Breaking-News Mania

Life is not as chaotic and rush as it appears in our breaking-news-centric electronic media.

For me, watching news has always been a funny and painful experience. I don’t wish to quote tons of research deliberating how attending to the news has been dangerous to our emotive and aesthetic sensibilities. I am taking this perspective at the vantage point of me-as-the-recipient of the news. I am at the receiving end of the frenzy and madness what constitutes the culture of breaking-news in media across the globe. Here, I switch to the news channel, and here I start listening to something ‘extraordinary’ happening in the world. I often contemplate does the world really under flux or media has made it so?

Mark Twain takes jib at the news industry when he says, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” A veteran journalist from Pakistan, Muhammad Ziauddin is reported to joke about media in the following words:

In the media industry, quite often, the news is broken not to give information or to expose some wrongdoings; but that is disseminated to hide the actual news and wrongdoings of severer and more sinister kinds than the flashy but empty headlines received by newspaper readers in the morning.

Nevertheless, a piece of news may or may not give us news, but surely, in many ways, it twists, hides, or distorts some other information- maybe more valuable than the one disseminated through newspaper or news channels. There are deliberate concealment, forced closure, prejudicial publishing policies, and influence of interest groups in the form of advertisements at play in the news industry. Quite often, news that happens on the ground invariably is the not same that is aired through news channel and broadcasted through handsome and properly trimmed news anchor. The details may change when the news route from news reporter to media manager, news editors, and channels owners and ultimately land before the news anchors to be disseminated with the world.

Why does the media lead towards a breaking-news mania? Or what makes news channels tend towards the race of breaking-news syndrome? Why does the chaotic news make a bombastic impact? Is that inherent to the news that bad news is great audience-puller? Does this imply that the world is a cool and calm place and all the negativity and chaos is because of breaking-news culture at media?

The emergence of media is not all that bad. Evolutionary researchers surmise that our core ability to learn a language came from our ability to engage in gossip. And gossip was integral to the social life of early hunter-gatherer societies. Gossip is a kind of social oxygen for biological being. Over time, engaging in gossip evolved into a system, known as media, the fourth pillar of the state. We can’t blame evolution to take that kind of turn as we can’t do the same on a number of other evolutionary development in human society.

But this gossip-loving appetite has taken an unhealthy turn- the developing and disseminating of breaking-news culture. Now, whenever we switch on our TV, from down deep in our conscious, we are expecting some sort of breaking news. If there is no breaking news, we got sad; we keep changing channels unless we get some. And if we are not lucky to get breaking news, we switch towards entertainment or sports channel or switch off altogether. This suggests we take only breaking-news serious enough to pay attention to.

And behold, when there is breaking news on the TV channel, we become attentive, and focused. Our attitude suggests that something big, extraordinary is going to happen. We have become accustomed to equating life with that moment of chaos, a moment of rush we happen to see through breaking-news. This perpetuates an unending circle of chaos and pessimism- right from the place of news to the land of our minds.

Listening to news is natural to gossip-lover humans, but craving for breaking-news is not healthy in any way.