Current Affair programs, what will happen in the future?

Current Affair programs, what will happen in the future?

What’s more important, neighbours feuding or the current events across the globe?

Current Affair programs were originally intended to provide audiences across the world of accurate analysis of current issues or topic of importance across the world. However, over the past decade the genre of Commercial Current Affair programs such as ‘Today Tonight’ and ‘A Current Affair’ have changed dramatically relying on ratings and profit instead of the original intention to ‘educate’ and ‘inform’ its audience.
Within Australia, Network stations such as NBN and Prime highly focus on the importance of ratings rather than the information being divulged to the audience, this is due to the increase in technologies and internet as well as the public’s interest’s movement towards celebrity, drama and crime.
Commercial current affair programs as explored by Marianne Bergseth (2009) have “developed a format that revolves around stories about “everyday” people and the scandals in their lives and presents them as news.”

BBC’s Journalist Michael Buerk explains his view of the current news media as “coarser, shallower, more trivial, more prurient, more inaccurate, and more insensitive, with each passing year."

As explored throughout the book “The Electronic Reporter: Broadcast journalism in Australian by Barbara Alysen pg (194)


“In paying for stories, media outlets commonly walk a fine line between competitive pressures and good taste. “

“In an ideal world, everyone who gave information to journalists would do so for altruistic motives. But life today is not like that. Information is a valuable commodity and in a market-oriented world, journalists sometimes have to pay for it…” has this gone too far, are we only receiving stories that will provide each station with profits- this then leads me to the point that these current affair programs are poisoning the news. It also raises the issue of the information being withheld.