Breaking Bhutto

I'm sitting here in New York with a computer in my lap and with CNN on the television. The news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto broke about an hour ago and I got it within moments on the NYTimes.com home page, which I happened to be visiting.

I'm of the generation that became accustomed to getting its breaking news from the television, when an announcer would solemnly intone: "We interrupt this broadcast for a special report . . ." We would stop everything and wait until one of the networks told us, for the first time, what was happening.

We can all remember (even if not yet born) Walter Cronkite wiping his eyes as he announced the death of President Kennedy, or the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald a few days later by Jack Ruby on live television. In my lifetime I can remember the Challenger disaster, the Lockerbie bombing and -- as a young boy -- the announcer on WOR-TV in New York scarily breaking in to say "Gil Hodges is dead" -- the New York Mets manager having just expired.

Now CNN and others are reduced to blabbering away, repeatedly showing the same footage of Bhutto stepping into her car moments before her killing. I have just watched a CNN reporter read to me various random anonymous blog comments that I could have read myself. I'm sure I will be able to get the footage of her assassination, if I want to, from YouTube before CNN can or will show it.

And forget about newspapers. By the time tomorrow's Newsday is delivered to me here on Long Island, with the certain front-page cover story on the assassination, I will have read and digested far more than the newspaper could ever deliver.

The internet is where news breaks now, and traditional media can only follow.

Comments

[Steve Robson]

Never mind NYTimes.com, I found out from a weird, cooky blog by some American, Internet Entrepreneur . . . ;-)