Over the past few months I've noticed that news reports have increasingly been prefaced with "Breaking News!" That seems to be the Phrase of the Month so far. But isn't every new bit of news "breaking" in some sense?
One of our local news stations persists in beginning stories with "Police report an incident at 123 Main Street, shown here on our Pinpoint News Tracker...", at which point a poorly detailed map of the area is shown. The map itself is so indistinct that even if you lived next door to the incident, you'd never know how to find it.
In the midwest we've been hearing "breaking news" for a long time now. It is an interesting phrase, though, and this is what Wikipedia says about it:
quote:
Today, the term "breaking news" has become trite as commercial broadcasting United States cable news services that are available 24-hours a day use live satellite technology to bring current events into consumers' homes as the event occurs. Events that used to take hours or days to become common knowledge in towns or in nations are fed instantaneously to consumers via radio, television, mobile phone, and the Internet.
The "Breaking News" ticker is a permanent feature of Sky News (a Murdoch channel). Its use makes some sense when the story is new (and/or important) but often it is several hours old and they are still calling it "breaking".
There is a large plasma screen in the lobby at work which is always tuned to Sky News, with the sound off and closed captions on. What with the "Breaking News", the closed captions, and often another news ticker, it is difficult to see the screen sometimes under all the text, let alone read the three competing stories at once. Real information overload.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Perhaps they need to hire Tom Broke-aw? And what's this crap about calling me a news "consumer!?!?!?" Only in a loosely metaphoric sense does one consume that which touches one's senses.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti
Heck, I even get breaking news on my iPhone. Today it was about our ex-governor getting 14 years in jail. Personally, I think that was too much, but then who am I to know. Someone made the point that Michael Jackson's physician only got 4 years for killing Michael, thus thinking that Blogo's sentence was too high. I have to agree with that. I wonder how many years the Penn State assistant coach will get for raping all those boys. Probably less than Blago. I don't think we have our priorities straight here in the U.S.
BTW, that's 4 convicted governors out of the last 9...
