Did ABC News 24 really drop the ball?
Did ABC News 24 fail to adequately cover the disaster in Japan on the weekend? Or did it upstage commercial networks?
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News
Some media reports have criticised ABC News 24 for failing to adequately cover the disaster in Japan on the weekend, noting that the channel was running regular programming on Saturday as a potential nuclear disaster was looming.
Such criticisms raise questions about how well staffed the channel was over the weekend as an international crisis was, and continues, to unfold.
As this site reported on Saturday, ABC News 24 pulled the biggest multichannel share on Friday night principally because it switched to live coverage of the tsunami on NHK World as the waves were crashing through Japanese farmlands. In contrast commercial bulletins ran limited footage in their 6pm bulletins, mostly on the quake and not the tsunami which was happening at around 6pm AEDT.
That’s hardly dropping the ball. It completely upstaged them.
On Saturday ABC News 24 did have some regular programming which was inadequate given the interest in the crisis.
An ABC spokesperson told TV Tonight the ABC had correspondents on the ground when the earthquake and tsunami struck, and provided immediate coverage.
“On Friday when the story broke, ABC News 24 switched immediately to a mixture of its own ABC reporting and rolling coverage from Japanese broadcasters, and provided extensive and continuous coverage,” they said. “As a result of this coverage, viewers switched to ABC NEWS 24 in record numbers. ABC News 24 was the top rating digital channel on the day with 4.2% share and the top show at 162,000 viewers.
“Over the weekend, coverage of the disaster continued, but it was not uninterrupted rolling coverage at all times. Using the resources available to it, ABC News 24 provided significant coverage of key developments in the story. Where possible, ABC News 24 interrupted its normal scheduled programs to provide additional news coverage of the disaster.”
Extra staff were also brought in on the weekend, but it isn’t clear whether it was actually enough to match the coverage that is provided on weekdays.
In hindsight ABC News 24 should have offered more from NHK World on the weekend. ABC1 is a better place to provide updates in between regular programming.
But its role on Friday night must also be recognised and the numbers indicate a significant number of the audience turned to the channel because commercial FTA networks were still coming to terms with the footage.
31 Responses
I believe this criticism is a beat up and Mediawatch is getting a bit lazy quoting biased opinions from newspapers. If you have watched how BBC World News and Aljazeera English have covered Japan, they have taken similar approaches over the weekend. There is only so much “new” news one can report before repeating themselves.
@Russell – to be fair all the networks were doing the same until they could get their own crews in to the area. The Japanese were the only ones with live coverage as events unfolded.
I don’t know how much we need to congratulate ABC News 24 for taking live pictures from NHK World on Friday night of the tsunami.
Isn’t that exactly what a 24 hour news network is meant to do? I live in the US and all the news channels here carried the same pictures live, I was watching Thursday night here. I imagine news channels in every country in the world carried the same live images. They all tapped into NHK World.
So how much should we congratulate News 24 for doing what everyone else did and what they should do?
You can’t compare a national 24 hour news channel that is set up and designed to air live breaking news, to local 6pm bulletins. They are two different beasts. No late local 10pm and 11pm newscasts in Los Angeles carried the live footage either. They were stuck telling me about a bush crash in LA 12 hours earlier.
That’s how local newscasts work. They’re rigid and structured and difficult to be flexible (for better or for worse) that is their nature. News channels on the other hand thrive on taking live pictures.
I think ABC News 24 does need to be criticised for weekend coverage however. This is a huge huge huge story. They should have run with it all day. Of course they have the resources and manpower. They have them there Mon-Fri. ABC News 24 needs to stop being so rigid and when news breaks – do whatever they need to do to cover it. Weekday or weekend.
The coverage was great on Friday and was great again on Monday (I was home and had it on all day). However, it was very much like an after-hours service on the weekend, with much-reduced coverage, and what was shown was repetitive. It may be a little strong to say that they dropped the ball but they certainly didn’t kick any goals either.
In recent days, ABC News 24 stayed with its originally scheduled programming rather than switching to NHK World or other news broadcasters with better resources in order to bring us the news. Especially during critical moments when new tsunami alerts were raised, and when another explosion occurred at one of the nuclear plants. Even Nine cut into regular programming to bring us the news.
Media Watch touched on this tonight, even commenting that maybe ABC News 24 should be renamed ABC News 12 (for half an hour of news and half an hour of rehashes on the weekends). Reminded me of CatFan’s comment here.
Given that NHK, BBC, etc were running the same footage with the same voiceover, word for word, every few minutes for hours on end; and that news is not just one story – no matter how big; going to normal programming at some stage is understandable. Things are still unfolding, or unravelling, in LIbya; NSW is heading to an election; Christchurch is still cleaning up;and all the usual day to day shenanigans go on. These need to be covered as well, especially when nothing new was coming in from Japan.
We pretty much only had ABC News 24 on for coverage. The footage of the tsunami has to rank as the most incredible natural disaster footage ever.
ABC News 24 is not getting great ratings, but we have to encourage it. It is an excellent 24 news service considering it is free – News whenever we want it. I remember when SKY started and for the first two years all they ran were news stories produced by Nine and Seven and Sky news from London…every hour – and that was it – No other programs at all…..Keep it up News 24 – Your service is greatly appreciated. It is very important for Australian TV you stay with us.
They dropped the ball this afternoon.
Sky did all of this as well …. Spread the love David
Dean I actually spread the love in an article on Saturday, including Sky News, which is linked in the story.
This story is responding to criticism of ABC News 24. Are you suggesting there was criticism of Sky I have missed?
we need to remember that these criticisms made of the ABC came from The Australian….owner of News 24’s rival, SKY News. Not exactly impartial.
Ahston, do you even watch the ABC News? Saying that stupid comment proves that you don’t.
Yes, they did fail on Saturday through a lack of leadership. Someone should have said, “hey, there’s a nuclear meltdown in Japan, let’s cover that.” I’m guessing there were a few relatively junior staff and a dog in a room who had been told follow the schedule and not to think.
What can you do? They just don’t have the funding to live up to people’s expectations of a 24 hour news channel.
They definitely dropped the ball on the Saturday, but there Friday coverage was first class. Overall they were by far the best network on FTA in Australia.
I found that when i’d tuned in they were pretty much just showing CNN’s footage the whole time..
I’m not complaining at all, just an observation. I think it is a decent service
What do you expect, it’s another country so of course ABC News doesn’t care! They only care about Australia and New Zealand
This article sums up my post in response to your Saturday post. “it’s been apparent from the start that ABC News 24 is crap on weekends… they essentially run it as a Monday to Friday business and on weekends they obviously don’t want to pay anyone to work. Well, guess what? The world doesn’t stop turning because it’s the weekend. Give us the same quality every day and stop padding out the weekends with endless repeats.”
This was still developing news on Saturday and ABC News should have continued coverage on what could possibly (hopefully) be the biggest disaster that will occur this year.
I think ABC 24 has done a great job and the regular programs are a nice break, most can probably only take so much before they keep telling us the same news unless something new breaks, when they can cross back to Japan at any time. SkyNews did similar from what I saw.
Well I for one switched ABC24 on the weekend to see more of the Japan coverage but was bitterly disappointed to find a totally pointless show about something else. Needless to say I haven’t bothered switching back to them.
ABC had their own reporters in devastation areas when 7 & 9 had their Barbies and Kens on empty street corners waiting to be told by Sydney what was happening and what to say.
ABC24 continues to provide excellent coverage. Over the weekend they covered everything new as it was happening and went to material like “Foreign Correspondent” and “Australian Story” when there was nothing new to report. Nothing was missed, as shown by the bulletins which followed the half-hour “fillers”.
Excellent job ABC24. The 16/5 comment is ridiculous.
ABC24 is doing a great job and should be congratulated on it’s success. It is an excellent alternative to Sky News and it’s free!
I don’t think ABC dropped the ball. As you said, they had excellent coverage on Friday. On Saturday, they were right to run scheduled programming. They can always interrupt it if a major breaking story happens. Otherwise, getting a bulletin at the top of the hour is good enough for me. I watched a couple of hours of ABC News 24 over the weekend, and had no problems with the coverage (of the earthquake or the other news of the day)
Cancelling regular programming would not have provided any more useful information than what they did, IMO.
ABC should be commended for their coverage. No disrepect but the NZ Christchurch quake was minor compaired to the events in Japan except the commercial channels still played regular programming.
Maybe ABC News 24 should be renamed ABC News 16/5. News 16 hours a day, 5 days a week.