The CBS promo showed a fire and a sinister close-up of a man with shorn hair uttering something vaguely threatening. And the tabloid-style hype seems particularly limp when you consider that the CBS Evening News audience is a Polident and Geritol crowd. Maybe CBS News is feeling giddy and exclamatory this spring. So do teen diaries. But bangs do not belong in the news, even as promotional devices for news stories.
Credibility is at stake, although that seems increasingly moot in the TV news world.
Most good writers prefer to let the material move the reader to provide his or her own exclamation. When they are used it is to follow an actual exclamation quoted from some source or to punctuate a bulletin or an event of astounding historic importance. Such events, needless to say, are rare. Blame Shakespeare True, The New York Times occasionally uses the exclamation point. But that seemed the rare appropriate usage.