Well, since this is the Pit – Your annoyance is entirely without basis!
That contradicts what ABC WH correspondent Jake Tapper said - “not able to watch any real time”. 
Yeah, both of these things I didn’t know at the time, but I think they are relevant.
No it doesn’t. They had a real time camera, but the connection failed when they got in.
It’s not their job. They get all presidential speeches early, as Rachel Maddow said on the Daily Show. They are often told not to speak about something ahead of time.
If you’re in a hurry, go to 4:47 and listen to the end. Heck, I had the time, so here’s a transcript:
[spoiler]Jon Stewart
Did they tell you guys–before the president made his speech–what had happened? Did everyone know?
Rachel Maddow
We had an understanding of what the president was going to announce. But not that far out in advance. I mean, nobody had advanced planning notes for “Sunday night, somethings going to happen.” It wasn’t like that at all. But once it was clear that the president was going to make an announcement, then people started getting word about what the general content of that was going to be.
Jon
It was funny to watch people be so coy because you knew they knew, and so they would be like, “And so I can tell you that it’s the CIA, involves a very skinny man, a man you might think has rickets.” Like they were trying–how do you walk that line?
Rachel
It’s the same way you deal with an embargoed speech; sometimes, a couple minutes before the president–or somebody else very important–is going to give a speech, you get the full text. And then you get all these pundits who say, “I think what we ought to expect tonight from this. . . ,” and you are thinking, “You’re a speed reader! I can see you skipping ahead in this speech to ‘predict’ this thing that you know is going to happen.” So people lie about that stuff all the time.
Jon
You know what I loved about that? Suddenly I felt like I was like a student: “What do you do when that happens?” “You know, you get the speech before hand.” “What?”[/spoiler]
Regardless of what the White House said, embargoing known facts is not their job. And note that Maddow did not say in that interview that there was an embargoed speech in this case. And furthermore she said that “people were getting word about the general content,” but she didn’t say that anything at all was embargoed. Indeed, in a case like this in which the facts are so important, I would say that their duty is not to hold back what they know. The White House can ask them not to say anything beforehand, but a journalist’s obligation is to the public.
And generally, if a journalist doesn’t feel bound to respect embargoed information, they will probably not receive it in the future.
ETA: but in this particular case, journalists were surely made aware of the general issues in order to hype up the forthcoming speech. Or to annoy Irishman. Either way, mission accomplished.
Is it too much to ask to have them switch to the President when the President is actually approaching the podium?
The White House notified the networks that the President was going to speak at X time (I think it was 10:30 p.m.) The President didn’t walk out at 10:30, or even 10:45. So the networks had two choices – go back to regular programming for whatever length of time it might take (which might have turned out to be 20 seconds) or have their anchors sit there filling time until the President reached G.W. Bush at whatever restaurant Bush happened to be that evening, had a second conversation with John Boehner and finished letting the Ambassador from Pakistan bitch to Hillary Clinton. Given the circumstances, no one was exactly sure when he was going to pop into the East Room.
Also, you might have noticed that ABC, NBC and CBS did not have their lead anchors on for the start of the broadcast (I think Brian Williams showed up something like 20 minutes later). That means they were putting the whole show together on the fly.