What live TV does do extremely well, though, is to high-five itself for its own immediacy and urgency and importance. Friday’s stampede was an extension of the archetypical Reporter Pummeled by Waves, for no journalistic purpose whatsoever, during a blizzard. This was journalism, performing itself. It was journalism suggesting that there is nothing more to journalism than the gathering of stuff.

That suggestion in itself weakens what journalism is. Even at its most raw, even at its most chaotic, even at its most live, TV news has obligations—to context, to fairness, to story. Of the questions that emerged from this spectacle, “did the journalists have the right to search the scene?” is a fair one. But did the journalists earn the right to enter that house? Did they do the work to uncover a story important enough to merit the exercise? No. What we saw instead was an empty pageantry of journalistic discovery: object after object, thrust up Simba-like to an audience that was both invisible and enormous. The story—and the public—lost out to the stuff.