The Daily Beast reported Thursday that even CNN’s own journalists are questioning the news outlet’s almost entirely conjectural coverage of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a story that single-handedly rescued CNN’s ratings last week from a steady decline in viewership.

The Daily Beast piece provides a few glimpses inside CNN, where some express concern over the channel’s increasingly hypothetical coverage:

"Is it really news coverage, when there is no news to report?" an anonymous CNN staffer asked in an email to FTVLive, a television business insiders’ blog.

The email seemed representative of the handwringing said to be occurring in various cable newsrooms among journalism traditionalists. FTVLive’s proprietor, TV news veteran Scott Jones, noted that while the NBC Nightly News on Tuesday took two minutes to give “all the new information” on the story, CNN “took all day to give you the same information… CNN's coverage is mainly just a group of talking heads guessing what might have happened to the missing jet."

The piece cites Frank Seson, a former Washington bureau chief for CNN, who highlighted the difference in the network’s approaches to Ukraine and the missing flight, arguing that CNN was covering the Flight 370 story “way too much, especially given this other gigantic story that’s unfolding in Crimea.”

But others at CNN, like Jake Tapper, have defended its exorbitant coverage, arguing that public interest is a legitimate reason to promote one story over another, telling The Daily Beast, “When there’s intense interest in an important story we often focus on it for several days if not weeks.” Calling it “one of the biggest aviation mysteries in history,” Tapper signaled that he will continue to devote coverage to the story so long as he felt there was an audience and that it seemed “worth covering in depth.”

Meanwhile other stations have taken aim at CNN and some of the other stations, including Fox’s Bill O’Reilly who called the coverage “out of control.”

But like the Carnival “Poop Cruise” story and the seemingly non-stop Bridgegate coverage, the overkill approach has worked for CNN over the last few weeks. As one anonymous “industry wag” told The Daily Beast, “Too bad for CNN that there isn’t a missing plane or a natural disaster every day.”