What's News With You?

I subscribe to several services that purport to bring me breaking news. But what, one wonders, constitutes "news"? What is "breaking"? The following came this morning from France24:



Interestingly, CNN, ABCNews, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today--none of them--provided me any news, breaking or otherwise, about this burgeoning war on the other side of the world. Not on their radar, evidently. Olympic competition, sure--and I would not argue that that is not news. Ditto for the death of Isaac Hayes. All newsworthy, all even "breaking"-news worthy. But I'm almost certain there's a big world out there, and lots of stuff going on in it, and it's astonishing how US news outlets--even the big, well-regarded ones--tend to overlook it. Yes, you may certainly visit those websites and find coverage of events in Georgia. But it doesn't seem to be considered "breaking" news, and thus it isn't going to be pushed to your inbox. You have to go get it.

(Yes, you can subscribe to their newsfeeds. Still not the same as having them treat a non-US story as important enough to push its distribution to those of us who have expressed an interest in receiving same. There is a difference between having it come to me and my having to go get it, even if the latter means checking my RSS feeds.)

Other breaking news that France24 alerted me to when the others didn't:

PLANE DROPS BOMBS ON TBILISI SUBURB
BOMB ATTACK ON POLICE STATION EAST OF ALGIERS
GEORGIA ANNOUNCES WITHDRAWAL FROM SOUTH OSSETIA
Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish dies at 67

Plus two or three French Olympic victories. And that's just today. Yesterday I got

GEORGIA DECLARES 'STATE OF WAR'
and
RUSSIAN TANKS CONTROL PARTS OF SOUTH OSSETIAN CAPITAL

as well as a "what's new" capsule.

When I was in college, back during an age that I like to call the 1970s, a political science professor and friend exhorted us to not rely on only one or two sources of news...and keep in mind, this was at a time when there were, effectively, three television networks (public television could be pretty spotty) and, in most locations, a single daily newspaper. No internet. So to ferret out stories that were not being covered by CBS, NBC, ABC, and the Omaha World-Herald, one had to, well, ferret out stories. Being on a university campus, that wasn't too tough: you hied on over to the library and read the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, maybe had a glance at the Times of London, perused a couple of news magazines, pawed through the Economist, and came away amazed at all the goings-on in the world that you did not know about!

It was good advice then, and it's good advice now.

For instance, CNN, ABCNews, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today have failed to deliver me breaking news about events in Georgia and Algiers, or the death of Palestine's leading poet. However, to be fair, they have yet to tell me about Isaac Hayes. Or Bernie Mac.