I can't understand the fascination with being "constantly updated" on some tragic event. Obviously, what happened happened, and there's nothing you as a viewer can do to change it. The news will still be there tomorrow, and it might even be more accurate! I would like to hear from someone who does watch the news in these cases. What do you get out of it? I remember watching pretty hard after 9/11. I was 19 then, and I can't for the life of me remember why I did.
The 24-hour news cycle is a relic of a bygone age. It arrived (at least where I live) in the late '80s and hit that sweet spot where the world was moving fast enough to require people to be updated on things on an hourly basis, but there was no platform where people could search for their own content, let alone contribute. Nowadays, I like to use a combination of Twitter + print media for all my news needs, the former allows me to stay up to date, while the latter allows me to read in-depth analyses a few days later. It's funny, because for so many years the conversation was always about TV making newspapers obsolete, whereas today I find NYT/WSJ/Washington Post to be much more useful than CNN/NBC/Fox
It's worth noting that ~3000 people died in 9/11, and the style and spectacle of the attack was unprecedented, at least for Americans. I wasn't glued to Boston coverage. I only kept up with it to the extent that I peruse the news daily. I was too young to really follow 9/11 coverage (10 years old), but I imagine if it happened tomorrow, I'd be much more interested in following developments than I was with Boston.