ABSTRACT
A number of observers have noted the ‘sameness’ of the news from day to day in terms of structure, content and presentation. Newspaper reporting has been criticised by Rock for its ritualised and cyclical nature which conveys an impression of occurrences-and societyas ‘eternal recurrence’ with no grand design.1 Frayn has parodied the formal bureaucratic nature of news production as well as the less formal interpretative rules, imagining a computerised system of news production which would break ‘its last residual connection with the raw, messy, offendable real world’.2
