When “Breaking News” Broke Days Ago

Going through the newspaper stack after an absence

By Ed Goldman

One of my favorite activities when I return from a vacation or business trip that lasted a week or more is to wallow in the past—which is to say, to read the newspapers I missed which piled up on my doorstep.

I’m fortunate to live in a community where, if I forget to put a “stop” on my newspaper delivery while I’m gone, no one spots the papers piling up at my front door and thinks to steal them. Or that the occupant is lying dead inside.

In truth, anyone who catches a glimpse of me sitting on my street-facing living-room chair in late morning, reading or working a crossword puzzle, might already think my soul has left its earthly casing. This theory is based on the fact that when I was a kid living in a congested apartment community in New York City, you could be dead for a week before you had enough room to fall down. 

Since my current, infrequent travels have been taking me to cities and towns where newspapers are a rare or extinct species—and I’m not just talking about backwater villages but also semi-metropolises and state capitals—I still stay vaguely in touch with what’s going on in the world by reading online newsfeeds or catching a TV news program. The local broadcasts are my faves, being completely interchangeable from city to city, as are most of the anchors.

But if you subscribe to daily newspapers (mine are the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), there’s nothing quite like the sitting down and spending an evening feeling you have the power to see into the future—especially when you read a story that continued to evolve every day. Recent examples of this might be the tragedy continuing in the mid-East or the comedy of selecting a new speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

You can feel like a smug time traveler when you read “breaking news” that broke days ago and by now has been reassembled or replaced by something else that’s “breaking.”

To expand on this theme for a moment, I’m not sure why news “breaks,” anyway. Same thing goes for the day “breaking” or one’s heart “breaking.” And with the way most of us snack up until bedtime, I’m not even sure why breakfast a few hours later “breaks” any sort of fast. Being asleep isn’t the same as fasting. If it were, most of us would just sleep through Yom Kippur, Lent and Ramadan. And since the latter lasts a full month, being a bear or having a case of Ambien within reach might be advisable.

I’m far from a news junkie but I do like to have at least a vague idea of what’s going on. Like, if Social Security were about to be abolished, an APB has been issued for the cabdriver hauling me to the airport or Armageddon has just been approved by Congress.