"'Breaking news' is 'broken news'" is a compressed critique of advertising-funded journalism holding that news which chases the sensational, exceptional, negative, recent, and incidental systematically misrepresents the world it claims to report.
The phrase was derived from 📝The Correspondent's remarks on the 📝Human Use of Human Beings in service to the 📝Monetization of Attention. The Correspondent, an ad-free membership publication that explicitly relabels "breaking news" as "broken news," was the English-language offshoot of the Dutch outlet De Correspondent, founded in 2013 by philosopher and former nrc.next editor-in-chief Rob Wijnberg under the banner of "unbreaking news." It launched on September 30, 2019 with more than 50,000 founding members across 130 countries and stopped publishing on January 1, 2021 after membership renewals proved insufficient.
As a consequence of a business built on advertising revenue, publishers are encouraged or forced to scare their readers with sensationalism by overexposing risks while blinding them to systematic progress. Thus, news outlets mislead readers because it pays more to focus editorial attention on the sensational, exceptional, negative, recent, and incidental as they are more profitable, thereby losing sight of the ordinary, usual, positive, historical, and systematic. Wijnberg's own formulation of the final axis is that the nightly news always ends with the weather but never with the climate: an event supplies the hook a story requires, and a trend does not.
The distortion is one of selection rather than falsehood, which is what separates the critique from 📝misinformation. Every individual report can be accurate while the aggregate picture it produces is wrong, so fact-checking cannot correct it — only a change in what counts as newsworthy can. The same mechanism operates at the level of a single story through 📝Headline Bias, where the framing element is read first and everything after it is fitted to the conclusion already formed.