Speculation...

Perhaps you've seen or heard or read about yesterday's rear-end crash involving 2 T-line commuter trains in Boston.

Coverage on local television, as it always is with these stories, was live, immediate, and went on for hours despite the static nature of the video and the glacial nature of the flow of any real, new information from the scene. They like to call this "breaking news," which most often means the dominance of technology over substance. After a fairly short interval there were basically no developments, nothing "breaking" to say or show.

Reporters and cameras were shooed away to spots up on the hill away from the actual scene, or left to to do stand-up reports from the front of a nearby hospital where nothing was happening. We had the same endless aerial shots from their looping helicopters hovering helplessly over the mangled mass of metal down below. We had the static shots of the brave rescue volunteers milling about down on the tracks. Then riders on the train, anxious for their 15-minutes began to call in to tell their stories. "I was sitting in my seat and suddenly we were hit. My glasses fell off. My bag flew out of my hand. I crawled around and found them and got off the train. So did everyone else. We went home." Twenty meaningless stories; all the same.

I expected all that. Have come to accept it, even. Time filling while the news department management and the viewers hope to see something fresh, possibly wrenching.

What got to me yesterday throughout was the level of speculation and half-baked assertions that the anchors, stuck away in their studios, were pulling from their imaginations and God knows where else. Half, and quarter baked stuff, especially from the peculiarly and inappropriately folksy male anchor on the CBS affiliate, WBZ-TV, (though all the others were nearly as guilty). On and on they went, words words words, filling the air despite the nearly complete absence of any actual information.

Guesses stated as fact about what all the rescue volunteers were doing, what might have caused the crash, the supposed mindset of the officials on the scene, even thin-air statements about the probable condition of the woman who was operating the train that smashed into the one stopped in front. (She later died).

None of it was meant to sensationalize the situation, none of it was meant to be insensitive, I am sure. But once again it demonstrated how these glib, high profile anchor folks are basically untrained and unprofessional. Smooth, yes. For the most part. But spectacularly unaware of the consequences of their vapid, uninformed drivel.

Whatever happened to: don't speculate; only say what you know to be the facts.

Of course if they ever did that what would they do with the hours of empty, arid, silent hours of coverage while we sit around like the video vultures we are, leaning into our screens. Waiting on the injured and the dead, live.