On a side note, been switching channels around (English-only at this point, no energy to parse the Arabic coverage of this yet) and have to say BBC coverage has been a lot better than the competition.

CNN has been fairly staid.  Not terribly insightful, but not really terrible, except in flashes.  They cut away to their White House correspondent for a moment, and she had something like this to say:  "It's a holiday week in Washington, but I was just talking to a spokesperson..."  In other words, everyone was caught off guard and she had nothing to add because only the third-string is in the office today.  But CNN does seem to have this institutional need to cut away to the White House for comment, even when there's no comment.

Al Jazeera English, sadly, is completely hopeless.  This is too bad, because I usually like them, but I don't think they've done well with breaking news in the past, either.  Their correspondent was really floundering and started into a long digression on gender in Islam that I found utterly incoherent.  Poor guy, seemed a bit out of his depth.  At the moment it looks like the whole channel is run by very handsome 22-year-olds.