Unless you’re an invet­er­ate news con­sumer — and increas­ing­ly, even if you are — dis­cern­ing whether the news you’re see­ing, hear­ing and read­ing is non­sense, or is news because it is non­sense, is becom­ing a mind-cur­dling task.

The cur­rent ado­les­cent-lev­el hissy fit spat between the world’s two biggest egos and low­est emo­tion­al matu­ri­ty lev­els is a case in point. On the one hand, it’s a cor­nu­copia of fod­der for the late-night comics, who often dis­play a bet­ter grasp of the inani­ty of Wash­ing­ton pol­i­tics than many “seri­ous” commentators.
But giv­en the mon­ey and pow­er involved, how the Trump-Musk bitch-slap fest plays out mat­ters on a lev­el it would not in a nor­mal world.
News that’s non­sense and non­sense that’s news.
Most issues don’t qual­i­fy as a “two-fer”, a two-for-one deal, however.
Decid­ing which side of the news-non­sense dilem­ma a sto­ry falls is com­pli­cat­ed by the obses­sion — espe­cial­ly on a 24 hours for­mat – of labelling any­thing and every­thing “Break­ing News”, even when it’s noth­ing more than a minor corol­lary to some­thing already report­ed, or mere­ly hype to fill air time.
At the end of the first 100 days of Trump’s sec­ond term, CNN’s fact check­ing unit con­clud­ed: “Some of Trump’s 2025 false claims were about con­se­quen­tial pol­i­cy mat­ters, oth­ers about triv­ial per­son­al fix­a­tions. Some were sophis­ti­cat­ed dis­tor­tions about obscure sub­jects, oth­ers obvi­ous fic­tions about issues aver­age Amer­i­cans expe­ri­ence in their dai­ly lives.”
The “obvi­ous fic­tions” will be just that to any­one pay­ing even cur­so­ry atten­tion to news.
But how many of the oth­er lies and dis­tor­tions were point­ed out at the time in the sto­ries that report­ed them?
I haven’t been able to find a reli­able tal­ly, but feel secure in guess­ing a lot few­er were left in the dust of more “Break­ing News” than were scru­ti­nised in the report that put them out in the first place.
It’s not even nec­es­sary — and would soon become  coun­ter­pro­duc­tive — to label every lie as such.
Point­ing out when a state­ment con­tra­dicts one the speak­er pre­vi­ous­ly made on the same sub­ject, or mere­ly adding …”in fact” and then report­ing the truth, would do.

                      LET GRAMMAR RULE

Giv­ing air time, ink, or screen space to pro­nounce­ments that need, but in some cas­es can­not no mat­ter what the effort, be parsed in order to make sense, is both point­less and an abro­ga­tion of jour­nal­is­tic responsibility.
Yet, as nov­el­ist Nicole Krauss not­ed in a recent speech: “The bla­tant­ly, proud­ly sense­less speech of our cur­rent lead­ers is not the cause, it is mere­ly the most extrav­a­gant exam­ple of what hap­pens when an entire cul­ture — increas­ing­ly, the mono­cul­ture of the world — gives up on, and ceas­es to be capa­ble of, the strug­gle to fun­nel mean­ing into language.”
The obses­sion with live TV is a  major offender.
Unscript­ed, on the spot report­ing can be vibrant, infor­ma­tive and in many cas­es, vital to get­ting the sto­ry out.
But the impact is the exact oppo­site when it rou­tine­ly replaces craft­ed scripts and use of pic­tures – the mar­riage of words and images to expo­nen­tial­ly expand the  “a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words” adage.
And I claim that from the stand­point of one whose more than four decades-long jour­nal­ism career has includ­ed print, radio and TV report­ing and pho­to journalism.
Unfor­tu­nate­ly the press, TV in par­tic­u­lar, is guilty of gram­mar style choic­es that not only vio­late the gold stan­dard Asso­ci­at­ed Press style­book for accu­ra­cy, brevi­ty and clar­i­ty, they would earn a D minus on a ninth grade Eng­lish composition.
I refer in par­tic­u­lar to the teeth-grat­ing use of “say­ing”, when what is meant is “said”.

                  EQUAL VS BALANCE

Then there is the predilec­tion for con­sis­tent­ly hid­ing behind “telling both sides of the sto­ry” instead of occa­sion­al­ly mak­ing a judge­ment call about which has greater mer­it and deserves more attention.
Intro­duc­ing a UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion for what amounts to san­i­ty to end the Gaza war, Sloven­ian ambas­sador Samuel Zbog­ar said:  “We believe this text reflects the con­sen­sus shared by all Coun­cil mem­bers that the war in Gaza has to come to an imme­di­ate halt, all hostages must be imme­di­ate­ly and uncon­di­tion­al­ly released, and civil­ians in Gaza must not starve and must have full and unim­ped­ed access to aid.
Does that sound like an idea that deserves a U.S. veto?
Accord­ing to Inter­im U.S. rep­re­sen­ta­tive at the UN, Dorothy Camille Shea, it does, because: “Any prod­uct that under­mines our close ally Israel’s secu­ri­ty is a nonstarter.”
A sin­gle sen­tence reduced  a cri du coeur for peace, free­dom for hostages and aid for suf­fer­ing civil­ians, most of them women and chil­dren, to  a “prod­uct”.
As for how the “prod­uct” is such a dan­ger­ous trav­es­ty that it “undermines…Israel’s secu­ri­ty”…there’s news, and then there’s non­sense that’s news.
Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.