A fellow named Stu Paterson tweeted the other day: "The term should only be used on a story such as 'Putin shot in head.'" While pondering that I received a flash from the showbiz paper Variety—"Breaking News: Catherine Deneuve Is Not Ready to Retire and Has No Regrets."

NBC's efforts have become so extreme—and undisciplined—that on the night cited above, it used the "Breaking News" banner in an attempt to cover a portion of video with the words "CNN Exclusive."

The Associated Press gets credit for recognizing way back in 1906 that not all news is created equal. It coined the term "Flash" to signal clients that something really important was happening. In years to follow, news services used words like "Urgent" and "Bulletin" to flag the biggest stories. I used to get chills in the ABC newsroom on rare occasions when Reuters sent the designation, "Snap."

Cable-TV and the internet share blame for crying "Breaking"—or in Fox's case, "Alert"—whenever news seems remotely new or mildly important. With their 24-hour cycles it became necessary to notify viewers that news was, well, happening. It's an odd and unfortunate twist that the legacy broadcast networks feel the need to compete by suggesting that almost everything they report each evening, no matter how stale, is "Breaking News."

ABC, meanwhile, has decided that even better balderdash for conveying urgency is the word "tonight." In the broadcast cited above, David Muir and colleagues invoked the term "tonight" an incredible 64 times—an average of once every 19 seconds.

Of course, not all news happens at night and, despite what garish graphics say, most news isn't breaking. Coverage, however, does seem to be broken.

(c) Peter Funt. Distributed by Cagle syndicate.