I was listening to NBC's original radio report of the 1945 crash into the Empire State Building. They laid out what they knew — a plane had collided into the building on a foggy day — what they didn't know — how many casualties there were — and interviewed a couple of survivors. What astounded me the most about the entire thing is at the end the announcer said, "This is the National Broadcasting Company. We return you now to the music of the first piano quartet." And then the slowest classical music begins.

This is completely different to what we would do today. First off, NBC waited until they had some facts before even putting it on the air. They even waited until office workers were saved and could interview them, and god knows how many hours that took. Nowadays reporters would be on the scene within ten minutes, shit would be on the air, and you'd just see an endless amount of raw videos of the incident. And they would never leave the story. Ever. The only thing that could stop them is if Russia started bombing us.

I think it's great that we have the capabilities to see incidents as they're happening, but simultaneously I really appreciate this old 1945 report. I watched the Newtown shootings as it occurred, and after a while I had to turn away from the television because I was becoming so disgusted. First off, nothing was fucking happening most of the time. It was just shots of police officers standing around or a news helicopter filming the scene from high above. And the pundits, oh Christ the pundits. They were saying absolutely nothing useful and literally speaking whatever the fuck came to their heads at the moment. It was a never-ending litany of idiocy and emptiness.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether I watched the shooting in real time or read about it later the following day. The immediateness doesn't really give me more information. In fact, it's worse because to fill up the vacuum of nothing happening, news just blabs stuff that's pointless or even worse, wrong. And after fourteen hours just spent on one story, you missed out everything else in the world. On the day of the Newtown Shooting, a man stabbed 22 children in China and Israeli soldiers beat up Reuters reporters. They sure as hell didn't cover any of that. In a way that's why I appreciate news that takes a breath and tries to figure stuff out before reporting, shows like Nightline or magazines like Newsweek. Although it's slower, they're at least not running at the mouth.

Still, NBC, at least you learned how to work on your segues. It's difficult to go from fire billowing out of the Empire State Building to a piano quartet without something transitioning it: "And that is when the rapist clubbed his victims to death with a dildo. That's our report, and now back to our previously scheduled program, Debussy's Clair de Lune."