TVSquad

Yassir Arafat was a terrorist asshole, that's why people got pissed off, plus CSI fans aren't too smart to even know who he is. :-p

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It's pretty much damed if you do, damed if you dont't. I dont watch NCIS but if I was I would have prefered the crawl. President or not it's not going to directly affect me. Now if it was some sort of emergency or attack then they should definetly cut in.

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Why break in? I'm not saying that President Ford was not a historical figure worthy of an interuption but what really changed for someone that found out 15 minutes or twelve hours later?
It was not entirely unexpected news and for that matter the family had delayed releasing a statement for several hours.
In the rush to be first, television news has turned everything possible into breaking news on the cable channels. I have no problem with CBS delaying the announcement of news until their schedule permits unless the news event might actually affect a great number of individuals.

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When someone dies of old age or a long term illness then why should regular programming be interrupted? What's so urgent about the information? What difference is it going to make to most people?

Sure, if it's someone like QE2 or JP2 that is/was still in "office" and whose death would/did trigger a succession process, spread the news as soon as possible. Otherwise, just wait until the nightly news or at least the top of the hour.

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I agree with posters above. The man was 93 years old; hearing he died was not exactly a huge surprise.

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Why didn't they break in? Simple. New is no longer news to ABC/NBC/CBS its all about ratings and numbers. This all goes back the mandate of the FCC in ensuring the broadcasters meet public interest in the like... they no longer do that. The news is now their to educate the masses, about current events, the news in now top 10 things to be on the look out for when using public restrooms... how to to survive a sinking oil tanker... when is the last time you heard Darfur in the news over the summer?

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I agree that this was not news that is worthy of a break in programming. If a high-ranking government official died suddenly (Dick Cheney has a fatal heart attack, for example), that warrants an interruption in programming. The death of a president who has been out of office for thirty years and was both very old and in ill health is not so vital that it needs to interrupt programming. It is a major story, but not an emergency.

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I agree. Unless it's something that immediately affects my health or safety, a crawl is more than sufficient. There's no reason to interrupt programming for anything beyond the most urgent of news, and the death by natural causes of a former president doesn't apply. The news is still being communicated, and the crawl is disruptive enough to communicate the information effectively without making me miss part of the show I'm watching.

Special reports made sense back in the pre-cable days when the Big Three were the only television news outlets. Now, if the news is important enough to me to stop watching my show, I can switch to CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. But that should be my choice, not the network's.

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so wrong, people have no respect for anything. A President dies, thats national news. A great man who brought the country out of some very bad times.

They should have come out, out of respect, not out of breaking news importance. Hell, I get breaking news alerts about K-Fed and Britney getting divorced, but they can't break away from a NCIS repeat to report a President's passing?

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I do think breaking news alerts should be for items which have an immediate effect on people and require thier immediate attention. I think CBS actually did the correct thing.

Gerry Ford was 93 and in ill health, no much news that he died. Maybe that he lived so long...

This is motre like the local weather false alarms, for ratings and bragging rights.

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You break in out of respect, he was a POTUS. They broke in for O.J. and that really didn't affect anyone other than those trying to use the freeway. They break in all the time for far less newsworthy reasons.

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Wow, people here are quite cold. I'm no fan of Gerald Ford. He was an unremarkable president remembered in history as the man who pardoned Richard Nixon. However, he was a President of the United States and for that alone he deserves a certain amount of respect. Regardless of party affiliation each and every president should be treated better than a crawl at the bottom of the screen; even if that means breaking in to their special tv programs. For God's sake a man is dead. Is that less important than the nest gruesome murder on CSI?

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I can live with a quick break in or a crawl. What got me angry was the way that Fox handled it. They broke into House. The news talking head then read some incredibly poorly prepared script. It had some of the poorest grammar I've ever heard from a national network. Then they "went" to Chris Wallace for his input, had technical difficulties during that. The talking head then repeated most of what he had just said, then they cut back to Chris Wallace, who repeated most of what the talking head had already stated 2x. Then they went off on a complete dissection of Ford's career and discussion of Betty's problems and recovery....

Then decided to go back to House after breaking in for 15 minutes making the episode worthless to anyone who had stuck around.

It was extremely high on the unintentional comedy scale and really a fiasco for Fox. They demonstrated exactly how you don't handle this sort of event.

IMO news break ins should be limited to events that people NEED to know in real time.

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Out of respect? Seriously? Breaking into a program is something that should be done for urgent, important news. I agree with what CBS did (and I don't care at all about CSI). This was the not-surprising death of a historical figure. There was no change to the world. Arafat's death had the potential to change things. Let's keep "Breaking News" to meaning SOMETHING, somewhere at least? Considering the sort of dreck that permeates that hideous crawl on all the cable news channels. There was no loss of journalistic integrity in favor of entertainment here; there was a rational, sensible news decision made.

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It's not like it was the number one show of the year, it was a REPEAT! I think the least we can do for the President that moved the nation ahead was do a 30 second thing saying he died.

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Chalk up another one in favor of CBS. I was watching Letterman, and I thought, "Oh, that's nice." I didn't expect ANYTHING to happen. Then when I flipped over to FOX for some syndie Seinfeld, I was ANNOYED that not only was it interrupted, but they had some shitty news guy that I've NEVER seen before. Screw break-ins, that's why I've got CNN.

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"Respect" is no reason to treat this as breaking news. Presidents are not royalty. They are public servants, plain and simple, and that's exactly how we should treat them.

When Arafat died, it was news that had real potential effects. Not so with Ford.

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Bravo for CBS! Too bad I don't watch much of their programming.

IMO, programming should never be interrupted. Running breaking news as a crawl allow people to judge for themselves whether they need or want to pay attention to it, or ignore it. If it's something terribly interesting, one of the news channels will be covering it better anyway. Of course, I'm sure the networks would prefer to have us watch their personnel, but then they should hire journalists instead of Barbie and Ken teleprompter-lip-readers, or operate their own news channels.

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If you read Bill Carter's excellent book 'Desperate Networks' it tells the story of the CBS News producer getting fired for breaking into CSI:NY to report Arafat's death.

Les Moonves went ballistic and it is quite possible no one wanted to get on his bad-side for doing it again.

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I fail to see how breaking into programming is "a sign of respect." There is no correlation.

I have pretty extreme opinions on network news, though. I don't think they should be in the business anymore.

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