Time to give up.

[Workingman]

Everything on the "News" is the same old crap that we heard days go. All the articles telling us how to cope, prepare, live with, minimise, clean, wash hands and so on have been done to death. The government's daily briefings are the same. Give it a rest. When there is something new to say put it on all channels at the same time - a public broadcast... or put out a communique, then sod off.

We get it. There is a crisis and rules to follow. Make the rules plain and simple - do this, do not do that - and if people do not follow them then: shoot them.

But please, please, stop the daily drip feed of the same old, same old.

[cruiser2]

As you say, the same old news.

No mention of stabbings, fires, serious road accidents.

Why show tourists stranded and wanting free flights home. They nknew the risks when they went. Someone from Yorkshire went to Australia after their house was flooded earlier this year. Now they want a free trip home.

Why should I pay for them not staying close to their house.

[cromwell]

Everything on the "News" is the same old crap that we heard days go. All the articles telling us how to cope, prepare, live with, minimise, clean, wash hands and so on have been done to death.

I though it would be like this. Which is why I stopped watching the news!
Honestly, when the BBC put that two hour long "Coronavirus update" program on, I thought I can see how this is going to go.
Cruiser, the only reason I can think that people would go on holidays like that is that they had bought and paid for the holidays and decided to chance it.

[medsec222]

Travel agents were still saying only a few weeks ago that there were plenty of holidays to other destinations available at good prices. Why would anyone want to go but I expect some people did.

[Suff]

For every discerning viewer, there is a feature built into every TV.

It is called the off button.

There is another saying in the scientific community. Madness is doing exactly the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result.

Why watch?

Travel agencies???

Witness the 500 people who arrived in France after the lockdown to go for a skiing holiday... My cousin had to sort that mess out.

The travel agencies are facing bankruptcy. They are going to take anything they can get. I have first hand experience of this, selling flights which they know are already cancelled, or are scheduled to be cancelled, then refusing to refund the money for 30 days.

As for people demanding to go home? Many people left before the lockdowns for reasonable reasons. They were being told that there would be no lockdown, so they thought it would be OK. Had they engaged the pint of mush between their ears, they might not have done so.

However the situation has descended into total chaos in many countries since the lockdown, meaning it is now impossible to even reach the airports in which the relief flights are being flown into.

My son was on an Air France flight, specifically put on as a repatriation flight. It flew in with Argentinian citizens and it flew out with other nationals who require to go home. Nobody went anywhere without either going home or a follow on repatriation flight. I bought and lost, a £230 ticket from Paris to London so my son could get on his flight. Many people don't have the resources to do what has to be done.

I had to buy my son a £10,000 private flight to get him out of what they call the "interior" in Argentina. If I had not done so, the two AF repatriation flights would have flown without him.

The American who was driving him to BA decided, when his flight out of BA was cancelled, that he would drive to Chile and fly out of there. Because he had heard that America was doing emergency flights from Santiago. He was told not to go, but would not listen. He was turned back at the border and has spent every night since in jail, to be let out in the morning, because he doesn't speak Spanish and he could not explain himself to interior police who don't speak English and because Argentinian hotels in the interior are refusing to take international guests.

If he had listened to my son he'd have saved me a lot of money and actually reached BA. It turns out that the police, when my son got his lost passport papers, was put down, by the local police, as Argentinian because they didn't believe he was British because they could not believe anyone spoke colloquial Argentinian Spanish with a perfect accent who was not Argentinian. Most travellers do not have that advantage.

So whilst I do agree that people can't just demand that the government "fixes" their mess, we also can't just leave them in country, cut off from finance and shelter, with no way of getting to the international airports from which the flights are going. Especially with accommodation prices hitting stratospheric prices.

It also appears that some airlines are profiteering in these difficult times. £40,000 for a flight out of NZ??

The Embassy told me there were several thousand UK citizens in Argentina at the time of the lockdown, many of them backpackers who had been in the country quite some time.

[Workingman]

For every discerning viewer, there is a feature built into every TV.

It is called the off button.

There is another saying in the scientific community. Madness is doing exactly the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result.

Why watch?

We don't, that's my point!

Yet all the channels have nightly "specials" all saying the same thing when they should be entertaining us and taking our minds off things - if only for a short while. It is cheap shot TV to fill a slot in the schedule but serves no useful purpose. So the discerning viewer has to flip from channel to channel.

[cromwell]

One thing the media do need to drop is the "It's all the government's fault" routine.
Why haven't you.... And so on.
Why hasn't the government got a magic pill to cure everything?
Because four months since no one knew this existed perhaps?

[Suff]

This discerning viewer has a Freesat recorder box, a Netflix account and the internet to amuse. Plus all the folks here.

So broadcast TV is something which is dipped into very occasionally and _never_ for the news outside of an election.

So, I must admit, it doesn't affect me. Perhaps if they were able to discern people who were turning away, they might stop it. Well, OK, that was a false hope, but that is about what we have.

As I'm isolating, I have my 32" PC monitor (the one I take away with me), connected to my laptop and my FireTV connected to that also. I switch between the inputs to talk to people or to watch stuff. As I have a rather large library of DVD's, half of which are ripped to my server, I have a big catalogue of media and several TV boxsets to watch through. Along with bringing my son up to date with 15 years of technology changes since he went to Argentina to live.

I shall content myself with the Google News portal and ignoring the shrieking press for the more staid articles.

[jenniren]

One thing the media do need to drop is the "It's all the government's fault" routine.
Why haven't you.... And so on.
Why hasn't the government got a magic pill to cure everything?
Because four months since no one knew this existed perhaps?

Absolutely agree Crommers, this is not the time for the blame game.

Personally I do like to watch the 5pm briefing to keep up with the latest developments/advice etc, it's 30mins out of my day, time I'm prepared to give. I do agree sitting watching news programmes all day would be very depressing, but as has been said there is an on/off switch. There are lots of other entertaining programmes/films on offer if watching tv all day is your thing.

[medsec222]

I am beginning to get very concerned when I see reports from other countries where the medical staff are equipped with heavy duty protective gear. I saw one clip on television earlier on today when a UK nurse was testing a patient in a plastic apron which blew over her head in the wind. My heart sank when I saw it.