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Frame from Charlie Brooker's How to Report the News - Newswipe - BBC Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Charlie Brooker's How to Report the News - Newswipe - BBC

10 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this comedy video4 months2013–2025 score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN invokes it as the best spoof of how news is formulaically produced, often when discussing media quality or automated news.

A short satirical segment from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe that lampoons the formulaic conventions of television news reporting, from stock shots to filler street interviews and news-speak.

1 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 4 citations · 1 jokes · Comedy

9 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@david-given Jan 2016 Recommends
on HN thread Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April
The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course. This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen: [this video]
Best rundown of BBC house style.
@cirrus-clouds Apr 2018 Recommends
on HN thread Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
Charlie Brooker did an excellent spoof video of the way news is reported. The video is 8 years old (made in 2010) but it still rings true today: How to report the news: [this video] Every TV news report on the economy in one: [link]
Excellent spoof of news reporting that still rings true.
@hgomersall Feb 2025 Recommends
on HN thread He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along
Most mainstream documentaries are full of fluff. You can generally read the transcript of a half hour programme in a couple of minutes. I thought Charlie Brooker might have a useful segment on it, but all I could find were the not-quite-on-point, but nevertheless excellent two related segments below: [link] [this video]
Excellent though not quite on-point Brooker segments.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@chestnut-tree Dec 2013 Cites it
on HN thread News is bad for you
Read more
I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press). The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority. TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos). [this video] [link]
Shows the formulaic way news is reported.
@majewsky Feb 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions
I don't think it's zeitgeist only. Or at least, not on such a short scale. The pre-internet equivalent of that is interviewing random people on the street about current events, to fill the 2:30 of your news report with something vaguely related to the subject. Like in Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news": [this video]
Example of filler street interviews in news reports.
@mrleiter Nov 2018 Cites it
on HN thread Varying Speaking Styles with Neural Text-to-Speech
Read more
Before Charlie Brooker started producing Black Mirror, he already was a highly observant critic of society and media. At one point he produced a generic news snippet of an unspecified event, where he pointed out all the standard videoshots and animations used these days to report on a topic [1]. He presented this "report" with the standard news-speak pronunciation of sentences. With this achievement of Amazon, and the recent development by China in AI news-anchors [2], one is not far off to see news reporting being done mostly by machines. Yes, some videography must still be done manually, but the rest could be automated. What that means for the TV news industry? I don't know, but it certainly deserves discussion. [1] [this video] [2] [link]
Brooker points out standard news shots and news-speak, relevant to automated anchors.
@jodrellblank Sep 2019 Cites it
on HN thread The Case for Doing Nothing
Pompous boring filler in the house style?[1] Yawn, no thanks. As you say, there are plenty of free outlets of information. What more explanation do you need? “Quality journalism” has its price, and the market doesn’t want to pay for it. Quality software has its price too, but the market prefers Linux. Wait, are you associating “free” with “low quality” or am I? Who can tell with quality these days. One thing’s for sure, it’s a difficult issue. [1] The text equivalent of Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news" segment: [this video]
Compared to text equivalent of the news-style segment.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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