Breaking News

"Breaking News"  The other day CNN breathlessly announced that they had exclusive leaked information about a security briefing where it was revealed that intelligence sources had unverified accusations about Donald Trump.  Unverified salacious accusations.  Black mail worthy videos that the Russians had in their possession.  CNN announcers were careful to stipulate that these murky allegations were unverified, but the tone and urgency of the announcement was the same as if reporting a plane crash.
  Soon, other news stations were picking-up this story.  Before you could say "WTF?" speculation on the likelihood of Trump's carnal misdeeds while in Moscow being caught on camera were the fodder for talk shows and pundit programs.  In a press conference this week, Trump denied everything, of course.  He also refused to take any questions from the CNN reporter because he "worked for a fake news organization."

On this issue, I agree with The President-elect.  Unverified allegations are not "Breaking News." They are not "News" at all.  CNN editors, Wolf Blitzer and the other talking heads who promulgated this story should be fired.

This raises another raft of annoyances about the so-called News industry.

Weather fatigue.  Why is ordinary winter weather covered as News?  I can understand why local stations might want to cover weather-related human interest stories,(bloody crashes, families burned-out of their homes in icy weather with firemen frozen to their hoses, etc.)   and local storm warnings can be useful to viewers especially fishermen and people looking for information about school closings.  But if you watch TV news on an ordinary winter day, at least a third of the time is spent watching a weatherperson standing in front of a map, yakking about isobars and windchills. Sorry, but seasonal weather is not news and it is certainly not entertaining.  Most annoying are the clever interactions of the news readers and the weather person as they try to fill time.    Worse, on the evening news programs we are forced to waste time watching footage weather related highway accidents in South Dakota. Yup, roads get slippery in winter.

What happened to the Weather Channel, where you could go and check to see if your upcoming trip or event would be affected by the weather?

The Crawl.  Another annoying feature of cable news is that stupid linear crawl of information that runs at the bottom of the screen while you are listening to other Breaking News, trying to read the captions and also seeing loops of  old file footage  of Osam Bin Laden brandishing an Uzi because they have no relevant new video.

"A story you heard first on our station."  For some reason, news editors think that we care who broke the story.  99% of the time, the exclusive story could easily be covered by this script: "We are first on the scene here in ______ where police are investigating something.  We don't know what happened and  in fact cannot answer any of the who what when where questions of traditional journalism.  But we wanted to show you some video of us standing in front of a building.  Complete story at nine when everyone will be reporting the same story.."