It’s last Wednesday, top of the hour, 1 p.m., Fox News Channel anchor Trace Gallagher announces that he has “Breaking news” to report.

Naturally, he has my full attention.

Gallagher, on his feet, whirls and moves quickly, taking us for a “breaking news” walk deeper into the newsroom. He stops at a monitor on which the breaking news he cited appears. Video is seen of light snow falling on a city. The city is identified as Boston.

That was the lead story, the breaking news. It’s snowing in Boston. On Jan. 28th. Not a blizzard, just some snow.

It snowed that day in New York, too. Not much, two-to-four inches. Yet, at 6 p.m., the lead story on the local newscasts – Channels 2, 4, 5 and 7 – was that it had snowed in New York. On Jan. 28th.

Such colossal TV news absurdities have become a national epidemic on slow news days, busy news days and all news days in between. Winter weather in winter. There’s no bigger news to report.

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But TV newscasts now seem irreversibly designed for the dim-witted, those likely to be watching “The Maury Povich” show when news programs air.

Last week Ch. 2 co-anchor Dana Tyler reported that the young men on Long Island who were charged with the stabbing murder of Ecuadorean Marcello Lucero, in November, have been charged with other hate crimes.

“Prosecutors,” Tyler reported, “say the crimes go back as far as 2007.” Given that Lucero was murdered on Nov. 8, 2008, those crimes could “go back as far as,” well, 10 months.

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CNN’s Larry King did the unexpected during his Jan. 26th interview of not-quite-yet-ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevic. King asked some pretty good questions. If only he had listened to the answers.

For example, when Blagojevic said, “But never, not ever, did I ever have any intention to violate any criminal law . . .”

Whoa, stop right there. If I tell you that I didn’t “intend” to steal your golf clubs, you’d stop me right there. But after Blagojevic told King that he didn’t “intend” to break the law, King allowed him to run through his own stop sign.

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The casual, slang expression “guy” has become an anytime substitute, from waiters – “Are you guys ready to order?” – to newscasters.

On local newscasts anyone, from a judge to a hit-and-run suspect, now can be heard classified as a “guy.”

Last week Fox News Channel anchor Neil Cavuto, normally a respectful pro, prefaced a live chat with newly named Illinois Senator Roland Burris, 71, as “the guy” Blagojevic appointed to replace Barack Obama.

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Speaking of the President, reader Joe LaDore notes that while the media focused on the errors made by Justice John Roberts in administering the oath, Obama made one of his own, near the top of his acceptance speech.

“Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath,” Obama said.

“Grover Cleveland,” LaDore writes, “must be rolling over in his grave – twice.”

Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th President, thus Obama became the 43rd American to take the presidential oath.

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As graffiti “artists” – vandals – continue to be celebrated in TV ads, it’s worth noting that on the day after the Super Bowl carried one such commercial, for Pepsi, newspapers carried a story about four people, ages 16-20, having been arrested for spray painting graffiti on the 135-year-old Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.

Damage is estimated to be as much as $100,000.

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The Biography Channel continues as a paradise lost, nothing more or better than a movie star/TV star/music star channel.