I haven’t had cable since I moved out of residence, so I haven’t seen the crawl in question. I am also assuming the “crawl” is what I call a “news ticker”. If not, disregard my comment.

I can remember watching an interview once with a news anchor of some sort and the question was raised “What’s with the stock ticker, the weather, latest sports stats, and crawling headlines? It only leaves two square inches for the anchor!” and they answered something along the lines of there is an impressive percentage of news-watchers that have a TV on their desks or something and it has to remain muted. So it’s for the audio impaired.

However… could close captioning be used to make the ticker optional? Flick it on and off as we please? It might help those who find it too distracting.

The news-ticker that seemed to start propagating after September 11th is a great source of post-modern poetry. They have the same decontextualizing effect that computer-aggregated news headlines have on news websites. Where else can you see: “SARS Death Count Spikes” and “J-Lo and Puffy, on the rocks” on the same screen?

CNN once showed me two great headlines, about a day appart. The first: “Widespread Famine Expected in Ethiopia”. The second: “Famine Averted in Ethiopia”.

Here’s another “ticker” item:

—WHO ACKNOWLEDGES SARS THREAT—

It took a minute to decipher that this wasn’t a poll i.e.”Who acknowledges SARS a threat?” , but in fact, “World Health Organization acknowledges that SARS is a threat”.

Unless you are old enough to remember Roger Daltry…which only adds to the confusion!

Don’t like the news crawl or news ticker? Just go to TVtape.com,…. they sell a product that acts as a black filter that adheres to your TV, no sticky residue, works perfectly to block out the crawl.