Death to the Crawl!

Time Magazine’s James Poniewozik writes about whether the crawl should go; a subject near and dear to my heart…

And it was a microcosm of the hyperagitated news culture in general. The nine years that followed 9/11 were years of genuinely big headlines: Iraq, Katrina, Lehman Brothers. Yet it was sometimes hard to distinguish truly monumental events from ordinary news amplified by monumental technology. Every natural disaster, it seemed, was the worst ever, every potential pandemic the most deadly, every financial crisis the most dire, every terrorism alert the scariest, every political division the deepest and most acrimonious.

Of course, just as you occasionally make a vow to turn off your ringer and stop taking text messages at dinner, the networks have tried lately to set up ticker-free zones. It now disappears during some news specials and opinion shows. In 2008, CNN substituted a more genteel “flipper,” which turns over lazily like a line on an old arrivals-departures board.

But nine years later, our news screens remain cluttered with data. Once the media’s volume level goes up, it’s hard to take it back down. It just keeps ticking … on … and on … and on …