News or Olds

I keep wondering why the local news stations interrupt regular programming for what they call breaking news, and do so often within twenty or thirty minutes of the regularly scheduled news. It may be the report of a forest fire near Flagstaff or a car chase in Scottsdale or a near drowning of a child in a backyard pool in Mesa. But couldn’t it wait for the regular news program? And too often they insist on reporting things I don’t consider news, like every damn house that catches fire in the Valley. Why do we need to know about every one of them? We get this shot of a burned out shell of a house, usually the second floor especially blackened and an estimate of the damage. Or the gruesome fact that three small children were found dead upstairs, or an old man or woman, and often that the cause of the fire was children playing with matches, or the old man or woman smoking in bed or on a sofa and falling asleep . . . never to wake up. And automobile accidents, and stabbings on X Street, and drive by shootings on Y Avenue. Surely there must be stories more newsworthy than just death and mayhem. Why not the man who just donated his 200th pint of blood? Why not the woman who works for the phone company and saved a family of starlings who had taken up residence in one of their transformers? I realize these are all human interest stories and not really timely (chronos, chronicle, time, thus news). Would yesterday’s news be olds? So why not have some olds on our news? And what restricts the news to bad news? Why not good news? Or at least news that avoids the gruesome?