If the English Language were a person, he’d suffer a cruel and merciless death

Sep 27, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Many businesses spend their hard-earned advertising dollars during the airing of TV newscasts in Guyana each night.
However, sometimes, I am left to wonder if their monies are going to waste since most newscasts portray a poor and distorted image of our journalism capabilities. Many of these newscasts are crying out for help.
But sadly there are hardly people with the right skills to lead these programmes to success. Consequently, to spend less money, TV stations have been recruiting very young people with basic high school qualifications and place them in the news business. Check the nightly newscasts. Ninety percent of the journalists are between the ages of 18 and 25 years. And that is exactly how mediocrity enters the system. The results: what we get every single night after we tune in our television sets to the nightly newscasts.
And so, there are some things that I detest on TV newscasts, but they are being repeated over and over and over. Nobody seems to be taking note. It seems to be the normal way of doing things. Well you can’t expect any better right? When it’s all said and done, this is Guyana we’re talking about. Substandard newscasts seem to be the order of the night these days. This is what I am talking about:
A story is introduced, but the wrong tape is played. Now instead of stop showing that tape immediately, and putting on the correct insert video, the wrong video is allowed to run. The viewer is at a lost. They have no idea what is being shown. The newscaster apologises for the “mix- up” and reads the introduction for the wrong video just shown. What nonsense!

Then there are those annoying stories that I like to call when reporters seem too lazy. They bring stories with a plethora of repeated footage (no voice inserts) and scenes (just a voice-over). The footage is repeated inasmuch as three times in the story. Sometimes, too, the footage is decades old.
Now let’s turn to mispronunciations. If the English Language were a person, he’d suffer a cruel and merciless death each night newscasts are aired. I remember the famous ‘Queen Elizabeth the Eleventh (II)’ pronunciation a few months ago. The person who said that is an editor today believe it or not. Yeah, I wanted to faint too when I heard. Names of presidents, countries, rivers and towns are the usual instances whereby mispronunciations occur. It shows that the newscasters do not peruse the scripts before actually presenting — or should I say reading the news. Yes, that’s what these people do: they read the news and not present the news. Ask many of them what today’s news was about (which they just read) and I am sure they would not be able to answer you.
I remember visiting the studios of Voice of Guyana about a decade ago. On the wall above the announcer’s chair was the pronunciation guide of a word: ‘Le Merdien’ as ‘Luh Meree-dee-on’ or something to that effect. That guide was always there for announcers who may have had problem pronouncing that particular name on the air.

Many newscasts do not go live because they are insecure of errors being made and them not being able to correct it right away. Many of them have resorted to taped newscasts.
And I am sure there are more stories which have happened and continue to be happening inside the news studios across Guyana, sometimes on live TV.
But how much can one view each night? However, sometimes fate allows you to watch at a particular time when funny and weird things are happening on the newscasts. So, many a time the newscasts become about the newscasts themselves and not about the news. That is very interesting. Viewers get distracted by the ‘bloopers’, so to speak, which occur ever so often.
Before I close, I must address the weather forecasts many newscasts give to their viewers. They couldn’t be more inaccurate. They plagiarize and pull off weather information on websites like AccuWeather and the Weather Channel and interpret them the whole wrong way then present them to viewers. Newscasts are inaccurately reporting scattered thunderstorms and rain over Guyana for several days in a row when in reality we are in the middle of a drought. For example, one of the sources of these TV weather forecasts say that on Friday, September 25, there would have been (in Georgetown): 41% probability of thunderstorm, 6.9 mm of precipitation, 6.9 mm of rain, 4 hours of precipitation and 4 hours of rain. That is impossible and surely did not happen. Yet, this is what TV newscasts will report to the public the evening before. It’s laughable indeed.

They report inaccurate probability of rain and precipitation as well as three-day forecasts. This goes to show how much the newly-installed Doppler radar is needed to provide accurate weather information to the public through TV newscasts. This business needs to show more pride of its work when putting out news programmes. Much more work should be done to TV newscasts to ensure that what the public would see each night is nothing that looks like claptraps and therefore makes a mockery of the news business not only nationally but globally too.
Finally, there are the ‘antics’ that are being seen on the TV newscasts. The letter I wrote about the ‘laughing-on-live-TV’ newscaster dealt a little about it. Then a few days ago, on that same newscast, at the end, the camera was (unknowingly to the newscaster) still running in the studio.
The newscaster started to take her coat off and then probably realised that she was still on the air live. She said “oops” and stooped down out of the camera’s way.
Leon Jameson Suseran

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