nothing but the facts, ma'am

here was a time, long ago, when you could buy a newspaper knowing the general view it had of politics and the world in general, yet be confident that television news, in contrast, was impartial. ITV would usually take a more populist stance than the BBC and Sir Trevor MacDonald, knighted though he is, would take a particularly condescending tone, but generally speaking they would both stick to the facts.

Then Channel 4 news started its frenzied trailers with Jon Snow, teasing potential viewers with frantic snippets of outrageous goings-on. Various other news programmes descended to including summaries of viewers' opinions phoned in or sent by e-mail during the programme as if the proportion of people for or against a simplistic question were statistically valid and counted as news. Yes, there is a role for vox pop, but it isn't news.

The BBC certainly isn't immune from patronising its viewers, and it seems to be happening more and more frequently, but this week I saw the worst example yet on ITV. I caught the lunchtime news on Monday, and was flabbergasted to hear them introduce the lead story about immigration. The arrivals were described as an 'unstoppable wave' of people coming from Africa. Irrespective of one's views about immigration, that seems to me to be not only unbalanced reporting but also highly irresponsible panic-mongering.

Tags: news | populist | condescending | panic-mongering