CAMPOut: Did you Catch the News? It's Harder Than It Sounds

I’m talking about that infuriating and relentless news crawl that’s been on the bottom of our televisions since 9/11. Exactly how much simultaneous information do we need?

In a time of national crisis, having breaking news at eyeball level was innovative and informative. Now it’s just irritating.

Turn on the set and you see a reporter, with film of beautiful downtown Baghdad in the background. It’s interesting but you can’t process the words or the scene because the bottom of the screen is screaming about FBI warnings, debunked diets, sports finals and Eminem’s rank on the music charts. With time, temperature and weather graphics for city after city scrolling in one corner, and the NBC Peacock or CBS Eye blinking in the other, where the heck are we supposed to look? Chiropractors all over the country must be seeing people for whiplash from looking six directions at once.

One news channel reserves the upper left hand corner for really frightening stuff like flood or tornado warnings. Confusingly, another channel uses the same corner of the screen for news network logos. Turn on the set and you see a logo of crossed palm trees and, depending which channel you’re watching, it’s either film from Saudi Arabia state television or a gale warning for Pensacola.

Sometimes the juxtaposition of items is entertaining. A reporter blabs about the President’s tax cut and the bottom crawl acknowledges the anniversary of the day the Hindenburg Blimp blew up. I didn’t know which story was about a bigger disaster.

The thing about these news tickers is that the fronts and backs of sentences are forever being lopped off by station breaks. You come back from a commercial and see "…found alive in the wreckage." Who? It sounds like a living hell. And it takes another twenty minutes staring at the bottom of the screen to find out it was a box of worms from a science experiment aboard the Shuttle Columbia. Yuck.

You glance away from the talking head in the middle of the screen for just a second and see the words "hoping to avoid the worst meltdown since…." And bang, we’re right back at a commercial. Worst meltdown since Chernobyl? 3 Mile Island? No, I had to sit through a whole hour of headline news, which by the way, repeats more often than that, to find out somebody was accused of having the worst meltdown in NBA history. Foul.

At one point I saw a blurb announcing a class in make-up application taught by drag queens. Now this is something I would have liked to know more about, but it’s like a phantom headline. No newspaper, magazine, internet site or evening news breathes another word about it. I think interns make this stuff up and type it onto the AP wire.

And speaking of drag queens, that’s who I thought the phrase "taking off their horsehair wigs and elaborate gowns" was referencing, but no, an interminable time later I discovered that the crawl was about British jurists contemplating changing their traditional garb.

I loved the CNN piece about an Asian city under threat from SARS, where a shortage of disposable face masks prompted women to use brassieres instead. Go ahead, picture it. Not only was the picture worth many thousand words, but the news crawl happened to be about zany new fashion trends. Coincidence?

Actually, it might not have been a coincidence, since some stations enhance their incredible shrinking commentator’s words with a news ticker about the same subject—giving you additional useless facts and figures about the story in progress. Other stations just crawl completely random factoids and trivia just to distract you. It’s cruel and unusual punishment.

Often, the shorthand needed to put complex stories into news crawl form breeds confusion.

"Sen. Kerry accuses President Bush of waging a war based on questionable intelligence."

Okay, maybe that’s not confusing at all.

Following are some of the news items I managed to see either the beginnings or endings of, but never found out another word:

"….but over brushing of teeth is harmful."

"100K angry bees sting truck driver in…"

"…beating her with an iron skillet."

And my personal favorite, "…when sour neighbor busts lemonade stand."

Quick cuts and splices may be fine for the MTV generation, but just trying to read the damn thing gives me a headache.

Apparently, I’m not alone, because I found a web site petition online called "Stop the News Crawl!" I signed it, although I imagine its fate will merely be fifteen seconds of fame some day on the bottom of my screen.

But the final humiliation comes closer to home. Since every Sussex County morning is fog bound, the regular cluttered mess of a screen is reduced to a third its size so the local station can run school delays. My favorite is the curious crawl, "John the Baptist two hours late."

During the school delay marathon my 27-inch television screen is reduced to the size of the set I watched Howdy Doody on in 1955. Boy I’m glad I didn’t buy that 54" $8,000 flat screen plasma TV so I could watch a 13" screen surrounded by a flashing list of every charter school on the Eastern Shore.

Frankly, now that all news is breaking news, including, this morning, a crawl announcing the box office receipts for Dumb and Dumberer, what will happen when we actually have some national emergency? I guess they’ll just break in with, gasp, a full screen of some newsperson talking directly to viewers. The novelty will be absolutely riveting. Shock and Awe.

Meanwhile, time marches on. Also weather, hockey scores, lotto numbers, stock prices and Elvis sightings. Film, and who knows what else, at 11.