Have I Got News For You

How much information can you absorb at one time? If you want to catch up on World News and tune into CNN or Bloomberg you will have data coming at you from three sources simultaneously.

The newscaster is speaking to you, there is a square grid in the corner of the screen with figures which change every few seconds and then there is the horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen which is constantly in motion. When you first tune in it is overwhelming. You actually need a few minutes to find your feet. It is not possible to successfully assimilate information coming at you from several sources at the same time. So you have to decide which one to concentrate on , which is hard work.

If you want to just listen to the voice it requires a lot of effort to exclude the other visual content. You could of course close your eyes but this is TV, sound and vision, so closing yourself off to the vision fundamentally diminishes the whole experience. You can try to just read one of the blocks of information which is even harder because the voice constantly pulls at you, you will pick up a word or a bit of a sentence that demands your attention and by the time you have extricated yourself from it’s grip the piece of the information that you were half way through on the bottom bar has disappeared. Would listening to your I Pod at the same time help? Probably not as you would simply get yourself entangled in a song with similarly distracting consequences.

It can be a thoroughly frustrating experience and an arrangement which is slowly finding it’s wicked way onto other channels. Ireland AM has the horizontal bar at the bottom which dispenses weather updates, Munster team news and general newsworthy tit bits while Sinead and Mark tell you about an unmissable wedding fair next week in the RDS.

The Sunday Game on RTE now has the dreaded bottom bar which ensures that we are kept up to date with everyone’s point of view such as those of Seamus in Caherciveen who thinks that “the referee in Killarney today was an absolute disgrace” or Tadhg in Ballina who reckons that “ the Connaught championship is a total shambles”. There are four pundits in the studio, I really don’t think the subject matter at hand requires any more input.

What could be at work in the case of The Sunday Game is that somebody in RTE is convinced that the programme is watched only by uncouth culchies for whom the sight of their comment scrolling across the screen would provide the thrill of a lifetime. A kind of audience participation. “Go on Joe send it, send it sure it’s great gas.”

Sky News and Sky Sports News have long been offenders. How can I digest information in relation to the status of Manchester City’s bid for Kaka, Carling Cup quarter final results and the results of Patrice Evra’s appeal to the FA disciplinary committee at the same time? I can’t because it’s not possible. What’s all the panic about anyway? Why can’t these items, all worthy stories in their own right be taken individually and dealt with one at a time? Believe me, football fans who are watching Sky’s lunchtime report on a Tuesday afternoon are going nowhere, they can stick around, slow down.

In trying to do everything at once they end up doing nothing. I have tried too many times to navigate my way through these types of bulletins only to come away bleary eyed, ill informed and frustrated.

The best you can hope for is a deranged cocktail of information, a smattering of everything “ Ronan O’Gara is fit to line out today as UN Humanitarian Director for Hezbollah in New York as they take on bottom of the table Abbeyfeale who require a bonus point win to keep them in touch with the Tamil Tigers who have just announced nineteen hundred redundancies and are relocating to Poland”. Grand, that’s me up to speed then.

Maybe women are the target market. The general perception is that they are capable of performing several tasks at once or “multi tasking“ as it‘s commonly known.

It’s not a myth either - I have seen my wife make lasagne, bathe the kids, pay tolls online, file utility bills and keep abreast of developments on Coronation Street all at the same time. I on the other hand need to apportion at least one hour of my time to the sole task of pairing socks which will inevitably still remain incomplete.

Mercifully the nine o’ clock news on RTE contains no such focus splitting shenanigans. They do however have a penchant for a phenomenon which I first encountered on local news channels in the United States - the on the spot live reporter. Somebody on the production team up there is of the view that a certain amount of urgency and edginess can be instilled into the most humdrum story by placing a reporter at the scene.

Now this is fine if the report concerns ,say, a jack knifed lorry or a civil disturbance. We get a view of the scene and a consequent insight into the scale of what has taken place.

But when the story concerns a meeting at the labour court or an announcement of a few job losses at a component manufacturer in Dundalk the live reporter is utterly pointless. How often have you seen an unfortunate reporter cowering under an umbrella at 9.15 at night in front of an office building wherein nothing noteworthy has happened since at least five hours previously. Everyone concerned has long since gone home. I’m sure he or she would prefer to deliver the commentary sitting across the desk from the anchor in a cosy studio. But that just wouldn’t feel as live though would it? There’s nothing like the sight of traffic moving in the background and the sound of a gale force wind howling to generate the feeling that you are witnessing something monumental unfolding before your eyes.

George Lee, he gets to speak from the studio every night. And I suppose that’s fair enough because with the kind of news he’s been delivering recently, we all need to be sitting down.