Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Stupid News

Or rather, why today's "Breaking News" e-mail alert was a waste of bandwidth. Here's the body of the e-mail alert from CNN:

North Korea has untested ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. West Coast, CIA director George Tenet says.

Okay... so that means I should do what at this very hour? Um, nothing different then I've been doing for the past week. It doesn't matter if I receive information like that this very hour, or if I learn about it 3 days from now. It's a nebulous threat about something bad that might happen on some uknown date in the future - therefore it doesn't qualify as "breaking news" in my book. Breaking news worth of an e-mail alert is stuff like North Korea launched an ICBM aimed at the U.S. West Coast.

... then there are news stories which fail to ask the critical questions, or answer the "impact" question.

posted by Wuphon's at 4:26 PM