You might be relaxing on your sofa having a cup of hot coffee in chilling weather that suddenly your TV pops up with breaking news. For a moment, you get still, wondering what disaster has occurred. But more often than not, it’s just superfluous information.
Breaking news, a well known interruption in our favorite programs is an integral part of any channel worldwide be it on your TV screens or while watching online news on online TV and it is designed to give viewers the latest information on the event that has just begun or occurred. But it turns out that breaking news does more than just that.
Starting with a flash on the screen, breaking news gives a false impression of something urgent or something terrible regardless of what the inside story is. Many people don’t find the news as significant as the channel seems to show. Then there is manipulation of words, picking up the most striking words from lexicon to make the story look even more important than it actually is. Red strips, moving 3D animations and an intimidating voice of the newscaster, it all adds up to the glamorized breaking news that is largely intended just to draw viewers to their respective channels.
While obviously there are many emergencies that are indeed shown in the breaking news, the information may be erroneous or inadequate since the story has just started to develop, and sometimes giving a false perception of security or relaxation that might eventually lead to an appalling story.
Critics claim that highlighting crime reports leads to a further increase in crimes. There is substantial evidence to prove this and Malcolm Gladwel in his famous book, ‘The Tipping Point’ has mentioned this phenomenon. He shared the research conducted by a social scientist who found that a significant correlation exists between the suicide rates and the amount of coverage of the suicide incidents in the media.
It is therefore imperative that governments should regularize the widespread use of breaking news and should devise a policy to keep a check over them. The term breaking news should be reserved for only the most significant events that have occurred recently, while assigning more moderate terms for any report that is deemed less important or any story that is in continuation of a past event. Else ways, breaking tv news will break feeble hearts and keep on creating disturbance en masse.