PressEthic

Yesterday, many people watched news as it broke live on air. The television monitor in New York University Bobst Library was surrounded by faces, hushed and intent on every word spoken by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and the team of reporters he rapidly flicked between in an attempt to get the latest on the breaking story of a plane crashing into a tower block.

Breaking news ups network ratings – that’s obvious. But what happens when there isn’t any news to break, when competition is tough and when ratings are falling? According to a study presented in 2005 by Andrea Miller and Lesa Hatley-Major from Louisiana State University, it just becomes a matter of definition.

The authors define “Breaking News” as: “hard, unplanned news that takes the newsroom by surprise.” But based on the findings of their study which looked at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, they claim that:

all of the networks were guilty of trying to elicit attention from viewers by passing off planned news events as newly discovered breaking events.

As a result:

we believe television news has redefined breaking news. Television breaking news can be either planned and unplanned, hard or soft news that crosses a newsworthiness threshold based on new content and/or live visuals. Breaking news 1) is reported immediately, 2) contains new information (expected or unexpected) and 3) is most often market-based (chosen to increase ratings).

Unsurprisingly, Fox News came out the worst for "breaking" news that was actually planned; but all three networks were found guilty of running at least double the number of breaking news stories during a sweep month (one of the four months a year that Nielsen Media Research, collects data contributing to their TV ratings statistics).

And it's not hard to see why. You would have thought that a Yankee pitcher’s plane flying into an apartment block in midtown Manhattan could sustain ratings for a while at least. But three hours later, Wolf Blitzer was valiantly plowing on with the breaking story, and hardly anyone was still watching in Bobst library.