The frightening pointlessness of rolling news channels was amply demonstrated once more last night, with BBC Radio 5 Barely Alive’s coverage of the Norwegian vileness.

First, the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner decided to opine – apparently in the absence of too much evidence – that the events bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack.

“Seems a little surprising,” I thought. “A blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian speaker apparently acting alone doesn’t seem too much like the multi-handed al-Qaeda atrocities we used as an excuse to bomb Arabic-speaking little brown people back to the Dark Ages.

“But, hey. This is the BBC. They wouldn’t just – you know – make it up as they go along, would they?”

This morning I awoke to the news that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian speaker is apparently a Christian fundamentalist with a history of decrying Islamism and multiculturalism.

Yet this morning’s Today programme was curiously bereft of Mr. Gardner fessing up to the fact he’d been talking shit 10 hours earlier.

Worse still, the BBC’s rolling news radio network inexplicably thought that the appropriate way to cover the tragedy was to phone up and ask for a comment from Jan Åge Fjørtoft.

Mr. Fjørtoft is an intelligent and erudite Norwegian who speaks fluent English, but I still don’t see what expertise he can bring to the analysis of these events in his capacity as a former professional footballer for Swindon Town, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Barnsley.

Maybe he was the only Norwegian in the duty producer’s contacts book…

Ironically, Mr. Fjørtoft was bumped mid-sentence by the stereotypically hyperventilating presenter precisely because the producers had managed to find someone to talk to who actually had some involvement in the day’s awful events.

If these rolling news networks can’t actually cover breaking stories with a semblance of competence, then what exactly IS their point?

But then perhaps I’m missing the wider point. Maybe the only appropriate reaction to acts as senseless as those in Oslo and Utoeya is utter senselessness.