Yep, “breaking news” used to mean “major disaster” or item of major import.

Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…

I'm of the belief that news networks shouldn't be legally allowed to call their channels "news" for 18 hours out of the day.

I disagree. I think that the 24-hour news cycle does contribute to the problem, absolutely. However, the critical aspect you're forgetting here is that the internet conditioned us to not pay for content because the ability to distribute content became commoditized. Once that happened, one of the largest sources of revenue for print publications disappeared, which forced print publications to rely more on ads, and therefore stories with headlines that drove more ad impressions (i.e. clickbait).

Newspapers were always funded mostly by ads. You could argue that internet ads are worse than print ads because tracking, but I don't see that argument here. Newspaper headlines, particularly on the front page, have always been designed to catch the eye. Cable news has many of the same features.

Classifieds were a big portion of income. Craigslist effectively killed that in the mid 90s. It's been a slow steady decline to stay solvent. They had to switch to the "print what your audience wants to read," type of infotainment. Emotion, particularly fear is very effective to keep asses in seats (and eyes on screens).

I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context.

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...

I think you nailed it.

Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines.

This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.

Yup, they should all be abolished. We're not meant to know what is happening on the other side of the country. We don't need to, otherwise it takes up precious mind space. Being "well-informed" is a lie sold to us by these channels.