Charlie Brooker's How to Report the News - Newswipe - BBC
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN invokes it as the best spoof of how news is formulaically produced, often when discussing media quality or automated news.
What it is
A short satirical segment from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe that lampoons the formulaic conventions of television news reporting, from stock shots to filler street interviews and news-speak.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2013 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec chx · 2023-06 · on “Charlie Brooker Got ChatGPT to Write a Black Mirror Episode”
Charlie Brooker is fantastic: On how news is reported [this video] On how mass shooting is reported and about the saturation [LINK]
Recommends david-given · 2016-01 · on “Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April”
The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course. This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen: [this video]
Recommends cirrus-clouds · 2018-04 · on “Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script”
Charlie Brooker did an excellent spoof video of the way news is reported. The video is 8 years old (made in 2010) but it still rings true today: How to report the news: [this video] Every TV news report on the economy in one: [LINK]
Recommends hgomersall · 2025-02 · on “He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along”
Most mainstream documentaries are full of fluff. You can generally read the transcript of a half hour programme in a couple of minutes. I thought Charlie Brooker might have a useful segment on it, but all I could find were the not-quite-on-point, but nevertheless excellent two related segments below: [LINK] [this video]
Cites chestnut-tree · 2013-12 · on “News is bad for you”
I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press). The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority. TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality.
Cites majewsky · 2016-02 · on “Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions”
I don't think it's zeitgeist only. Or at least, not on such a short scale. The pre-internet equivalent of that is interviewing random people on the street about current events, to fill the 2:30 of your news report with something vaguely related to the subject. Like in Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news": [this video]
Cites mrleiter · 2018-11 · on “Varying Speaking Styles with Neural Text-to-Speech”
Before Charlie Brooker started producing Black Mirror, he already was a highly observant critic of society and media. At one point he produced a generic news snippet of an unspecified event, where he pointed out all the standard videoshots and animations used these days to report on a topic [1]. He presented this "report" with the standard news-speak pronunciation of sentences. With this achievement of Amazon, and the recent development by China in AI news-anchors [2], one is not far off to see news reporting being done mostly by machines. Yes, some videography must still be done manually, but the rest could be automated. What that means for the TV news industry? I don't know, but it certain
Cites jodrellblank · 2019-09 · on “The Case for Doing Nothing”
Pompous boring filler in the house style?[1] Yawn, no thanks. As you say, there are plenty of free outlets of information. What more explanation do you need? “Quality journalism” has its price, and the market doesn’t want to pay for it. Quality software has its price too, but the market prefers Linux. Wait, are you associating “free” with “low quality” or am I? Who can tell with quality these days. One thing’s for sure, it’s a difficult issue. [1] The text equivalent of Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news" segment: [this video]