The constant use of “breaking news” in mainstream media is just one of many signs of the decline of the media’s quality.
Today, I decided to watch CBC News. When I flicked on the TV, I was greeted with a banner that said “BREAKING NEWS: Mark Carney to Hold Press Conference”. When they went to commercial break, the graphics flashed “BREAKING NEWS” and “LIVE” (in media circles, we call those graphics a “toss to break”). When CBC came back from break, the same graphics flash up “BREAKING NEWS” and “LIVE”. This before the network went on to air a normal news cast. A banner popped up at some point that said “BREAKING NEWS: Conservative Party Future”.
The whole cast was like that. BREAKING NEWS, BREAKING NEWS, BREAKING NEWS. If there was any space to put it in, the CBC slaps “BREAKING NEWS” in there. To make matters worse, the anchors generally have a habit of leading with the phrase “breaking news” on top of it all. What I saw today was by no means an anomaly. It is what I see every day. Even the advertisements have anchors saying “BREAKING NEWS”.
To be fair, the CBC is far from alone in this crime of misusing “breaking news” (yes, it is a gross and disgusting misuse of the phrase). Other media outlets have a habit of jamming “breaking news” into everything. For those who haven’t lived through the 90’s and early 2000’s, this may just be something the mainstream media broadcast news does. For some, it’s probably just a habit that the media does and it may be difficult to really understand the context behind it.
For people like myself who did live through the 90’s and early 2000’s, however, there is a lot of context behind this phrase. In fact, it is one of the more obvious signs of just how far mainstream media has sunk over the years in terms of quality.
Back in the day, “breaking news” actually meant something. Generally speaking, people working the news reserved the phrase “breaking news” for major actual breaking news stories. For instance, a massive earthquake that kills over 1,000 people. That is breaking news. Another example is a helicopter crash that kills a big city mayor. That would be breaking news. A third example might be a wildfire that destroys thousands of homes and kills hundreds. That could very well be breaking news.
Breaking news is a phrase that was reserved for the biggest stories. If a lot of people were killed by a natural disaster or someone important was killed, then that would fall under the “breaking news” banner. So, when “breaking news” popped up on people’s television, something huge clearly happened and it caused people to pay attention.
Unfortunately, as most of us know, mainstream media’s quality has degraded over the years. It became a product to be packaged and sold for a profit rather than something that was actually a public good. Marketers, somewhere along the line, looked at the phrase “breaking news” and realized that this was how you get people to pay attention. So, as seemingly the logic goes, if you put it in more parts of a news cast, more people will pay attention.
The enshittification of mainstream broadcast news was already under way and that was one of the ways mainstream media degraded in quality. The phrase “breaking news” was increasingly slapped onto more innocuous stories such as the Prime Minister holding a press conference. In other cases, “breaking news” was slapped onto other mundane stories such as Statistics Canada releasing data on the population of Canada. As time went on, things got worse and worse.
Eventually, graphics coming out of break all had “BREAKING NEWS” splashed over it even though nothing really huge was happening. Broadcasters were so lazy that they even slapped “BREAKING NEWS” just before a commercial break as well. So, when a story does break that would actually fall under the category as actual “breaking news”, the phrase itself doesn’t mean anything and the story itself ends up selling itself that rather than the phrase.
That’s how we got here today. The phrase “breaking news” has devolved to a meaningless cheap marketing gimmick by mainstream media. It’s a phrase that mainstream media just slaps everywhere because they feel that more people will pay attention thanks to the two magical words. This despite the fact that it is a huge turn off to a lot of people now.
There are things in the past that I think are best left in the past, but this is one system I wish was brought back. If a story is absolutely huge, then it gets associated with the phrase “breaking news”. Other stories, like the Prime Minister holding a press conference (which is a regular thing), should just be labelled as the regular story that it is: not “breaking news”. I know that’s not going to happen and the mainstream media will continue to abuse that phrase for many years to come, but it’s just one of the many ways mainstream media has lost the plot in running a proper news organization.
