Loading more news
On the 2026 race, cable news coverage, and why it should be common practice to admit "We just don't know anything worth reporting yet"
Ever since the computing world broke free of text-based interfaces like DOS and Telnet, almost every graphical platform has used some kind of icon to signal that a page, program, or multimedia file is loading. Spinning circles and blinking dots serve notice that “Something is coming, and we’re working on it, but it’s not ready yet”.
■ It’s hard to imagine just how much better television news programming (especially the cable news networks) would be if TV news also came with a “loading” screen. Something to say, “We’re working on it, but there’s nothing reliably intelligent for us to say quite yet.”
■ CNN ran a segment this week featuring a report on betting markets and their predictions about the outcome of the 2026 Congressional vote. It’s hard to think of a better example of nonsense masquerading as news, serving no other purpose but to fill space and proffer the illusion of information.
■ With 8 billion people on the planet, there’s enough newsworthy material to go around and fill 24 hours a day with news coverage. But the supply of potential news content isn’t distributed evenly with the distribution of journalists.
■ Even more consequentially, much of what is objectively “news” fails an important test for media success: It’s not obvious to the target audience what’s in it for them. India, for instance, is home to one out of every eight people on the planet, but it’s rarely obvious to the news viewer in Boise or Little Rock why that news from way over there is of any consequence to them at home.
■ But it shouldn’t be of any less interest than what shows up in online prediction markets about an election more than 12 months away, and that’s where the spinning icon that says “Loading...” should come in. There are plenty of times when nothing would be better than something, if that “something” is no more fact-based than an astrology report. News is undoubtedly coming -- it always is -- but when it’s not ready yet, we’d be better off knowing that it’s OK to look somewhere else for a while.
