Or it was, at any rate, for the BBC, who repeated the revelation at half-hour intervals (at least on Radio Five) and interrupted their normal schedule of programmes to update the eager listener about the latest developments.
Over the course of a couple of hours, the story progressed in much the following way:
- We understand that Chelsea are set to announce the dismissal of manager Luiz Felipe Scolari in the near future.
- We can confirm that Luiz Felipe Scolari has been sacked by Chelsea.
- Reaction from a former player about the news: shock, instability, never saw it coming.
- Where will the club turn next? Canvass the opinion of the BBC's chief football writer.
- Rumours are that Jose Mourinho and Guus Hiddink are the early frontrunners for the job. Ask an expert about the likelihood of Mourinho ever returning to the club.
It's not unusual, I confess, for stories about footballers or football managers to replace 'proper' news in football-and-celebrity-obsessed England. You might assume, though, that for Scolari to stay at the top of the news agenda for a significant amount of time means that there's nothing else of any consequence happening anywhere.
And you'd be wrong. From my position in the northern hemisphere, the bottom of the earth is eating itself. It burns with a ferocity unknown outside of war. Australia is ill, and she tears away clumps of her own surface in a cry for help. Australia is ill, and her people are falling in great numbers.
The earth has ripped Australian lives out of the ground and left them, scorched, to their fate. Whole towns, in some cases, have been eviscerated by this plague of blazes. For the main broadcasting company in the UK - a constellation which considers itself to be a friend of Australia! - to relegate such a nation-changing drama to the second news item because of football is shameful.
I thought at the time that the elevation of Scolari represented the day that news had well and truly been put out of its misery. The news values I learned when I was studying journalism are all for nothing; they may as well be written in Latin for all their applicability only ten years down the line.
Monday was the day that the third-best football club in England leapt over a nation of 20 million people and swept it off the board; and then the board and all its pieces, all its certainties, disintegrated in front of my disbelieving eyes. It has been coming for a long time. I am sick of the pandering to celebrities, pulled down from a firmament that never truly existed, by a cackling tabloid press. So I don't read the tabloid press any more.
Their corrosive methodology is one which has leached out of its domain and poisoned everything. So some Australians have died? Well, how about this? Some Brazilian man with a moustache has been pushed out of his hyperbolic door, and in prioritising the latter over the former, I need never have to think about anything again.
I was asked yesterday if I'd ever contemplate going back into journalism. My audible answer: mmmm, if needs must, then yes. My silent confession: it'll be with a heart like lead if I must accept that one man's spiral into luxurious unemployment here is more important than the loss of 200 lives there.
