The News About the News

At 8PM each night.....on ARD (Channel One, the state-run network), there's the fifteen minute news segment.  For the vast number of Germans, this is the primary method of which they get their national news.  Generally, out of eighty million folks, there's five and a half million Germans who watch this segment nightly.

For an American viewing it (I tend to watch it most nights out of the week......there's several observations I can make).

I like the fact that it's a nicely compacted news piece and fits into fifteen minutes with no commercials.  I like the 60-second weather segment at the close of each show, which is a five-star graphics piece and fairly accurate (at least for the next twenty-four hours).  I like how they shuffle the presentation folks around so there is no regular guy each night (there's probably six different people that they use during the average month).  And I like the basic style of news......never more than sixty seconds on one topic unless it's a big story with lots of angles.

Negatives?  If you wanted more info on something.....you'd have to wait around till 9:45PM for the more extended news segment.  Political dynamics getting a lot of spread?  Well, yeah....I'd say a quarter of each segment is tied down to one political party or some political topic.  Segments on one-star type news events?  That's a major negative to me and noticeable at least five or six times a week.

Well....someone finally sat down and asked the German public about their impression.  There were some kind words, and a fair amount of criticism.

Almost a third of the German public thinks there's too many speeches by political players that get hyped up on the 8PM news.  Almost the same number of people think it's too much negativity being spread onto the newscast as well.  A quarter of the German population thinks that very little on Germany gets reported.  Somewhere around ten percent of the folks watching the news felt that it was all too complicated for them to grasp the significance.  Finally, some folks complained of the musical score used for the nightly news is annoying.

I looked over these criticisms.

The musical thing is amusing....it's the same music used for the past two decades.  Everyone from the BBC to the US networks.....all use some type of musical piece as an introduction.  I don't think much about it.....it's simply an identification of their 'brand'.

The complicated complaint?  Some topics are simply bound to a complicated angle and you'd have to take twenty minutes to explain the whole picture to some people.  I'd generally regard the 8PM news piece as built for a eighth-grade student and most folks ought to grasp the situation.

As for German news?  Yeah.....it's a noticeable thing.  Out of an entire week.....if you take out sports and weather.....I doubt if more than twenty-percent of the nightly piece has news on Germany.  Murders are rarely portrayed.....same for bank robberies....and you'd have to watch your regional network to get anything within your own state (that's a separate time-period).

Negativity?  Yes, it's always been there and part of the skeptical nature of this team of news people.  You can pick any topic and guess the positive or negative angle which the story will be told.  President Obama used to always get a positive angle, and the last year or two....it's flipped to a negative angle.  The FIFA soccer folks used to always get a positive angle, and it's flipped to a negative angle now.

The political dynamics?  In an average week of 105 minutes of news.....I'd take a guess that 35 minutes will be involving some German political party or some episode from the Bundestag.  I admit, there's some important legislation going on and sometimes....there's a good fight erupting (the autobahn toll fee was the most recent episode).  There's also one-star political chatter used to fill up a news piece......just to give you some alternate position.

Maybe the ARD team will take the criticism and do some things slightly different.  The thing is that most Germans don't really want a CNN or Fox News type twenty-four hour news coverage deal.  And there's really not enough going on to make such a network possible in Germany.