BREAKING NEWS! Faith Salie has something to say about "Breaking News"
If you're just joining us, I'm covering some BREAKING NEWS! You know news is breaking, because I'm telling you so, and I might touch my ear piece like this, and it's also important you read "BREAKING NEWS" right there on the corner of the screen.
And if you turn the channel to any other cable news outlet, you're going to see the same thing, SO DON'T LOOK AWAY FROM OUR BREAKING NEWS TO THEIR BREAKING NEWS!
According to CNN and MSNBC and Fox, everything is important right now (which means, nothing is important). It's like the boy who cried wolf (Blitzer).
Breaking news is not a new angle on an ongoing story. It's not that the President tweeted. And sadly, it's not that 45 million Americans are under the threat of extreme weather.
Historically, breaking news meant a trusted broadcaster interrupted a program with an urgent report of something everyone should know. This happened rarely, and we snapped to attention, because some man was making "As the World Turns" stop turning.
Then cable news was born – and 24-hour channels need news all the time.
But now that we can get stories with the swipe of a thumb from social and digital media, cable news begs for our eyeballs by breaking stuff.
Call it "Special Report" or "Happening Now" or "Just In" – we're not fooled. We're just too tired to change the channel.
Breaking news is not fake news but fake urgency. This discredits journalism. At a time when our press is under assault, a great way to up the cred of the Fourth Estate would be to discriminate in how it delivers its stories.
We're hungry for depth, not drama.
We can all agree on this: if something keeps "breaking" all the time, it's broken.
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Story produced by Young Kim.
