Do the Crawl!

I am, when I have access to a television, a compulsive 24-hour news junky, and what I think I have in common with all other compulsive 24-hour news junkies is our compulsive need to know the news, 24 hours a day. That’s why I love “the crawl,” the constant rotating headlines at the bottom of the screen on 24-hour news channels, and why I can’t understand that some people don’t love it.

Although it’s been documented that, in the era of 24-hour news channels, the average news cycle is decreasing steadily to approach 24 hours, it will probably level off at some point; at the same time, the amount of newsworthy events that occur in any given day will definitely level off, and may already be decreasing. For all that I love news, I actually can’t stand news channels, and when I had access to a television I rarely stayed tuned into one of my top three (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, in no particular order) for more than 15 or 20 minutes. That’s because they all stink: when there’s no news, they stick a blathering talking head in the studio and he rants about something irrelevant; when there is news, they stick a blathering talking head in the studio and he rants about something relevant. These people are always uneducated, always bad interviewers, always afraid of any challenging ideas, always hired based on voice and facial appearance rather than knowledge and intellect.

By constantly repeating the latest headlines in text format at the bottom of the screen, the news channels allow me to turn my head at any moment of the day, or turn on the television (in the strange unlikelihood that it’s not already on), or flip over from a different channel (usually a Law & Order rerun) and find out immediately what’s happening. Then, if there’s a high-speed chase, or a press conference, or a verdict, or a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, I can begin focus on what the moronic anchor is staying. The value of “the crawl,” therefore, is that it manages to compensate for the overall lack of new information a person acquires in 24 hours of watching the news. I highly recommend it.