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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.
Back-breaking news
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.
My mom’s second husband, a wonderful man named Dan Cohen, simply had to drop everything at six p.m. every weekday so he could switch on his TV and watch the CBS Evening News with or without Dan Rather. He said he wanted to keep up on things. Yet a mere 10 minutes into the show, he’d fall soundly asleep—and stay that way until my mom told him dinner was ready. When she asked him, somewhat amusedly, if anything important was happening in the country, he’d say something like, “Oh, the usual craziness.”
That was a pretty safe answer—and my mom knew to probe no farther. She recognized that her husband put a “stop” on his news delivery every night.
Don’t forget! A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).