"Breaking News"

Welcome fellow travelers on the Misinformation Superhighway en route to the New News Cycle.  Welcome to a world where nothing can be breaking news because everything is breaking news.

Your attention span is the the most wanted commodity in all the realm and they’ve figured out that it has only gotten shorter.  “Peak Give-a-Damn” has already been reached.  Its all downhill from here.  Dickens used to serialize his novels, releasing a new chapter in the newspapers each month.  These days his publishers would be putting them out in Tweet form:  DVD CPPRFLD #london.

No one has any interest in lingering over any news, its importance fades by the second rather than by the minute or hour like in the Olden Days (2005-ish?).

What was “breaking news” this morning is now irrelevant this afternoon if only because we all know that there’ll be new breaking news tomorrow.  Which we will then process, discount and fling out the station wagon’s window like a creamsicle wrapper on the way to the lake house.

“Steve Jobs -Breaking News!  Peruvian Elections – Breaking News!  Anthony Weiner is a sick f*** – Breaking News!  Debt Ceiling Vote – Breaking News!”  Ten minutes later?  Who cares.

And if you thought this was only the case as it pertains to stocks, you should see what goes on in the currency news cycle.  They’re literally trading sneezes and innuendo.  They’ll go long the Euro based on the first half of a sentence by Jean-Claude Trichet and then short it based on the second half depending on its annunciation.  A total joke.  Wiggling to every squiggle on the charts, trading if only because the last trade was already traded.

Breaking, breaking, breaking, breaking, breaking, breaking, breaking breaking…

Broken.