Politics
ABC News Live Has Been Breaking The Same Story For Eleven Hours
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
At 7:14 AM Eastern on Tuesday, a thing occurred. ABC News Live was there. By 7:15, it was breaking. By noon, it was still breaking, which in structural terms means it had not broken, but that distinction does not fit on a chyron.
ABC News, which operates ABC News Live as a 24-hour streaming channel devoted to continuous coverage of events as they happen or as they fail to happen, marked its eleventh consecutive hour on the story at approximately 6:17 PM, at which point anchor Linsey Davis described the situation as "very much ongoing" in the same tone a person uses to describe a flight delay they have stopped believing will end.
The story in question involved a government official, a room, and a scheduled briefing that was postponed, then rescheduled, then postponed again, and is now described by ABC News Live as expected "sometime this evening or possibly tomorrow morning, we'll bring it to you live."
In the intervening eleven hours, the network aired forty-three expert interviews, thirty-one of which featured a person saying some version of "we just don't know yet," and four of which featured a different person saying "that's a great question" before also saying they did not know yet. One guest, identified on screen as a Former Senior Adviser, said the situation was "deeply significant in ways that will become clearer as we learn more," which is a sentence that contains no information but was received with a grateful nod.
David Muir, reached for comment, told reporters: "What we're seeing here is a story that is unfolding in real time, and that's exactly what we're here to cover: the unfolding. The real time. We don't know when this ends, and we think the American people deserve to not know alongside us, together, continuously."
Between hours six and eight, the live shot featured an empty lectern in a government building. A lower-third graphic read "AWAITING BRIEFING." The lectern did not move. Three correspondents described it from three different angles.
At hour nine, the network pivoted to what it called "context," which is the technical term for airing footage from 2019 while an anchor explains that the situation has historical roots. The historical roots segment ran forty minutes and concluded with the anchor noting that "of course, the full picture is still emerging."
A viewer in Columbus, Ohio named Patricia Wendt, who had been watching since 8 AM, told her husband at 4 PM that she was "going to keep it on in the background in case something happens." Nothing happened. At 7 PM she described herself as "invested." At 9 PM she described herself as "honestly kind of angry at the briefing room at this point."
Patricia is not a ratings anomaly. She is the product.
The 24-hour news format, pioneered by CNN in 1980 and now practiced by every major network with a streaming budget and a fear of silence, operates on a foundational premise: that news, like a gas, expands to fill the container it is put in. A press conference becomes a day. A development becomes a week. A vague indication that something might be announced becomes, in the right hands, a chyron that says "BREAKING" for seventy-two hours while anchors take turns asking each other what they think the other one thinks.
ABC News Live did not invent this. It has simply committed to it with a kind of monastic discipline that deserves, at minimum, acknowledgment.
The briefing was held at 10:47 PM. It lasted six minutes. The official said nothing new. ABC News Live covered it live, called it significant, and promised continued coverage through the night.
By midnight, they were back to the lectern.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/video/41463246/