Culture · Satire
CHICAGO — A landmark study published this week by the Meridian Institute for Media Analysis has confirmed what viewers have long suspected: 94% of content labeled 'BREAKING NEWS' is neither breaking nor, in a meaningful sense, news, though it does retain 100% of its documented power to exhaust everyone within range of a screen.
Researchers spent twelve months logging every red banner, urgent chyron, and push alert across major networks and news apps — 12,047 in total. Of these, exactly three met the study's criteria for genuinely breaking news, defined as 'new information of significant consequence that a reasonable person would want promptly.' The remaining 11,997 included scheduled events occurring on schedule, anonymous sources describing what other anonymous sources were 'bracing for,' the word 'developing' applied to situations that had concluded, and, in one documented case, a network breaking into its own broadcast to report what the anchor was about to say anyway.
'The most striking finding was a category we ended up calling weather in a costume,' said lead researcher Dr. Yusuf Adeyemi. 'These are ordinary, cyclical events — a report was released, a person gave a speech, a market went down and then up — dressed in the visual language of emergency. The red banner. The pulsing globe. The music that sounds like a submarine losing power. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference. Your nervous system sees the submarine music and prepares to defend your family. It does this eleven times before lunch.'
The study's physiological findings alarmed even the researchers. Subjects exposed to a typical day of alerts showed stress responses comparable to 'being followed at a moderate distance,' while reporting they had learned, on average, 'nothing they remembered by dinner.' One control group, given a week of news exclusively from a printed Tuesday newspaper, showed lower blood pressure, better sleep, and, notably, an equal or better grasp of current events, though they did report 'a strange loneliness, like leaving a loud party that was also a fire.'
Network executives, granted anonymity to be honest, did not dispute the findings. 'Of course it's not all breaking,' said one veteran producer. 'If we only ran the banner when something was truly breaking, we'd use it four times a year, and the first time viewers saw it they'd have heart attacks. In a way, running it constantly is a public health measure. We've inoculated America. You're welcome.'
The study reserves special attention for the phrase 'we're just getting this in,' which producers admitted refers less to information arriving than to a segment needing energy. Also documented: 'more on this as it develops' (translation: there is no more), 'sources close to the matter' (translation: a man near the matter), and 'this just in to our newsroom' (translation: this has been in the newsroom since Tuesday, but it just got interesting to us).
Media watchdogs hope the findings prompt reform, though the researchers themselves are pessimistic, noting that a preprint of their study was covered by four networks, three of which announced it with a red banner reading BREAKING: NEWS NOT BREAKING, and one of which cut away halfway through to a car chase that later proved to be 'a normal man driving home.'
Dr. Adeyemi says the team's next project will study the phrase 'you won't believe' across digital media. Preliminary data suggests that in 98.7% of cases, you will believe, and in the remaining 1.3%, the thing was not true.
This article, the Institute confirmed, is developing.