Broken news

There is a fascinating article in the current Business Week headlined “The Media's Crush on Apple.” In it, writer Arik Hesseldahl makes a compelling argument for the news business' extraordinary slant toward Steve Job's product line. And all it takes a brief reflection on the amount of free press the various iPod hybrids have received of late to realize that Mr. Hesseldahl may have a point.

But perhaps the most fascinating comment to emerge from the article is one merely used anecdotally. The piece leads by quoting a NewsAlert that floated on the AP wire this past Tuesday:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs unveils an iMac computer based on Intel Corp.'s chips, just six months after the historic partnership was announced between the two once-unlikely Silicon Valley bedfellows.

Mr. Hesseldahl correctly explains the usual nature of AP NewsAlerts:

The AP sends these when something important happens in the arena of world affairs, the sort of thing that causes CNN and networks like it to flip on their "Breaking News" graphics: A government has fallen in a coup, an election has been won, a head of state has died, or one country has invaded another.

And thus the question is posed by the article as to how a product release has somehow become tantamount to the overthrow of a government. But where Mr. Hesseldahl is wrong is in characterizing such alerts as being similar to those offered by “CNN and networks like it.”

As both a member of the news media and former Associated Press staffer, I have had access to the AP wire for some time and am quite familiar with many of its trends. I also subscribe to the news alert services provided by every network news outfit plus CNN and Fox News.

The difference between the AP, a relatively perspective-conscious news service and the network outfits, beholden to ratings, is the amount of trash that floats on these alerts. While it may have been hyperbolic for the AP to move a story about a product release on its NewsAlert wire, the reality is that rarely does a day go by when my e-mail box isn't cluttered with “breaking news” announcements from ABC, CBS, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC about the latest missing teenager or pervert of the hour.

The AP NewsAlert service – until this week, at least – was always reliable in the sense that if a story floated on it, there was an extremely high chance I could expect to read the details on page one of the next day's New York Times. The network news services, in mimicking this urgent wire, have cried wolf so many times at such a high pitch that if Osama bin Laden were to be killed at the same moment a Florida teenage girl was found alive, I am actually beginning to think I'd be looking at the Miami dateline first.

Then again, with the general direction of 24-hour news networks being what it is, I am surprised I am yet to see Rita Cosby juxtapose the Saddam Hussein trial with that of Scott Peterson while standing outside of a Baghdad courthouse.