When I was a kid, "Breaking News" was only used for urgent announcements that had to interrupt something else. If the story about the kid who did the nice thing had to be cut short because there was another school shooting, that was breaking news.
That seems like it was such a long time ago. Now it's pretty much just the TV equivalent of clickbait, it doesn't mean anything anymore. They just put it in front of all the top stories indiscriminately.
When did it change?
My favourite lazy clickbait phrase is “Lockdown”. As soon as something vaguely exciting happens this meaningless phrase is thrown up by low quality news outlets.
thrown up by
low qualitynews outlets
FTFY, I removed the redundant part.
How do you know it did change? Maybe the media manipulation started before then and what you consider the true stories were actually propaganda? Maybe it's only coming out now because they had a slip in people pointing out the propaganda. Maybe you're seeing the same manipulation now that you saw 15 years ago
Because some of us are actually older than 40 and remember news broadcasts from when we were kids. OP is correct.
It changed because they need to reprogram you quickly. You have to be mad at some new thing they tell you to be mad at.