Fashion victims and the news

Fashion commentators say things like "Blue is the new black", but this week Libya is the new tsunami as far as the 24-hour news channels are concerned.  Can someone remind me please: wasn't there a magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan ten days ago, and didn't a massive wave sweep across swathes of the north-east of the country?  Wasn't there some sort of a problem with nuclear reactors too, and maybe I dreamt that more than 300,000 people were displaced and that tens of thousands perished?

Watching Sky this morning, it's as if it didn't happen, and the Beeb is making only the most occasional references to it.  Libya, Libya and even more Libya is what we're getting, with pointless pics of a black sky with anti-aircraft fire flashing through it.  There are some library shots of planes taking off, and submarines firing tomahawk missiles - I've seen it all before in Iraq and I'm bored with it.

Do these people really think that we're so dumb that we'll put up with this lazy and sloppy journalism, or is it me that's out of step with the general view?  More likely is that they simply overdid it so much last week that they believe we're all tsunami'd out, and need a change.  I fear that my journalism course is simply making me loathe televison news with a vengeance. 

The old adage that the pictures are what is important was absolutely true when the tsunami struck, but that was only because they were so 'good' (that's TV speak for horrific) that no-one who saw them will ever forget it.  However, in 90%+ of news reporting that isn't the case, and that means that the words become important.  The problem is that when news channels are stuck with their rolling coverage, the pictures - probably already unremarkable in most instances - are coupled with cliched, and not very good words.  The result is coverage that is occasionally wonderful, but usually pretty average.  That's why I turn on Sky News first thing to look at the breaking news ticker, but then immediately dump it for Radio 4 - maybe it's my age but I prefer my news to be of the grown-up variety (this morning, by the way, Radio 4 did cover the crisis at the nuclear plants - it's going better but there's still a long way to go - you wouldn't have got that from Sky!).