What you saw on television was the man behind the scenes. He was loved by everyone in the newsroom."We extend our deepest sympathies to Roscoe's partner Gray [Bolte] and his family."

The director of Seven News, Sydney, Chris Willis, paid tribute to Ross: "We all loved Roscoe. He was the consummate newsman and a wonderful human being. He had incredibly high professional standards and could be a tough task master. He led our news brilliantly in the time he was here."He was also great fun to work with. He was serious about his job, but didn't take himself too seriously and frequently entertained the newsroom with jokes at his own expense. We will all treasure our memories of Roscoe."Earlier this year Ross, who had retired from the Seven network in 2009, told Fairfax Media he learnt of the cancer after a routine trip to the doctor.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/television-newsreader-ian-ross-dead-at-73-20140430-37gj8.html#ixzz30Pba3CQF

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Vale Roscoe... News reading may sound a bit boring or easy. But news-readers are a special breed of people very carefully chosen by TV channels. 

The death of Ian Ross, Newsreader for Channel Seven for years till 2009 highlights the illusion that it was only yesterday that Ian was reading the news on that channel... Of course I could claim a bit of memory loss, time gets fuzzier with the passing of time and old age but Ian Ross was a gentleman on TV as well as in private life, we are told. I did this cartoon of Ian, in 2005, with a hosts of other news reader characters to illustrate how "news" is manipulated to serve a perception of consumables on behalf of media barons. 
News reading is tricky. One appears every night in your lounge room and one needs to be trusted with the delivery of news — mostly bad stuff, including car crashes — and the way the news is "written" for the spoken word is very important. At one stage I was complaining about the ABC-news which was making puns all the time, stealing bread and butter from comics and cartoonists. That was after RM... Who could not trust Richard Morecroft?... He was top of the heap then, till he got retired early "because he was not a journalist", I believe.

Recently I enjoyed the Hugh Riminton little quip about the royal visitors by the end of the saturation coverage... as replayed on Media Watch:

Even Australia’s more serious TV journalists, like Ten’s Hugh Riminton, were roped into this daily catwalk commentary and copy-Kate culture. 

“HUGH RIMINTON: ... Diane von Furstenburg, Roksanda Ilincic, they’re hard names to say but they are easy clothes to wear, apparently. People in the know have been gazing lovingly at the Duchess of Cambridge’s outfits. She’s been known to step out in plain, old Zara as well, so we’re told. But anyway, at the insistence of some of my colleagues here on the late news, here is another look at Kate’s look ... 

HUGH RIMINTON: ... believe me I have a gun to my head as I deliver all of this stuff. We wish you a safe and happy Easter break, thanks very much for watching, have a great weekend.

 

— Channel Ten, Late News, 17th April, 2014”


Despite Channel Ten being in financial hell, its personnel and programming are still very good for TV, except its atrocious Bolt Report which tends to tone the whole thing down... But then, that's life. One could say that news readers are not supposed to "comment" on the news, but the choice of items and of political protagonists, plus the writing style of the piece can be a discreet (no so discreet) comment...

As well, the source of information plays a big part, is already pre-munched in press release format or "press conferences" designed to frame the news, comes from overseas agencies that have their own agenda for bashing something. For example the news in the west about Russia and Kiev is heavily slanted. We portray NATO as the defender of Kiev when doing army manoeuvres in Poland, while the Russians are painted as the bad guys for doing the same thing IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY... And it's not even a case of the chicken of the egg... The West started along time ago using the "mafia" elements in Kiev to undermine "democracy" in that country...

Meanwhile, the idea of sanctions against the Russians for whatever they are doing is not really palatable with a lot of Germans. Nor is Russia deserving of its "FFF-" financial junk-status from the US rating agencies (as punishment of course), considering that Russia has little debts and cashes in with its state operations such as Gazprom. For example it would make sense that all mining in Australia be ventures between the federal government and private enterprise. That would solve the non-existent budget crisis in a flash... But our present CONservative masters are hell-bent on a format of private self-assisted suicide for this country... all coming with imperial honours... for gallantly digging a trench in which many of us will die.