Is CNN as bad as everyone seems to think it is? Often, yes. The network’s live coverage of Monday’s destructive acts in Baltimore, and its seeming appetite for more trouble on Tuesday, in many ways demonstrated the strengths and shortcomings that are involved when a cable news channel tries to chase a live (and incendiary) story while haphazardly feeling around for a central statement or a bigger picture.

Marquez cut an interesting figure at the epicenter of Baltimore’s meltdown: Dressed like a hipster Clark Kent (sans necktie), he for some technical reason required the constant use of his smartphone, which he held to his ear while interviewing eyewitnesses and answering questions from CNN anchors.

This had a way of making Marquez look like both a lunatic and a true man of the moment; he wasn’t always on point (“I didn’t know what a tough and diverse city this is,” he remarked), but his relentlessness exemplified the swashbuckling flavor of a CNN hallmark that goes at least as far back as the Scud Stud days: the reporter who is in the thick of things. In between reporting what he was seeing, Marquez was peppered with unnecessary attaboys from the anchors back in the studio, who expressed fear for his safety. Oh, the humanity.

But viewers — from President Obama down to the rest of us — also recognize the corrosive effects of repeat footage of looting and fires. When CNN fixates on a burning car as its primary visual for 45 minutes, or when it appears to treat the loss of one CVS drugstore as a bigger tragedy than the death of a person in police custody, viewers pick up on that. If you were watching CNN anytime between Monday and Tuesday afternoon, you would sometimes think you were watching a noisy funeral for a drugstore, one of 7,600 drugstores in a very profitable chain that can very well avail itself of some positive, valuable PR by rebuilding.

The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware that spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled."