[BC] "Breaking News" Interruptions

[Alan Kline]

Bernie Courtney wrote:

> A network is no longer just solely about news, but also entertainment.

The networks have *never* been solely about news. News has always been 
an important part, but never exclusive.



> But radio often runs  a :60 news update at the top of the hour, if people
> want more information they either go online or  turn on a news station  to
> get the rest of the story.

But they don't *encourage* the audience to do that. That's the point you 
keep missing. You *don't* encourage your audience to go elsewhere. You 
can't control what they really do, but don't make it any worse than it is.

> Am I suggesting that CBS should have pre-empted the rest of Letterman to
>> go wall-to-wall with this? Of course not. A brief interrupt would have
>> been enough.
> 
> 
> 
> The crawl was more then enough IMO.

So, on Friday night, should a crawl have been enough to announce the 
death of Saddam Hussein, a foreign war criminal whose death was 
expected? CBS did a full network interrupt during East Coast primetime. 
Are you saying that Saddam was more important than a US President?

ak