During the summer of 2005 the BBC broadcast Broken News, a satire on 24-hour news channels. In one episode, the newsreader talks to a correspondent outside a hospital in during an outbreak of ‘Tomato Flu’ (a disease originating ‘from a turkey farm in Turkey'):

News reader: Will, what more can you tell us?

Correspondent: Francis, yes, I’m here at the Asklipiio hospital in Athens and what we’re being told here tonight is that the head of the surgical team treating the 59 year old woman at the centre of this unfolding drama, Dr Astenopolapadus, will come out of that door you can see behind me, down the ramp in front of it, and then give a statement to the waiting media, any moment now.

News reader: And do we know what he’s likely to say in that bulletin?

Correspondent: Well, Francis, not at this stage, no. And indeed it may well be that we don’t know what he’s going to say until he’s saying it.

News reader: And Will, when you say that at the moment we don’t know what he’s going to say, what is it exactly that we don’t know?

Correspondent: Well, at the moment we don’t know the woman’s name and we don’t know the precise details of the symptoms she’s suffering from and we don’t know whether Dr Astenopolapadus is a man or a woman.

John Morton, the show's creator, wanted to expose the banality resulting from the combination of too much airtime and not enough news to go around: ‘the frenetic world of news isn't about news anymore. It's about predictions, speculations, recap, taking a look at tomorrow's papers or yesterday's papers, possibly even last Thursday's papers… as consumers of continuous news, [we] surf the infinite choice of networks… desperate for something to hold our interest, moving on as soon as we are bored.’

John Morton’s use of the language of consumption, choice and boredom is not inappropriate. In the last five years we have of course seen technological innovation (when Broken News was first broadcast, Twitter did not exist and Facebook had been around for about a year). So the ‘infinite choice’ of networks is now an even more dynamic market, encompassing not just television channels but social media. The diversity is driven by the dubious assertion that the public has an insatiable desire for information. Hundreds of thousands of people protested the potential closure of BBC 6 Music, but who would object to the termination of BBC News 24?

This has irrevocably changed the role of the journalist. Whether in broadcast or print media, gone are the days of the ‘deadline’, where the pressure was to research and produce a single piece of copy or a single story every 24 hours. Come have the days of speculative commentary blogging and tweeting new angles. 10pm flagship news bulletins seem pointless and boring, since most of the time they are only re-reporting information that was available 4 or 9 hours before, only with different commentators – a choice of Nick Robinson, Laura Kuenssberg or James Landale, or whatever combination of the above.

So relentless is the push of news, that it has long since stopped being a matter of reportage and description. Increasingly, news media is now in a more dynamic and interrelated relationship with events – we can no longer deny that it has a powerful role in shaping events. Last night, Sir Chris Fox (former head of ACPO) voiced concern about the role of the media in the search for Raul Moat:

Twitter, blogs, rolling news… have brought a different dimension. Every fifteen minutes people want a new angle, something new to talk about… information is given without it being verified, that sets all sorts of hares running… [the media] could be using up huge amounts of police time on red herrings and wild goose chases… the real danger is reflecting police professionals away form the job.  

In situations like the Raul Moat manhunt, the media has a vital role. It is the link between a small number of police officers, and a large number of members of the public who both need information and assurance and could potentially themselves provide the resources the police need to do their job – a million eyes and ears, as Sir Chris Fox went on to argue. The same is true of democratic institutions: where they are distant from the public, the media can occupy the space in between, enabling citizens to engage and act in an informed way.

It has been long acknowledged that the news media has a status analogous to that of a public utility. And like all public utilities, the extent to which you can allow a free market to flourish is surely open to question. What happens when it starts, as is surely already the case with some providers, to excite and entertain at the expense of informing, or when the ongoing search for the new angle, the next morsel of information results at best in banality and, at worst, in the misleading of the public?

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.