We want to know what you think

Your views - they say those words to us, at us, on the news. The newsreaders have been taking our views, via a small, unseen army of staff known as ‘we.’ ‘Your views’ they say, as they hold up their fan of paper and their iPad and sincerely read out the text. These are the views of all of us: mine and yours and everybody’s. Our voice, our opinion of the news is to be heard. Of course, what they mean by ‘your views’ is ‘these people’s views.’ A handful of people have contacted the programme and their comments have been taken, maybe mistaken, as voicing a consensus, or neatly expressing one of two nationally existing opinions: for or against, however those two might apply to the particular news story.

Comments from people with atypically strong opinions, strong enough to have inspired them to call/text/email the broadcaster over a news story, are read to us, apparently telling us our own minds. Though if the news team think these views represent the viewers’ minds then why tell us what they presume we are already thinking? But then the media's presentation of a news story is often shaped by the expected public reaction to it. The public is going to be either outraged or (cheekily) pleased by it, though it’s not certain whether that statement is an observation or an editorial command.

“Well, we want to know what you think.” My regional news told me last night. They posed the slightly loaded question: “should councils be paid to help so-called problem families turn their lives around, or is that what our taxes should already be paying for, without any need for extra incentives? [1]” Answers collected, it turned out that I was thinking that benefits claimants with troublesome children should lose their handouts and be kicked out of their homes. The money they were receiving would be better spent elsewhere (on all the extra bailiffs, perhaps).

Normally of course this only occurs in the lighter news – things like the regional news, breakfast news and the Jeremy Vine Show. It’s the smiling, warm, local news presenters who are reading out these calls, texts and emails. Newsreaders who always look slightly out of their depth, as though the autocue is mischievously adding death threats or dirty jokes between their lines; newsreaders who will talk about the tragically dead while maintaining a serious story expression with all the assurance of someone trying to anticipate the timing of a photo booth; newsreaders who will only ever look relaxed when they’ve broken the short silence held after the tragedy story and cracked a smile for the one about a retired bobby who’s built a model of the Titanic out of matchsticks.

It is peculiar that the regional news teams are the ones who have to read out our freshly baited thoughts on the state of the nation, rather than the increasingly hawkish national newsreaders: they with their animated moralizing eyebrows and their ‘you speak, I POUNCE; you try to answI POUNCE’ school of interviewing—like idiot Joseph McCarthys who don’t quite know what they’re trying to expose.

Instead it’s the nice guys—the newsreaders who smile and maintain your nursery time sedation and fuzzy glow—who read out the frustrations and heated vitriol in our opinions of the day’s news. They smile benevolently and thoughtfully as they read things like: ‘If they’re not prepared to adopt our way of life then they should not come to live in this country;’ ‘These anti war protestors should try being a soldier and getting shot at all the time;’ ‘I’ve worked ever since I left school and really struggle to live on the wages my partner and I bring in. We aren’t allowed to go on strike for a better pension. Why should doctors be a special case?’ There are no answers of course. There never will be.

This is not interactive news: there is no discourse; nothing is dealt with. The newsreaders smile sympathetically at these contributors’ sentiments, but always with an eye on the clock, like an inwardly despairing salesperson whose small talk has unwittingly opened someone’s conversational floodgates. They tell us to keep the texts and emails coming in, and give a link to a page on their website where we can contribute and read all of our thoughts. Even the late night national news bulletins, like those of the terrestrial 1, 3 and 4, encourage our thoughts with tiny screenshots of their Facebook pages before they sign off for the night. ‘We really want to hear your views, good night.’

Interestingly, our views were seen on the national news last night—on the ITV news bulletin at 7:45. Roving reporter Lewis Vaughan Jones was signing off from his spot next to the threateningly high River Mole when a group of kids appeared at his shoulder and started shouting into the camera and making hand gestures, finally giving Vaughan Jones a hefty shunt as the shot prematurely faded to black. Presumably these boys were irate about the lack of flood defences or flood defence plans in their local area, or the lack of police patrols.

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[1] South East Today, BBC1, 11^th June 2012, 6:30pm.