The Unnatural Order

I imagine this to be a very difficult job. An hour is not that long to explain what is going on in our country and, indeed, the entire world. Especially when you consider that you have to take out about 7 minutes for weather (or 17 minutes if you're One News) and 12 or so minutes for sport (17 minutes if you've got Hamish McKay coming down with a case of ‘finals footy fever').

The producers' selections are of course driven by what they think will attract the most viewers and rate well. Blood rates well. Scary stories about epidemics rate well too. And as we're seeing more and more, sadly, celebrity scandal is ratings gold.

So if the producers were captains picking teams for a lunchtime school rugby game, these types of stories would be the kids that hit puberty at 8 and had muscles growing out of their biceps. Choose them first, and let them do the opening hit-ups. Biggest story first, second biggest story second, and so on.

But once the big boys have been chosen, the producer is left with some gangly, awkward, wimpy stories too. These are the ‘animals behaving like humans' stories. The ‘feijoa shaped like a kiwi' stories. These tend to be chosen last, and placed toward the end of the hour, scraping in just before sport, or if they're especially feel good, just after weather to leave the viewer with a smile.

The May 20th edition of 3 News, however, seemed to have a selection well out of its natural news order. It was a story from the UK about Ida, a 47 million year old primate fossil. Within the first 20 seconds of this story we were told that this archaeological find was the missing link, that it was final proof of Darwin's theory of human evolution AND that it was the eighth wonder of the world!

I leaned closer to the TV in awe, but then realised where this story was placed. It came in after a Veitchgate update, a story about an Ozzy kid having his head drilled, even a story about a guy who had his hand bitten off by a shark two years ago (note the high rating elements of blood and celebrity scandal).

All of a sudden I began to question the validity of this fossil find story on the sole basis of its placement toward the end of the news hour. There seemed to be nothing dodgy about this report though. It even contained an appearance from Sir David Attenborough, a legend in my book, hailing the scale of this find. So why was it picked last? Why was a relic, which is said to verify the origins of our own species, placed last in the news pecking order?

Coming out of the story, Mike McRoberts didn't seem to care too much. He jokingly threw to sport with, "one of your relatives eh Hamish? Ha!" And that was it. I was left to wonder why this story, which seemed like the Jonah Lomu kid you pick first, was left beside Hamish McKay musing on a night at the trots.