History Main / BreakingNewsInterruption

** A standard interruption, where normal programming is replaced with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-fSTgFXblE the picture of the Union Jack and sombre music]]. The minute you see this, you know someone important has just died. More specialised networks might not necessarily interrupt their programming, but if they don't, they'll show a message telling you to turn to a news channel (but won't tell you ''why''). In some cases they've been rehearsing for years; in others, like [[http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/continuity/diana.html in the case of Princess Diana]] (who died suddenly in a car crash in 1997), it was basically combined with ThisJustIn. In all cases, no programming can just wait to finish, whether the audience wants it or not; in Australia, viewers [[https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2021/apr/12/abc-says-75-of-complaints-about-prince-philip-coverage-related-to-interruption-of-tv-drama-vera lost their minds]] when Creator/TheABC interrupted ''Series/{{Vera}}'' to announce the death of Prince Phillip.

* In Japan, the vast majority of the TV channels are part of big conglomerates, so they don't interrupt their programming so much as direct the viewer to a 24-hour news channel owned by the same conglomerate. They do this with banners called "telops", which often include a brief description of what just happened. Sometimes the interruption really is important, other times it's quite inane (''e.g.'' Fuji TV announcing that ''Manga/DemonSlayerKimetsuNoYaiba'' had become [[WorstNewsJudgmentEver the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan]]). A few are particularly notable:

* America ''loves'' interruptions for extreme weather, and there tends to be a lot of it (at least outside of perpetually sunny California). Whenever there's a big snowstorm in the Northeast, a tornado in the Midwest, or a hurricane in the South, the over-the-air networks interrupt their programming to allow local news there to cover the progress of the storm and its aftermath. Even national networks like CNN will sometimes cover a storm as if it were a local network and give advice to a national (and even international) audience as if they all lived in the affected area. This could last for the better part of a day. People occasionally complain about the preemption of normal programming, but since severe weather can actually be dangerous, they usually lose that argument[[note]]in 2019, an Ohio TV meteorologist [[https://www.facebook.com/WSYXABC6/videos/2062657480704588/?v=2062657480704588 took to Facebook]] to [[TheReasonYouSuckSpeech tell off]] people complaining about weather coverage (for a series of tornadoes that killed six people) interrupting the season finale of ''Series/TheBachelorette''[[/note]]. In 1977, it also led to a CoincidentalBroadcast of sorts in Michigan, when the series finale of ''Series/MaryHartmanMaryHartman'', whose storyline involved a tornado striking the show's setting in Ohio, was interrupted for coverage of a ''real'' tornado warning.

* Music/{{Nas}} announced the death of Music/TupacShakur during one of his concerts, on September 13, 1996. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIwnNe3RPQA Footage is available online]]

* Music/{{Nas}} announced the death of Music/TupacShakur during one of his concerts, on September 13,1996. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIwnNe3RPQA Footage is available online]]