"Breaking News" not so "breaking" nor "news", but what else is new?

There was a time when the words "Breaking News!!" constituted an abrupt stop to what one was doing; whether it was chatting with a friend on the phone, making dinner, doing the ordinary minutiae that is a part of life, until that once mysterious, often brooding bulletin darted across your flat screen TV.

Until now.

Leave it to the cablers to destroy another institution; welcome to the new world "breaking news", which 99% of the time now is nothing more than repeated "updates" of "news" that took place many minutes and hours ago, at best.

Fox News is the worst at this practice; over at Rupert's palace they call 'em a "Fox News 'alert", and they conveniently always seem to occur at the beginning of a Greta Van Susteran "On the Record show or Geraldo Rivera, whose baritone "THIS IS A 'FOX NEWS ALERT" lately amounts to nothing more than a cable version of a National Enquirer headline.

Fox is not alone.

CNN and its stable of hosts are prone to the irritating use of "We have 'Breaking News"; Wolf Blitzer is a fine journalist and does good, solid work, but does it not seem much too coincidental that many a time, his "Situation Room" opens rather prominently with "Breaking News?", which, again, is nothing more than a re-hash of a presidential press conference, or say, the latest "developments" in the Gulf of Mexico disaster, for example.

True "Breaking News" is just that, news that has taken place, something profound that necessitates breaking into regularly scheduled programming. 9/11, for example, a natural disaster, the earthquake in Haiti, an assassination of a president, something entirely worthy and legitimate of real "news alerts" and bulletins.

Now, thanks to the continued commercialization of when and where we get our news, and the outlets that have marginalized what is really genuine "breaking" news content, "Breaking News" and "News Alerts" don't have the same residue of importance and significance as they did in the past. Now they are mere innocuous audio crawls that shoud be at the bottom screen, if at all.

Wonder what Cronkite would think about all this?

Never mind.

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