I've sometimes stumbled across newscasts from the 70's that are available on the publicly run Danish broadcast station (it's like the BBC) and really noticed the difference. The news would contain maybe 4 or 5 stories spread across an hour. The anchor would spend 10 minutes explaining the current political situation in Russia, and have a 10 minute interview with the foreign minister about how this would impact the country. The people interviewed actually got to tell us their opinion instead of speaking in soundbites. Very different to todays news.
I think that's more of a US news thing. I still remember getting my first broken tiny TV in the US, which only got one channel. I had been out of the news loop for a few weeks at the time, literally just a few weeks of the plane. So I park myself in front of the TV to get some news.<p>First the local news, OK they do call it local so I'm not too surprised there's no world news, they do keep adverting this "nightly news" that's coming up. OK the nightly news... hmmm... doesn't seem like news more like infotainment, aaand it' over. I still have no idea what happened in the world today. But hey adds for another news block at 10pm, I guess I'll stay up for that. Oh but it's local again and I get a "world news minute".<p>Bizarrely not only do I have no idea what happened in the world today, but I didn't even hear much about US issues, certainly almost nothing about US foreign policy. Shockingly I got A LOT more information on the news behind the iron curtain when it was still up!<p>So yeah, there's no such thing as TV news in the US. But other places in the world have news. The Irish Times is a good paper for people who can only read English.
News as a concept doesn't make a lot of sense for educational purposes. It represents only a thin time slice of the most recent events - dust on the microfilm of history. It is far more informative to study the past, all the events that brought the world (or some part of it) to its current state. This will provide a more complete understanding, even if you are ignorant of the events of the last few months.
The programme as shown is here (with this speech in its original context about 1'30'' in): <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm4GiyyVKQQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm4GiyyVKQQ</a>