The title does the heavy lifting. Bonta's poem never mentions a television, a screen or an anchor. It names "24-hour news network" and then lets the lines behave the way such a channel does: they keep going, and they barely stop to make sense.
The opening couplet shrinks the whole machinery of broadcasting, with its studios, cameras and scrolling tickers, to a single organ. "Some mouth has run / all night and day." That "some" is offhand and a little contemptuous, the way you might wave at "some guy" you can't be bothered to name. The verb carries a lot too. A mouth that "runs" is one that talks too much, but the word also suggests a tap left on, an engine idling, even a sore that won't close. The present perfect, "has run," says the talking began in the past and shows no sign of finishing. Every word in this stanza is a single syllable, eight plain beats in a row, so the language itself sounds flat and worn, like a voice that has been going far too long.
In the second stanza the grammar starts to come apart. "what ills not heard of" has no proper verb, and it can be read two ways. It can be an exclamation: what ills, what unheard-of ills, there are. Or it can be a quiet suggestion that some ills go *unreported* despite the endless talk. The phrase "not heard of" is a loose cousin of "unheard of," meaning unprecedented, and there is dark comedy in that. These ills are supposedly beyond anything we've heard, yet they are being heard this very minute and will be again in the next hour. The mouth is set against the ear here. One keeps running while the other is left to take it all in.
Then comes "which extraordinary news as good." The "which" has no clear antecedent to hang on, so the sentence sounds like speech improvised on air, trailing off one clause into the next. The line also swells around "extraordinary," the only long word in a poem of short ones. It stands out like a headline's inflated adjective. The irony is that a word loses its force when it is used all day, every day. If the extraordinary arrives hourly, it has become routine, and the word ends up meaning the opposite of what it says.
The last two lines turn on a line break. "As good" pauses for a moment on its own, so that the news is briefly just *good* before "as any peace" qualifies it. Because "as good as" is also an idiom meaning "practically" (as good as new, as good as done), the ending is slippery. It might mean the dreadful news is, for the network, as valuable as peace would be. It might mean that news of ills has become a substitute for peace, something we consume in its place. The phrase "any peace" matters as well. Peace here is generic, one interchangeable item among others, with no particular peace in view. Since the poem is about reporting, it is hard not to hear "piece" inside "peace," as in a news piece, though that is my inference from the sound and the context rather than something the poem states.
The sound supports this. The final stretch is full of hissing consonants: "ills," "news," "as," "as," "peace." They give a faint static or whisper, the sound of a broadcast left on in another room.
The poem has no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. There is no full stop to close it, so it doesn't conclude so much as stop, and the reader senses the talking carrying on past the end of the page. The lines run 4, 4, 5, 5 and 3 words, so they widen and then contract suddenly, like a breath cut off.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. In twenty-one words, Bonta offers no sermon about the media. He lets a disembodied mouth, a stretched adjective and an ambiguous ending make the case. What stays with the reader is the unsettling suggestion that when disaster is talked about continuously, it can start to sound like comfort, or like something to sell.