The Failures of Live News

Of-the-second, around-the-clock coverage is not a good way to deliver information

A live TV news antenna towers above me in this shot from my time as a daily news reporter.

Discussed: News, town halls, cable, broadcasting, fact-checking

In September, due to an international move, I left my job at a national radio program, ending (or maybe pausing) fifteen years in the daily news business. I figured I would take a few weeks to decompress, then, with my head clear and my moving boxes unpacked, I would go back to my regular habit of keeping current—checking apps, websites, radio stations, and podcasts to get a sense of what’s going on in the world. 

This didn’t happen.

When I tried to stay updated on the news out of general interest and not professional obligation, I found the process tiring, and even dispiriting given my love of journalism and the role it’s played in my life. Watching the news, I felt like I was stepping into a fast-moving stream with no sense of its headwaters or destination. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the ability to understand global events—I’d made a career of it until just a few weeks before—it was the way the stories were presented that was so exhausting. And the way they were presented…was LIVE and around-the-clock. 

Looking for details on the former president’s court appearance one afternoon, I found liveblogs on major websites that offered updates as they happened, but I needed to scroll past these and navigate a number of links to find context about why anything was happening at all. Television was impossible—every channel had live footage of a courtroom door. On social media I found arguments over speculation punctuated by terrible jokes. Every platform was built for people who were either glued to screens or were willing to become glued.

On the surface, it seems strange that news could be so impenetrable in a time when its delivery is so constant, but it’s this constant delivery that drives the problem. The advent of 24-hour news presented a challenge to news outlets: News reports are expensive to produce and filling an entire day with them would be too costly, while repeating reports might make people tune out. The compromise is something like we have now—a few pieces of information stretched to cover an entire day. Money saved on depth is spent on width. Field pieces are replaced by interviews, reporting is replaced by punditry. This does a disservice to the audience and to journalists who are in the field collecting information that should be presented in depth, information that bears repeating. 2023 was an alarmingly deadly year for journalists. This is a job that matters, a job that people risk their lives for. There are stories that should not be thinned or only cut to occasionally between shots of talking heads. When coverage is treated as an all-day affair, details are lost in the general wash of conversation—major developments are buried under smaller updates and the viewer has no time to process information before the conversation continues. 

To further enable the stretching, almost everything is presented live. Besides conveying a sense of importance, going live allows networks to present incremental updates the second they happen. This injects a bit of newness, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making even the smallest pieces of information seem like breaking news, when in fact they’re small updates that need to be contextualized to make sense. So much of what’s presented equates to a news outlet saying We are telling you this now because we can tell you now. 

One of the most notable news mishaps of the last year was CNN’s live town hall with former president Donald Trump. There was no particular reason for this event to be live; even Fox News (perhaps shy after settling a massive defamation lawsuit) pre-taped its interviews with the former president around the same time. On CNN, Trump freely repeated lies and insults while the supportive crowd cheered. Leading up to the event, media watchers debated the best ways to attempt real-time fact-checking, an idea that publishers have chased for years. It’s an interesting concept, but it inherently involves airing statements that are false. If it’s unethical to repeat a lie with the knowledge it’s a lie, what is it to present information so raw you can’t even tell if it’s a lie? Maybe instead of speeding up fact-checking, outlights might slow down their dissemination of unchecked information. 

We catch buzzwords of unchecked information a lot in live coverage: We’re hearing reports; it seems as if; we’ve been told; we have not yet confirmed, but… It’s unclear what any of this does for the viewer besides give them a chance to marvel at the speed at which information reaches them. If they remember to verify this information later and find out it was wrong, their trust not only in the outlet, but in all reporting, is at risk.

The excitement isn’t just the viewers’. I’ve worked in newsrooms during big news event and I can attest that reporting against a deadline while live on the air is thrilling. But journalism doesn’t exist to excite reporters, it exists to inform the public. And very often, live coverage fails at this task.

News doesn’t exist to entertain the audience, either, and that’s what the endless stream of live news so often attempts to do—to keep viewers tuned in not because they may learn something, but because anything could happen. Here, too, it fails. People are tuning out. Last year was among the worst for the news business for layoffs. CNN has failed to find traction as a streaming service. But this has much more dire implications than a shrinking bottom line. 

In a recent episode of the public radio show On the Media, Benjamin Toff, co-author of the book Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, offered a few ideas about why millions of Americans don’t bother keeping up with news. Toff and host Brooke Gladstone discussed the “arcane language” of news—a vocabulary of references to prior coverage that seems to me endemic to an always-on world of thinly covered news. Toff then suggested that many news avoiders ask themselves “What difference does it make ultimately? If I know more about what's happening, what can I actually do about anything?” This strikes me not as a reason for news organizations to get into the habit of suggesting solutions, but as a sign that the description of the problem is lacking in detail; the audience doesn’t have enough information, even though they’re trying to find it. 

Even worse than causing people to tune out from an issue that seems hopelessly complicated is the prospect that this lack of clarity drives the audience to seek conclusions or context outside of the world of facts or informed analysis. They may feel a need to adhere to a party line on an issue, or to “do their own research” with social media and web searches, where they’re more likely to find conspiracy theorists and crackpots who offer ready-made ways to think about major issues. 

Writing about TV coverage of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, The New Yorker’s Michael Arlen noted that while the technique and technology that made it possible to produce daily reports on fighting and troop movements were impressive, “what it all adds up to seems not nearly good enough.” He emphasized the word “seems” because, despite the constant coverage, he didn’t “have any shimmering private vision of how this war ought to be reported.” It just seemed that the way it was being reported wasn’t that effective.

The last part of Arlen’s quote has been on my mind as I’ve watched the news as an outsider. When a story is incomplete, it’s hard to know what’s missing—it’s information we don’t have and, often, not information we even know exists. We may not feel informed or satisfied, but it’s not clear what will fill this hole. I don’t know that I have a shimmering private vision that will fix the problems of modern news media, but I do know that the current tactics aren’t working—not for the audience, not for the journalists, and not even for the giant businesses that bankroll so much of this. I do have one idea for a change, though—slow down. Verify, analyze, contextualize; be more rigorous, even if it means not saying anything for a while.