“This just in: A large sinkhole formed this morning on a street in downtown Atlanta. Police are looking into it.”
Well, it seems that the bogus “breaking news” epidemic has, at least for NBC anchor Brian Williams, reached its breaking point.
Since that Malaysian Airlines jet with 239 on board went missing on March 8th, CNN and its sibling Headline News have clung to this story as if their shot-callers made a conscious, desperate decision to bleed it dry, to advance it every hour as fresh, “breaking news” when there’s nothing new to report other than that there’s nothing new to report.
So CNN would just throw it back in the mixer, add a few more eggs, beat it, refry it, hit it with more Tabasco then serve it as new dish of hot news.
It seems that anyone who has ever entered an airport — or driven past one — has been presented by CNN as an aeronautical expert with a credible opinion as to what happened to Flight 370, where the craft might be and in how many pieces.
Additionally, anyone who has ever been served a stale roll on a commercial flight has been leaned on by CNN to provide their take on global terrorism as it relates to airport security.
Clearly, NBC had enough. On its April 7th “Nightly News,” at the very top, Williams said this, almost certainly targeting CNN:
“It has now been one month since Flight 370 has been heard from, and while the cable news coverage has called it ‘breaking news’ for 30-plus days, the first real break came at midday, Monday, in Australia, with word that the underwater sound that vessels are picking up are consistent with the sounds of the submerged beacon from an underwater jet liner.”
Never heard anything like that, before. A national news anchor, in his lead sentence, taking a barroom swing at competitors for loading up on nonsense.
Did it belong there? Was it professional? Might Williams have made that point a little later, a little lower? Might he have skipped it, altogether? Don’t NBC news affiliates push old news and no news as “breaking news”?
Sure. But everyone, including prominent news anchors, has a breaking point, and it sure sounded as if CNN had pushed Williams past his. As astonished as I was to hear what I heard, it was pleasing to the visceral senses – a good smack to the chops of those who, every day for a month, had been asking for it!
*
Dept. of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: On March 17, a federal judge in Chicago sentenced career TV infomercial scammer Kevin Trudeau to 10 years in prison for fraud. Judge Ronald Guzman called Trudeau — seller of get-rich/get-cured/get-thin-quick schemes — “deceitful to the core.” Slam!
Well, that should have been that. All the TV networks and channels that for years cashed Trudeau’s checks in exchange for allowing him to prey on their vulnerable viewers would have to find the next big-time TV scammer with whom to split the take.
But on the morning of April 13, 27 days after Trudeau was imprisoned, there he was, pre-recorded, selling easy-money on Viacom-owned, national Spike TV. Apparently, the programmers at Spike didn’t know or didn’t care.
Ah, but Trudeau, who lived in mansions and drove gilded chariots, went to prison broke. He has no money to pay Spike for his TV time, not unless Spike is willing to garnish his prison salary, which, if he finds work on the inside, won’t be much.
As for those who may have called the “Operators” who were “standing by” to accept their orders so that Trudeau could make them rich, well, perhaps they’d instead be interested in a nice pair of personalized, Illinois license plates.
(Thanks to reader and early-riser Dominick LaVarco for the heads-up on this.)