We started our news bulletin with a view to do something different. We were quite lucky in getting a story that was easy to manipulate to challenge dominant ideology. The story we had was "Older workers have lost rights battle" and this was basically the story of how the laws in this country do not allow over 65 year olds to claim redundancy payments or unfair dismissal compensations. As most people in this country think that the elderly are just a nuisance, we thought it would be quite effective to take sympathy on the older workers and write in bias of them not in bias of the government as most news bulletins do. We decided also that we would do some kind of opinion from the older workers. We did not know at this point what that would be but it turned out to be a man going out in public getting opinions from the elderly in the public. We also thought that not many of the bulletins, especially the BBC, do public views as they tend to be biased and unprofessional. If they do decide that they are going to do an interview or have a reporter, it will usually be an official, like a governmental official who would give their side of the story. Even if they give the impression of not being biased and delivering the news straight, I really think they favour the government rather than the people when the BBC and others do bulletins. .
Our presentation was also meant to go against the dominant ideology. The dominant ideology for official news bulletins tends to be formally dressed in a plain suit and a tie, good demeanour, for instance he has good posture and is not too imposing, and he speaks well, using a good vocabulary and a very plain, posh accent. All this is used to remove bias and to keep your attention focused on the news itself. The presentation of the background and the studio is also very plain, with earth tone colours and no-one in the studio except the presenter. This is again the avoid distraction and to keep your focus on the news stories.
