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How far should live News go?

ABC viewers are starting to realise that live, rolling News is sometimes confronting stuff.

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ABC viewers are starting to get a taste of what viewers of channels such as CNN have known for a while -that live, rolling News is sometimes confronting stuff.

Last night’s unfolding drama of the hostage crisis in Manila was screened as it happened on ABC News 24 as well as Pay TV channels including SKY News and CNN.

ABC’s Scott Bevan, host of The World, was left to describe the tense scene from ABC’s Ultimo studio and speaking to South East Asia Correspondent Zoe Daniel in Bangkok.

But with a gunman on board the bus, and hostages unaccounted for, vision could have gotten very ugly without warning (as if it wasn’t already). 8 people were later discovered to have been killed.

Bevan gave warnings to viewers but dropped away from the scene when it got too hot.

News Director Kate Torney said in a statement that footage screened on a news channel after 10pm may differ to decisions involving coverage on ABC 1 at 7pm.

“Last night’s vision from Manila was live and the program host, Scott Bevan, made that clear to audiences and warned that the vision may distress some viewers. The decision to drop out of the live feed was taken once it became clear that the vision contained extremely graphic images. This decision was taken in the interests of the audience. The coverage returned to the live feed soon afterwards, when it appeared that the siege had ended,” she said.

“We review and discuss our coverage on daily basis, and last night’s broadcast is no exception.”

Paul Murray Live on SKY News was also describing the scene until news presenter John Mangos later took over.

As previously reported here, it was former Today Tonight host Anna Coren who was just 150m from the action, giving an eyewitness account across CNN. That’s chasing a story.

ABC News 24, which has previously been criticised for not cutting to some press conferences during the election campaign, suspended its stories to show the drama live. But it seems they are damned if they don’t. damned if they don’t with some viewers using social media to blast the footage as too confronting.

So where do News Editors draw the line in a tech-savvy and ferocious landscape?

Everything changed with the first Gulf War in 1990. How well we remember the OJ Simpson car chase in 1994. We were rivetted by live vision of 9/11 in 2001. The 2003 Iraq War showed us satellite vision of bombs hitting targets and camera crews “embedded” with troops.

The decision lays in the hands of News Editors whose nous for journalism will tell them if vision is too risky to air live. ABC News 24 was right to air this incident, including to some offended viewers, but it’s also lucky it didn’t turn any more graphic.

29 Responses

  1. The commentary on the BBC indicated quite clearly and numerous times that the feed that they were showing (which was the same as ABC and Sky) was from local Manila television and that there was a deliberate10 – 20 second delay imposed by that source. The same delay was present on the Australian networks.

    At the point that tear gas was put into the bus the BBC indicated that the pictures that followed for several minutes after that were replays of earlier footage and the live feed had been cut in Manila. The ABC and Sky were oblivious to this even though it was obvious to viewers that the same scenes as earlier were being repeated.

    It was only after this (when the gun man had been shot) that pictures of the bus returned with smoke coming out of the windscreen etc.

    I have no problem with anything that was shown – it was shown all across the world exactly as we saw it hear. I found the Australian commentary adequate but uninformed – Scott Bevan should have had backup much earlier. By switching to BBC and CNN I felt I knew more of what was happening than the Australian commentators. You could also hear the CNN commentary in the background of the Sky coverage.

    CNN used their own camera feed so they had no censorship but it was at a level closer to the ground so was poorer for that.

  2. this is live news as it happens . people need to stop complaining ..
    excuss me Mr gun man can u stop that please .. Yes mr gun man we are a 24hr live news channel . no no no mr gun man u cant do that and we cant put it to air – some one might complain. instead we will show more rubbish about ben cousins – or about that cat stuck up a tree . oh no cant do that either some one will complain bout us showing a cat in a tree .. oh boy what to do. thats it we will dumb the news down… or show more today night or ACA — yes thats it

  3. The coverage on either network was not rubbish! If you don’t want to see it then change the channel, you have a remote for that reason!!!!!!!!!

    I don’t understand people who complain with what they see on TV, it’s news. This is the world we live in. Being in the media and news genre of work, things like this always happen and we’re always there to capture it whether it be a kitten stuck in a pipe/drain or a hostage situation you see in another part of the world. Heck, we’ve watched things like this in Action Movies.

    You watch it because it’s happening, and if you don’t want to see it, like I said; use your remote!

  5. I’ve installed and used hardware in broadcast facilities that can induce a few seconds delay all the way up to 60 minutes, as they did on Big Brother live shows. It might be prudent for this to be used in certain hostile situations such as this. I’m sure the viewers, as I dont care about seeing humans being slaughtered on TV a few minutes late. It’s already in place in most broadcasters now for the daylight saving farce we must endure year after year. I would bet you next year’s wages if this happened in November the Qld news bulletin version would be sanitized and the WA version completely re-edited.

  6. The ABC should be more careful in the future. They shouldn’t feel the need to compete with trashy commercial news networks to always be there with the latest breaking news. Smart investigative journalism interspersed with regular updates is what is needed, not rubbish like this.

  7. It may be newsworthy and may have been shown on other networks, but that does not mean that the ABC should have shown it live. Coverage does not always need to be up to the second even on a 24 hour news channel, sometimes it is better to take a minute and get it right rather than have the dubious privilege of claiming that you present it the fastest.

    I agree that the world can be a violent place and news programmes should not shy away from that, but the presentation of violence should have some purpose. Not only can violence be shocking to viewers, but in this case the showing of this mass killing disregards the dignity of the victims of crime and the feelings of their friends and family.

    The simple fact is that broadcasting this footage live does no one any good. Providing a summary of what occurred a couple of minutes after it was all over with some edited footage would be just as good for informing viewers and would have shown greater respect for those killed. Live coverage of people getting shot to pieces by some nutter is sensationalism not the sort of considered and responsible reporting one expects from the ABC.

  10. News is news. CNN was airing it. Sky was airing it. There’s no excuse for the ABC’s news channel not showing it. If you’re going to cover Live news, you have to cover it as is. Of course you can make a different editorial decision for the 7pm news on the main channel – it’s a different bulletin. The ABC covered last night well – hopefully they get even better.

  12. I saw some of it and was shocked they were airing it, I quickly changed the channel. There is no need to show any kind of crime or siege live on TV, it serves no purpose at all.

  14. People need to accept this as a result of a 24 hour news service. I also do not think time-zone should be a factor when it comes to the news. The truth might be disturbing, but I’d rather get the truth than a censored version of it
    NB – please no philosophical debate on what the ‘truth’ is

  15. @ryaneco – “the cameras were not close enough to see graphic violence.”

    Are you freakin’ joking!!! – they had a very close up shot of the dead gunman hanging out the door of the bus with his brains leaking out of his head. I dont know how much more graphic you can get on live tv!! (and remember it was just after 8pmWST)

    Now obviously ABC was taking a feed from an Asian network so they had no control over the pictures. They did the right thing to cut to a ‘title screen’ very briefly and return later when things were a little more under control but I think it was too little too late.

    All that said, I agree with ABC’s decision to broadcast the incident live and the way they dealt with it, this was their first major event bar election stuff that they’ve had – it is a 24 hour news station after all and I think we all need to accept this brave new world of FTA TV in Australia.

  16. On September 11 the whole world witnessed a plane going into the World Trade Centre, we witnessed people jumping from the buildings, and we witnessed both buildings collapsing killing thousands. That was live tv. I think we’ve seen it all.

  17. Its news and viewers need to deal with it; news shouldn’t be censored warning should be given the world is an ugly place; I am not stating things like murders and the like be shown but live situations such as these is news; the cameras were not close enough to see graphic violence.

  18. It was very graphic to show an obviously dead body of the gunman hanging out the door of the bus so the ABC were right to drop that footage once it was on for a few seconds.

  19. Unfortunately I didn’t see the live feed, but saw the reports afterwards. Yet, I’d like to congratulate ABC News24 for taking the pictures because it’s become a massive international story since.

    I’m sick & tired of rusted-on, Green Guide letter writing, Errol Simper-loving, baby boomer ABC1 viewers who think every television channel, radio network & website that *our* (not just theirs…) ABC operates should mirror ABC1 standards in every way. ABC News24 cater for a different audience who want their news fast, raw, rolling & live! If you don’t like it, you can simply wait for Lateline to start after 10:30pm & they’ll edit the pictures down for you in nice bite-size forms.

    Of course the finger is always pointed towards poor ol’ ABC when Sky News showed way more & one of their female presenters almost vomited on-air. Keep up the good work, ABC News24!

  20. Kate Torney says decisions differ after 10pm, but have they forgotten that isn’t the timezone for everywhere they broadcast? Here in Perth, we got it at 8pm, a time some people can still be eating dinner! Not great.

  21. I, like everybody else who was watching was shocked to see a dead body in the door, but they did pull out of the feed very quickly and then warned viewers, for those that were offended, its live news and bad stuff happens, im sure what we were seeing outside the bus was nothing compared with what was happening inside it.

  22. Back when I did radio, we employed a 5 second “buffer” that could instantly ‘dump’ the broadcast if a sudden expletive or inapproporiate statement happened. Doesn’t live news like this employ a similar method wherein, say, a man gets shot but it gets dumped in the five seconds before it reaches the airwaves?

  23. I happened to be watching ABC N24 at the time. It was very graphic at times. There was a bloody body hanging out the door and what appeared to be a few lifeless bodies beyond the glass windows of the bus.

    Not sure what to think of it really. I agree that stuff like this can be deemed ‘going too far’, but that’s the reality of breaking news. You aren’t forced to watch it afterall.

  24. I flicked over just as they were showing footage of a person who looked severely injured, hanging out of the bus door. That shot was up on screen for at least 30 seconds before they cut to something else and I was surprised it made it to air, although I wasn’t offended by it.

    Scott Bevan was clearly on the hop trying to describe the scene, which was chaotic at best. A correspondent who was in the region and was talking to him said the broadcasts she could see on local TV were not as graphic and there appeared to be a 20-30 second delay between what we were seeing and what the correspondent was seeing, indicating ABC News 24 probably wasn’t adding much if any delay.

  25. Welcome to the brave new world of 24/7 live TV news.
    As you note David, viewers of cable news have seen this sort of stuff for years (9/11, Iraq War, various Middle East crisis, car chases, other hostage situations). If a news crew is able to broadcast an ongoing event live to air, it will go out.
    Unfortunately you see some very ugly things over the years if you are a close TV News channel watcher.
    I remember in 2005 a massive car bomb killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and dozen of others. In the first few minutes of their breaking news coverage CNN Int. began taking unedited pictures from a videographer that would have been shot at the scene just moments earlier, and what was broadcast was something that I (and my dad who was watching with me) will never be able to remove from our minds; a person in one of the cars from the motorcade hit by the bomb was burning head to toe, still alive, trying to get out.
    It took me seconds to realize what I was seeing before I was forced to change to channel, presumable CNN aired the footage without checking the content first.
    News channels need to be very, very careful with what they broadcast, especially airing unedited/live footage or close ups of horrific scenes in a breaking news situation where beating competitors is all they seem to care about.

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