In all the chaos of last week, as news of the Boston Marathon bombing, a chemical plant fire and explosion in the small town of West, Texas and a sinkhole in Chicago flooded the content of television stations, news websites and social media, several important news outlets got their facts wrong. When CNN, Fox News, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe erroneously reported that a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had been arrested, they did a disservice to journalists and journalism.

Social media and constant updates — and, when those were unavailable, constant repetition of facts already known — drove the coverage of events, such as the Boston Marathon. 

This extension of the 24-hour news cycle represents a broken business model. Although journalism should be a disinterested public service, the fact is that journalism is a business; call it an industry, even.

Like all businesses, however, media corporations must deliver a product. Last week, CNN and the others chose to deliver a product — any product, so long as it takes up air time — rather than the product that they ought to have delivered or that they were expected to deliver. In their haste to deliver that product, news agencies delivered a shoddy one.

In all cases, but especially where public safety is concerned and politicians and ordinary citizens alike are likely to demand that suspects’ constitutional rights be compromised, knowing the plain, unadulterated facts is essential. 

The question must be asked: When news agencies do not report the facts and serve the public, what are they doing?

Although Karl Marx turned out to be wrong on many of his predictions, his pronouncement that religion is the opiate of the masses is similar to today’s reality. Today in 2013, however, television and social media are the opiates of the masses, and society’s collective inability to pull itself away from the feeding tube of the digital world requires news agencies to report isolated, unconnected facts rather than stories.

The lack of moderation with which we indulge in news consumption, devouring it like gluttons, fails to recognize that there really ought to be a time for every purpose. Information about a manhunt in Boston will not help us make better decisions about our lives, unless perhaps we live in Boston. To the extent that the bombing is a national issue at all, the rest of the country should wait a while and allow events to crystallize and accumulate some context before taking rash actions.

Last week’s mistakes — including past mistakes such as CNN’s misreporting of the Supreme Court’s decision in the “Obamacare” case — expose the farce of the 24-hour news cycle yet again. In the same way that it would be bad for a person to eat all the time, sleep all the time, or drink all the time, it is bad for media agencies to report, manufacture and package news all the time. A collective decision to turn off the television and unplug from social media until an actual story is available and go about our own lives for a while would do most of us a great deal of good. It would do the news some good, too.