For several months, the 11pm hour of AC360 has been a re-air of the 10pm hour. On most nights, that’s just fine considering on most nights, there isn’t a whole lot of new news to report.
Tonight was not one of those nights.
The John McCain story broke just three hours earlier, with new details and angles certainly worth looking into. Candy Crowley‘s piece about the three top candidates and the upcoming primaries seemed out of place considering the breaking news about McCain.
But that’s only one story. At 10:47pmET CNN reported the Navy launched a missile meant to shoot down a rogue spy satellite. A few minutes later Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre reported the successful shoot-down.
With the re-air, Anderson Cooper was teasing the fact that the Navy was going to try to shoot down the satellite, 35 minutes after it happened. At 11:25pmET, he asked Erica Hill, “we’re still waiting to see if the Navy is going to shoot down this spy satellite?”
FNC & MSNBC stuck to the program, airing The O’Reilly Factor (which tapes earlier in the night) and a new documentary on Hillary Clinton, respectively. But, this was the night the news network with a late news broadcast, should have been live.