Continuity error with TV

But it hadn't happened yet, unless the movie is told out of order like Pulp Fiction. He was arrested he day after hacking and they were at Nikon's the night before, as far as we know. I get why movies do stuff like this. It's like in Blade Runner when Deckard is testing Rachael and we hear fragments of questions he hasn't asked yet echoing in the background. But here it seems more like they edited the scenes out of order by mistake, not for an artistic effect.

I just went back and rewatched it to refresh my memory. I've always noticed the editing of that part and never felt like it was an error.

But I think you're right! The thing is, the lighting in these scenes always kind of threw me off. When Joey goes to hide the diskette, there's light shining in making it seem like early morning. I always kind of assumed that it was late enough to be early morning, just before the arrest, and that the guys were watching it as it happened, and the scenes played out out-of-order in the movie. The same type of lighting is in the TV scene, and it looks like early morning when the Sun is already shining. But the problem is, moments before, when they're entering Nikon's place, Cereal asks him if he can spend the night. So it's clearly supposed to be sometime at night, regardless of the lighting (which could easily be explained by street lights).

In other words, I could easily chalk up the order of the scenes to an artistic choice, if it weren't for the fact that as presented, these scenes seem to be implying that it's happening at night, which then begs the question why they're watching the morning news at night.

I always assumed that they had been at Nikon's during the arrest. But the way it's presented, it's like they got to Nikon's at maybe 6:30 am (at which point "night" is already over) and then Joey gets arrested at 7 am, with news crews somehow there as it happened. And nobody bothered to get any sleep? Why would Razor and Blade be broadcasting so early in the morning? There's enough questions that I'm willing to concede it's probably just an editing mistake. They probably intended that scene to happen after his arrest, but ended up putting it in before because it worked better with the flow of the movie.