MMM: Breaking news in a Sept. 12 world

Last week, I was putting in 45 minutes on the elliptical machine at the club and half-assedly monitoring the bank of TV screens above my noggin when ESPN News flashed a bright red "BREAKING NEWS" graphic along their crawl. The "breaking news" that followed was that Larry Brown had been named head coach of the Charlotte Bobcats.

Funny thing, though -- I'd heard that exact same story four hours earlier, on ESPN Radio, no less! If news is at least four hours old, and it's been reported on one of your own media platforms, how exactly is it "breaking" news?

This has been a pet peeve of mine for awhile, going back at least to the time when TV news directors started lining up with the "if it bleeds, it leads" crowd in an effort to drive ratings. Time and again, I'd see the "BREAKING NEWS" graphic on screen, only to be shown a car chase along an LA freeway, or a house fire in a distant suburb.

For me, there are two types of misleading done by these media charlatans. In the case of Larry Brown's hiring, it was certainly news, but it certainly was not breaking -- at least, not four hours after it had been first reported. And in the case of the car chase or the house fire, it certainly was breaking, but was it news? That is to say, if it hadn't been going on during the half-hour newscast, would they break into programming to report on it, or even report on it at all in a later telecast?

This really started to irk me in the months after 9/11. I was working in the Internet news world at the time, and we kept a constant vigil on the various cable news networks to make sure we had wire copy on our site whenever a new development in the search-and-recover efforts arose, or a new threat had been uncovered. Our heartbeats would race whenever one of these networks splashed a "BREAKING NEWS" graphic on the screen, and in the wake of that horrible day, most of them were very responsible in limiting the use of that ploy to when they actually had something both newsworthy and timely to report.

However, it wasn't long before big media went back to their typically sensationalist ways. Soon, it felt like they were using me, playing on the raw nerves still exposed in the months after the towers fell to pimp their latest non-scandal scandal. They knew that, like Pavlov's dogs, all they had to do was ring the bell and flash "BREAKING NEWS" and I'd fly to the screen at full attention to hear what they had to report.

Sadly enough, that ploy even crept into the advertising world. I specifically recall a TV commercial that aired in late 2001, with two fake news anchors breathlessly stating, "We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this breaking news ..." only to find out the "news" was a big sale at the local auto dealership. Given that we'd just spent a couple months living in fear of a follow-up terrorist attack, and that the news organizations actually did report on 9/11 and the ensuing developments in this very way, this type of ad was craven at best and positively cruel at worst. And the suits at the TV stations who accepted this kind of ad in the months after 9/11 ... well, there's a special place in Hell reserved for them.

Which brings me back to ESPN News. Sure, their "news" isn't as serious as a terrorist attack or an anthrax scare, but given that ESPN reports solely on the sports world, shouldn't the "BREAKING NEWS" tag be saved for something that's actually breaking, and actually news, at least in the context of the sports world? If you cry wolf often enough, you won't be able to reach your audience when you actually have something newsworthy to report. And I probably won't bat an eye the next time I see the bright red graphic on ESPN News.

Then again, we're talking about a network that invested hours upon hours of SportsCenter to determine "Who's Now?" so nothing they do should surprise me anymore.