On Fox News, Bret Baier broke out his reading glasses. On CNN, Jake Tapper read a website U.R.L. aloud. On NBC, the legal correspondent Pete Williams brandished a three-ring binder stuffed with freshly printed pages, holding up a sheet covered almost entirely by black bars of redacted text.

Journalists received their copies of the Mueller report — all 448 pages — at the same time as the general public on Thursday. Except they had to explain it all on live TV, and the sooner the better.

The result, for television viewers, was a halting, if ultimately educational glimpse at the tedious mechanics of real-time reporting: sifting through documents, puzzling over footnotes.

“We’re all going to law school here today,” the anchor Savannah Guthrie told NBC viewers.

Catherine Herridge of Fox News, speed-reading (and speed-analyzing) on-camera, asked her colleagues for patience. “I’m going to take a break here, continue reading, and flag headlines as we get them,” she said. MSNBC kept its legal analyst, Ari Melber, sequestered at a small desk on-set, occasionally throwing to him for updates.