BREAKING NEWS!

For years I’ve ranted about local tv stations interrupting regular scheduling for what they call “Breaking News.” They too often consider what I think is trivial news for their break-in. Why can’t it wait for regular news coverage? Why must a new fire near Flagstaff require us to know about it and to watch the flames? Or a car chase in downtown Phoenix? Or Kim Davis hugging the Pope? Some news is important enough for such breaking interruption, like the recent shootings in Oregon. But most of it isn’t. I remember when John F. Kennedy Jr’s plane went missing in 1999. He and his wife and his wife’s sister were on their way to Hyannis Port and Martha’s Vineyard for a wedding of one of his cousins. He was the pilot and they were supposed to arrive sometime late at night, but as of the following morning nothing had been heard of them. I’m not an insensitive person. I feel for the death of any person, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind,” as John Donne put t four centuries ago. But I feel that the news people are a bit ghoulish when it comes to news of important people dying or missing. I could just imagine them the next morning when the news first broke about the leading figure in America’s royal family. They must have been washing their hands and nearly salivating over the meal that lay before them. Things to do, old Kennedy film to round up, people to interview, clever commentary to write. So they took over the air for nearly the entire day, hashing and rehashing the same facts and details. They interviewed the JFK biographer; they interviewed Barbara Walters; they had the ABC aviation editor on to tell us all about the kind of plane Kennedy was flying and how it worked and what it looked like and other details we really had no need for. They brought in yards of old Kennedy film, most of which was unrelated to anything except the Kenned mythology, even that old chestnut when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you.” We watched several times the footage of JFK Jr. announcing the start of his magazine George. We watched minute after minute of aerial shots of the open sea out from Martha’s Vineyard. We learned about the locator box designed to be triggered on impact, sending out a signal to rescuers. They went back and forth from one reporter to another, each looking more and more smug as he or she reported his or her particular tidbit of Kennedy background. It always strikes me that reporters try to report too much. They always claim the public’s right to know. But does the public have to know EVERYTHING about a story? They cover a bloody homicide and go into peripheral details the public not only doesn’t need to know, doesn’t care to know. They cover a horrific accident and then interview virtually everyone who ever knew anything at all about the victims. With the Kennedy story I kept checking to see how long they’d keep at it and if went on all day and into the night. You can plow the same ground only so many times before the crop fails.