t want the world to see, especially if I become famous, and all you can tell me is to be happy? Ehh…..