ABC defends decision not to switch to rolling coverage of tsunami
The ABC has defended its news coverage of the Japanese tsunami disaster, pointing out that ABC News 24 was the most watched digital channel on Friday night – the first time this has occurred.
ABC News 24 – which carried BBC News 24 for much of that period along with content from Japanese broadcaster NHK – rated an audience share of 3.4% in the 6pm to midnight slot. The same time the previous week saw the network with a 0.3% share.
Within that, ABC News 24’s average audience topped at 162,000 – well ahead of Sky News top audience of the night of 114,000. Previously ABC News 24’s highest prime-time share was 2.3% on February 2.
However, ABC News 24 was criticised for filling much of its weekend schedule with archive content rather than switching to rolling coverage.
However, an ABC spokeswoman said the the organisation has taken a similar approach to fellow public service broadcaster the BBC. She said: “The reality is ABC News 24 did exactly what the BBC did – we had live coverage then went back to the regular schedule then crossed back into regular news updates throughout the day.”
For contractual reasons, the ABC was not able to carry a constant feed from BBC News 24. She said: “Most of our feeds over the weekend came from the BBC and NHK. The ABC operates under a quota system with the BBC which means we are limited in the amount of coverage we can run from them.”
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There wasn’t much ‘new’ news coming out of Japan anyway. If anything major had changed, I’m sure they would have switched back to rolling coverage.
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Abc24 had good coverage of the Jap disaster. It beat anything on the FTA’s, dont have Pay so can’t comment on Sky news.
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I ask readers to consider why Caroline Overington and Tim Blair, both Murdoch minions, would go so hard against ABC News 24 in their columns. Clearly they are not detached observers and want ABC News 24 to compare unfavourably to Murdoch’s Sky News in readers’ eyes.
On Friday evening I watched the live coverage on ABC News24 over the online stream and then checked in periodically throughout the weekend, when I never had to wait more than 15 mins for an update on Japan. Fair enough, I say, given the speed of developments.
I also don’t think any good comes of wall-to-wall disaster porn.
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To be fair on ABC24, by Sunday there weren’t any new developments and the scale of the devastation and nuclear fears had been well and truly covered. They would have cut into the scheduled programing had there been anything further to report.
The people doing the complaining seem to think that ‘news’ is repeating the same things over and over again. Every night during news breaks we hear “…and I’ll have more news in an hour…” Wrong – what they actually mean is “I’ll have the SAME news shown again in one hours time”
And besides – any complaint coming from News Limited attack dogs must be read in the context of the hatred they have for anything to do with Our ABC, and its threat to Uncle Rupert’s ability to make money.
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SBS was the only FTA to break its schedule from 6.30pm to 10.30pm. Nice one.
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I can only assume Tim Blair was watching Millionaire Hot Seat and getting the answers wrong of Friday evening.
Puposely made the swtitch from ABC24 to the FTA channels at 6pm Friday night to witness their coverage, but was only given a minute of news relating to the earthquake. No news on the subsequent tsunami.
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