Must be difficult for news teams, struggling to shed light on this immense planet peppered with stories. Where do you start? You determine which current event is most likely to affect your audience, and place that at the top of your agenda. Then you methodically explain said event, so your viewers or readers retire for the night with a clearer sense of the world, and their place in it.

Unless there's a gunman on the loose. Then you just shout like a wanker.

That masturbatory term is a fitting one. When it develops an obsession with a particular kind of story, the news turns into an idiot with an erection. Its IQ plunges 50 points and it can't stop till it's satiated.

The hunt for Raoul Moat got the news so flustered, it shrieked its reports at a pitch several hundred octaves above satire. Beneath a photograph of Britain's Most Wanted Man as an infant, The Sun ran the caption "Cute baby … but two-month-old Moat clenches his fists". On the front page, his estranged mother apparently wished him dead.

Moat was so enraged by this kind of coverage, he threatened to kill a member of the public for each inaccurate report he came across, like an extremist wing of the Press Complaints Commission. The police requested a news blackout on stories relating to Moat's private life. Soon the rolling news networks were reduced to filling hours of airtime with speculation about what kind of campsite he might have built. To make this seem exciting, they'd yabber that "the net" was "closing", or read out exhaustive lists of how many the guns the police had.

When the police cornered Moat on the outskirts of Rothbury, the immediate advice to everyone in the vicinity was this: for your own safety, go inside and lock your doors. The BBC's Jon Sopel recounted this information as he strode down Rothbury high street, moving as close to the standoff as possible. At the cordon, a distressed and tearful woman explained that her mother's home was in the sealed-off area. She rang her mum. Sopel asked her to put it on speakerphone. "That's a bit impersonal," said the daughter. But she obeyed.

Then Sopel borrowed the phone himself, presumably so everyone at home could enjoy hearing how scared the old lady was. After several minutes he handed the handset to the woman's husband, who was standing patiently on the sidelines, waiting to speak to his wife. The phone was still on speaker when Sopel passed it back, so the man's conversation with his shaken wife was also broadcast live on air, with a camera trained on his reaction.

In the background, lads attracted by the cameras grinned and gave the odd thumbs-up, lending events the air of a live Children In Need link up. Why stay indoors for your own safety when you can walk outside and be on TV? If I was 15, I know what I'd do.

Meanwhile, other reporters were competing to get as close as possible to an armed confrontation with a mentally unstable gunman with an acknowledged hatred of the media. On air, they whispered down phones so the police couldn't hear them. Sky's James Matthews crept to "within metres" of the standoff until an armed officer caught him. "Crept up silently, first I knew was when I felt his breath on my cheek," he tweeted. There were other tweets from TV reporters, written in a breathless hurry. Channel 4's Alex Thomson apologised for the rush: "Sorry lots of Bberry tweets in dark running thru peoples gardens evading cops – some spelling may have gone astray".

Eventually a shot rang out. Matthews held his microphone in the air and captured it for posterity. The muffled blast was replayed over and over on Sky, while Kay Burley asked an expert to assess what the "significance" of this single shot might be. The expert thought it sounded like a suicide. He was right. Raoul Moat had done as the front page suggested. The story had come to its end.

And we all retired for the night with a clearer sense of the world, and our place in it.