While I was in the sand, looking into the choppy white and blue water, the internet and cable channels were stirring madly. There was a photo of the ABC team bent over their desk reading the report on live television with George Stephanopoulos watching over them like a proctor in an exam. CNN’s Chris Cillizza posted his “3 Takeaways on Mueller Report Day” tweet only twelve minutes after he posted the link to the actual report, and the guests on the channels babbled madly, regurgitating conclusions they must have invented before reading more than a dozen pages of the report. It was cartoonish, like some dirty trick Road Runner would play on Wile E. Coyote—hand him a 448-page-long report to read then drop an anvil on his head.

Online it wasn’t much better. One pundit strung 451 tweets over a twelve-hour period. The president tweeted, and everybody posted screenshots of some page that they found particularly damning. Trump’s loyalists demanded that the media apologize, and the handful of them that haven’t blocked me on Twitter clogged my timeline with their spin. Thankfully, most of the pro-Trump faction didn’t even pretend to have read the report, they just peddled well-worn talking points. Probably the best handling of the report was done by VICE, who simply had their reporters read the entire thing in a video feed.

When I got back from the beach, the internet was still looking for an angry fix, and so I kept my computer in the corner of the room and read profiles in back issues of The New Yorker.

The other Playboy man in Washington, Brian Karem, claims to have read the Mueller report in its entirety, and he penned a column on his conclusions on this website. Karem’s piece was one of the better ones that I read, along with McKay Coppins’ column in The Atlantic. But Coppins and Karem both waited a few days to write their summations (Coppins’ was more of a critique of the media response than the report). They didn’t make the mistake of trying to cover the report live as if it were breaking news.

Because the Mueller report really wasn’t breaking news, it was a summation of things that happened months and years ago. It wasn’t any different than the release of one of those inside-the-Trump White House tell-alls that we’re subjected to every several months. And we don’t write articles about those before we read them, or if we do, we never lie about having read them. When Bob Woodward puts out one of his books, you don’t see the cable hosts reading passages of it, for the first time, on live television.

I called CNN’s media reporter, Oliver Darcy, hoping to figure out if I was seeing this wrong. Darcy managed to buoy my outlook, though not entirely positively, mostly just by noting that reading the Mueller report on live television was the only way to cover the story. He told me, “it’s a live news environment, there’s no way to get around that. People will just tune into other sources for information. [The outlets] read specific parts of the report and then went to the journalists who had read that specific section. I don’t think that the viewers, who were watching, could tell how frantic things were behind the scenes.”

I had to disagree with him about viewers not noticing that their truth-tellers were scrambling, and he added “the Trump White House has certainly given reporters a lot of practice to dissect news events and get information to viewers as quickly as possible.”

And maybe that’s the reason a lot of America was staring into televisions while I was standing on a beach staring into the Atlantic Ocean. This is the Trump White House; in the Obama White House maybe we tuned in when Osama bin Laden was killed or when there was election. But the Mueller report was just another moment in that break-neck news cycle that we’ve grown used to under Trump. Our reporters have learned to sink into huge pieces like this and spit them out into chyrons (those clauses you see at the bottom of the screen on CNN channels). Maybe that’s a good thing.