Breaking News: Radio's Big Lie

Remember the pre-Fox News Alert world? When bulletins were actually news worthy? Now, it seems, breaking news is nothing more than a teaser.

Like a Pavlovian dog, my ears perked up when I heard the phrase “Breaking News” on NYC’s WCBS Newsradio 880 this morning. Actually, the complete phrase was “Breaking News coming up after this…”

What followed was a commercial, then a promo for the TV show “Undercover Boss.” Then came the breaking news.

In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman wrote about the phrase “Now this…” He lamented how reporters (“talking hair-doos”) move from tragedy to trade without giving any story its due.

Now, “Breaking News” has become its polar bookend. Devoid of meaning and dangled like a lure designed to catch the biggest audience share. As a sportsman, I know fish eventually wise up. They learn to differentiate between lures and real bait and move on. If only we could do the same.

McNews You Can Use

This morning, the Internet was buzzing with images of monkeys waiting on customers in a Japanese sake house. I call this type of story Fast News. Much like fast food, which entices us with lesser versions of homemade fare, Fast News tempts us with easy-to-consume facsimiles of real news. After a while, both leave us feeling empty and wanting for more.

Fast News is appearing everywhere we look and unfortunately many confuse ubiquity with quality, and availability with desire.

In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman maintained that Morse’s telegraph, which removed time and distance issues from the information-sharing process, “erased state lines” and “collapsed regions.” This happened, Postman wrote, at a “considerable cost.”

Postman quotes Henry David Thoreau, who stated in “Walden” that “We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

In other words, just because we can share information almost instantly over a great many miles, does not mean this information is necessarily worth sharing.

Yet the purveyors of Fast News share away, one after the other. Monkey see, monkey do.