On Breakfast the presenting is a little better than that in the regional news programmes, but not much. Interviews with politicians have to be left to Dermot Murnaghan, who if not actually grilling the MPs like Paxman still manages to show how they will avoid giving a straight answer if they possibly can. They manage to get an often varied and impressive list of guests. However sometimes this panders to the situation and many of the guests are 'experts' with rather dubious qualifications such as one medical expert who mispronounced testosterone several times in one sentence. The trouble (and it is not the fault of BBC Breakfast) is that most news in general these days is almost entirely based on hype and hyperbole, so that for example they have to bring in a doctor to reassure the viewers about the latest health scare that eating a apple a day will increase your risk of breast cancer or something equally ridiculous.
The way the news is chosen is interesting as at one point in July 2007 they managed to stick to floods in Britain that killed 4 people for almost the entire running time, while nearly completely ignoring a cyclone in Pakistan that left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. They seem quite happy to repeat the same lack of news every few minutes. When a car was discovered with a bomb inside this was literally the only information that they seemed to have available, along with about 20 seconds of footage that showed a policeman at the scene getting into his car and taking his hat off. This was shown a numerous amount of times throughout the morning and they featured a parade of terrorism experts and the like, none of whom could shed any light whatsoever on the situation or speculate to any degree with so little to go on. Completely pointless, much like the flood coverage which mainly featured various presenters standing around in a puddle every day for weeks while revealing little of interest about the situation.
Mostly BBC Breakfast seems to serve as advertising for other BBC programmes, with many interviews and features focusing on these, giving a biased version of how good these shows are. Some of it is a waste of time - for example having the failed candidates from 'The Apprentice,' who say barely anything they did not say on the extra show presented by Adrian Chiles the night before. Otherwise they seem to think that every viewer is fascinated to know how the latest winner from their musical reality shows is doing, hardly newsworthy. At least the bias means that they do not try to tell us how supposedly hilarious abysmal reality show 'Big Brother' was the night before like many other daytime programmes do ad nauseam.
On a good day, if there is a lot on in the news, this can be watchable and informative, the trouble is those days are few and far between, especially when celebrity gossip such as David Beckham's new hair style seems to be considered front page news. There have also been some improvements in the presenting line-up, giving it more consistency.
Overall though, when it is time to leave for work, you rarely feel like you might be missing something in the last hour worth seeing.
