Breaking News
07/14/2025

Back in the early days of the 20th century, newspapers would publish special editions of breaking news. And newsboys, standing on the corner, would cry out “Extra, extra, read all about it!”

Today, of course, we can get news almost as soon as it happens, but I have to wonder what such immediacy has done to the news business.
Let’s take a look at one recent event to see how it was reported.
When the United States launched its air attack against Iran, that was certainly breaking news. Television networks broke into regular programming with screens that said, “Breaking News,” or “News Alert.”

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Unfortunately, television executives seem to think there has to be a continual series of breaking news events. So three and four days later, news networks still had what’s called a crawl going cross the bottom of the screen with the words, “Breaking News: U.S. Bombs Iranian nuclear facility.”
But three days after the basic event, it is no longer breaking news.

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Then there were the reporters “on the scene” telling us there had been a bombing. They didn’t know how much damage and they didn’t know the diplomatic fallout, so they gave us hour upon hour of speculation:
Here’s how we think the Iranians might, or might not, react. The Israelis might do this, or they might do that. The weapons sites were obliterated, or maybe they weren’t. The enrichment program was set back years, or maybe just months, or maybe not at all. And all of that processed uranium was trucked away weeks ago, or maybe it was buried in the rubble.
I really have to wonder, why the news networks can’t just give us the facts as they are known, and then go on to something else.
Reporters could spend the next hour of the news cycle gathering more information, report it at the top of the hour, then go back to gathering more information while the network anchor goes on to the next story.
Here’s some actual facts about the bombing I didn’t see covered anywhere: we heard “centrifuges” quite a bit. But what are they, and what do they actually do?

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We heard the Iranians were building nuclear bombs. Were those atomic bombs or hydrogen bombs, and what’s the difference?
You know, a nuclear weapon is pretty much useless without a delivery system. Do the Iranians have a ballistic missile, a specialized airplane, or could they put one in the back of a minivan and set it off downtown?
Those are all factual issues, not speculation, and I think a reporter could find an answer to these questions fairly quickly. In fact, I’m no expert, but I bet I could find one or two experts within a matter of minutes.
When I was doing radio news, we had a rule: you can’t run the same story more than once. Sure, if it was a breaking story we could run the basic who, what, when, where, why and how, but we had to gather new information for the next news cycle.
And certainly we could interview an expert, but they might get only 30 seconds on the air.
Like Joe Friday, just give me the facts.
I’m Larry Burriss.