Or, for that matter, to fact-check it. To wit: David Shuster, two weeks ago, repeating the false claim that one “Martin Eisenstadt” (actually, the serial hoaxer Eitan Gorlin) was the source of Carl Cameron’s “Sarah Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” reporting. And Rick Sanchez gleefully—and, as turned out, incorrectly—reporting that, during last week’s G20 summit, world leaders had refused to shake President Bush’s hand. Time considerations don’t excuse the reporters’ errors (in Shuster’s case, a mere-seconds-long Google search would have been enough for a fact-check: The fact that he that he was a hoaxer was on the first page of the engine’s search results on the day Shuster made his ill-advised “Eisenstadt” report). But while journalism may be deadline-oriented as a general rule, TV, in particular—even more than blogs—often demands that journalists who use its platform make split-second judgments about what information to distill, how to distill it, etc. A “twenty-four-minute” news cycle, as Time’s James Poniewozik had it, tends to rob TV reporters of the breathing room required to think before talking—to the air, if you’re an anchor, or, if you’re a producer, to the ear of your anchor. The speed of the current news cycle turns televised journalism’s chief asset—its immediacy—into a liability. A big one.

When TV anchors and reporters “break” news, what they’re really doing, 99 percent of the time, is regurgitating information that is already (and readily) available on the Web. Which is not only redundant—it turns news reporters into little more than script-readers—but also, in today’s split-second world of news consumption, inefficient. Why spend fifteen seconds listening to Kyra Phillips announce Obama’s latest cabinet appointment when you could ingest the same news, as an online headline, in two? The thirteen-second difference may not mean a huge discrepancy on its own, but multiply it out over several days or weeks or months…and the result is a lot of wasted time, on the part of audiences and journalists alike.

TV’s current method of news-breaking filters two-dimensional information into a three-dimensional platform, which manages to undercut both the information and the platform in question. The whole system is approximately as sensible as Michael Phelps chucking the whole swimming thing for a career in astrophysics—or Barack Obama deciding to give up politics to play pro basketball. Indeed, to watch many news shows is often to feel that one is watching a radio broadcast whose participants happen to be wearing a lot of makeup.

So, then. Looking ahead—past these years of adolescently awkward transition in our journalism, past this period that finds us growing into the Web, past the period when “a digital world” is a prospect rather than an established fact—here’s one thought for TV news to serve its audiences and itself: Stop thinking in terms of immediacy. Put another way: Stop trying to be a platform for breaking news.

Now, granted, that may seem impractical at first, even foolish—the whole live-air thing, after all, would seem to make TV a painfully obvious platform for of-the-moment news-breaking. And occasionally it is. But not overall. Because (sorry, Luddites of the world, but) the Internet’s expansion in use and relevance is not an opinion, but a fact. Journalism, going forward, will have the Web to contend with. And the Web is simply superior as a platform for breaking news. It’s superior to newspapers. It’s superior to radio. And, yes, it’s superior to TV.

While a TV reporter simply reads a breaking-news headline—and perhaps, when audiences are lucky, offers a few sentences of context (and, when they’re really lucky, an accompanying graphic or photo…and, when they’re really, really lucky, accompanying video footage)—the Web can offer the same headline (again, in efficiently readable text) accompanied by: links to related stories, maps and other graphics, any video that may be available, etc. And as the news item follows the normal trajectory from headline to report to foundation-for-analysis, a Web page can archive that evolution, providing context at every step.

Watch a TV news broadcast while a story is breaking, and you’ll likely have to wait—in some cases, quite a while—for the cycle to loop back to the story you’re interested in. And, even if you happen to hit it just right, timing-wise, you’ll still miss out on the depth and context that only the Web can provide. While news on the Internet reaches, nearly infinitely, both horizontally and vertically, news on TV is is constrained by the limitations of its own segmentation. It offers finite points to the Web’s ever-expanding lines.

So, then, when it comes to efficiency, it’s Web: 1, TV: 0; and when it comes to context, it’s Web: 1, TV: 0. And, importantly, it’s also Web: 1, TV: 0 when it comes to accuracy. Because when errors, of fact or judgment, are introduced in Web stories, their corrections, once noted, become part of the story’s textual record. An “update” notation, when done correctly, displays at once the original error and the correction. In this way, the evolution of fact-finding and narrative-building is made transparent. When errors are made in TV news reporting, on the other hand, their corrections often get lost in the ether. If you were to hear an erroneous fact in a morning TV report, it would take nothing short of a stroke of luck for you hear a correction to that same bit of misinformation later in the day.

In other words: the Web celebrates and fosters the organic, context-driven nature of news. Television, confined as it is by the dual constraints of time and technology, fights it.