Watch these Charlie Brooker critiques on TV. There may be some soundbites you can use in your writing. He has a fantastic turn of phrase and you can quote him too.

This is a really up to date news story on how a recent BBC documentary has been uncovered to have constructed its narrative in a wholly unacceptable fashion to create a narrative that wasn’t exactly true.

Consider the ways in which even the news media can be described as an example of hyper-reality and blurring the boundaries between a media constructed reality and the real life..

Is it possible that we know far more about the media, celebrity news & popular culture than we did about significant events and people in the ‘real’ world.

It is important to consider news values and understand how some important pieces of news are pushed off the news agenda because they don’t fulfill the editorial agenda and so the news we do consume is highly selected. This selection is often about what will make a popular / entertaining story rather than reporting other bigger world events but ones that are more remote, ‘foreign’ and ones for which they don’t have pictures.

Finally, the news is packaged up into easily understandable narratives, indeed news items have narrative structure, ‘characters’ cast into simple types & roles and there is often highly emotive use of language and symbolic imagery in order to represent the events / people in a particular way.

Here is a really funny and insightful video from TV critic Charlie Brooker, who incidentally wrote one of our key texts Black Mirror. Here he is talking about the formulaic structure of a TV news item and how they are neatly packaged up for consumption.

Take a look at the Guernsey Evening Press – hegenomy at work even in a small, backwater like Guernsey.

And finally – this is controversial but it is an episode of Russell Brand’s The Trews where he criticises the ‘propaganda’ surrounding terrorist attacks and how the story that the government delivers, feeds us through the media, has a purpose of keeping us on their side and not encourage us to question our own foreign policy and actions abroad. He is loud and outspoken but many of his The Trews discuss modern media and in particular Fox News who represent the multi-national corporate dominance of the world. You will either love him or hate him but what he says does give food for thought and ideas for discussion.