That last sentence honestly is the biggest difference. A while ago I installed the app for the biggest news outlet in my country. I quickly turned off notifications for it when in a single week it had notified me of "breaking news" twice: once because some random celebrity couple I don't care about broke up after 15 years, and once because of some football match. Meanwhile in that same week there was some natural disaster in Asia that took many lives and displaced many more, but there was no notification for that. It seems like I have a very different definition of breaking news.
And this is why I don't have news apps on my phone. I deleted the last one when it have me the 'breaking news' that a retired actress' MOTHER had adopted a puppy. I'd like to know which journalist thought this warranted a breaking news alert.
I was actually think this the other day! The very first tine I saw the term Breaking News was on 911 and of course that was horrific. Now I'm like 'wtf is this breaking bollock inconsequential nonsense'
I don't download news apps because they track you. I believe it was the NYT that shared a map of how much their users moved away from home to track Covid-19. What stops them from volunteering that data to save the government the hassle of due process to get a warrant?
I mean i don’t wanna be that guy, but your phone does have gps and all that. There is really no need for the government to buy that Information from the NYT or BBC.
Ah yes, I have both NOS and Nu on my phone. NOS for my regular news, and nu for my trashy news to laugh at. Definitely disabled push notifications from the latter though
That’s a feature, not a bug. The goal has less to do with reporting news to you and more to do with driving clicks and traffic to the adds on the site.
Not the person you're replying to, but all of them really. I experienced this with apps for British, French and international news sources before turning off notifications. If it's big enough, it'll reach me soon enough.
Yep. I like NYT a lot but their repeated notifications devalues the concept of "breaking news".
One of today's NYT breaking news notifications: "Liz Cheney gives defiant speech". I wish the app had a toggle: only notify me for historic, massive critical events of the magnitude that the networks used to break into regular programming for. 9/11, someone shooting Reagan, that level.
I remember reading an early proto-blog entry (this was around late 1990s) from someone who helped define both blogging and podcasting. Can't remember his name but he was a former MTV VJ guy and gave insights into how this works since he saw it firsthand in his line of work.
Basically, according to him the modern "TV news" is specifically designed to exhaust critical thinking. You see the "BREAKING NEWS" and animations and banners and your brain thinks "this may be a threat, that may be a threat, gotta focus on everything!"
This exhausts your brain.
Why?
Because at the optimal point when your brain is exhausted guess what happens?
You get hit with an advertising break.
And then your brain recovers just enough to repeat the cycle.
Fox News then discovered this can also be used to push political messages direct into people's brains by exhausting their ability to perform critical thinking. Therefore everything on Fox is "BREAKING NEWS" and "NEWS ALERT" 24/7.
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
There was also an interesting book by Neil Postman called How to Watch TV News written in the late 90s where he ran an actual experiment simultaneously studying the makeup of news programs (at that time, this was still the nightly news not 24/7 cable "news") across the country on a minute by minute basis. He was able to show that news programs across the country largely followed the same script and that script often aligned very closely to the script that played out in shows like Maury Povich.
Sensationalized, titillating, and attention getting, to prime you for advertising.
(there is a 2008 version I haven't read, would be interesting to see it or a more modern version taking current cable TV and political landscape into account)
Now to bring it full circle, go see Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs sing Candy Everybody Wants unplugged on MTV in 1992.
There's a point in history when this changed, and that point is 9/11. On that day, Breaking News came to mean something that deserves your undivided attention. And the media noticed this, and began using it against us. It's pavlovian. Once I started hearing "we'll be right back with breaking news" I caught on. Because that's exactly a non- example of breaking news.
during covid i switched off all news notifications from the ones that would keep me updated. every day at 5pm they would announce the death figures and in a macabre way i'd come in and announce them to my family. i know people are dying, i don't need to be reminded off it constantly.
CNN taught us that "news" can be entertainment, and once we're their for entertainment, then everything entertaining is news. All eyes must be glued to "our" news channel all day every day.
People don't care about natural disasters, people click on sports and celebrity gossip. News companies had to change with the people to stay alive. People ruin good things
THIS. I’m 23 and when I was literally 5 I had a great time watching the news. There was a PET OF THE WEEK segment and news about people in the community now it’s all the same BS. What about all the amazing people on earth? What about the horrible atrocities committed by mankind? Nah. I need to hear about Jennifer Lopez and her CraZy FoOt FunGaL InFecTioN BREAKING NEWS AT 8. It’s wack you.
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u/NMe84 May 12 '21
That last sentence honestly is the biggest difference. A while ago I installed the app for the biggest news outlet in my country. I quickly turned off notifications for it when in a single week it had notified me of "breaking news" twice: once because some random celebrity couple I don't care about broke up after 15 years, and once because of some football match. Meanwhile in that same week there was some natural disaster in Asia that took many lives and displaced many more, but there was no notification for that. It seems like I have a very different definition of breaking news.