Lewis Black Demands End To The "Crawl" on CNN

The vein-popping anger of one of my favorite humorists, Lewis Black got directed at CNN yesterday in an interview with Miles O’Brien. He directed his comments directly at the management of CNN and said, "…you guys have got have got to…take the thing off the bottom of the page. Take the words off the bottom of the screen! There are people talking here." Amazingly the banner and crawl disappeared for the remainder of the interview.

Black voices the frustrations that many American’s feel in his commentary, myself included. The barrage of sound bites, crawling half-sentences and numbers scrolling onscreen convince us that we are getting lots of real news. What we are getting is crap. Edited, censored, distilled crap that will raise our blood pressure and convince us that we need to stay glued to the screen incase something really important happens and we miss it.

Here’s the news. We won’t miss it. In this age of home video, 24-hour news and more no event goes undocumented and it will eventually reach our eager eyes soon enough. Just because we missed the first bomb falling on Baghdad during the first Gulf War, we didn’t miss seeing the anti-aircraft rockets replayed millions of times on the news channels for the next 14 years.

In reality it really doesn’t make any difference. Our power to stop things like the current crazy war is not dependent on seeing it happen sooner than anyone else. Though "breaking news" may offer a distraction, it rarely offers anything useful unless it concerns eminent danger such as an approaching tornado. Real news needs to be analyzed and considered to be useful. To see events in perspective and to see the bigger picture we need time to think critically. Critical thinking is the antithesis of the modern 24-hour news machine. Critical thinking requires that we actually do some of our own research to form a cohesive and valid opinion on unfolding events. Sound bites and press releases are not news; they are tools of marketing departments.

We have commoditized our information and treat it like buying gas. We go to where we can get it fastest and cheapest with as little time spent understanding it as possible. That is why our nation is in such a mess. The kind of stuff Lewis Black rants about is precisely what we need to be examining closely. Otherwise we are just buying whatever is fed to us without question and are nothing more than a nation of sheep.

Thanks Lewis for getting CNN to drop the crap for at least a few minutes. Lets hope your voice is heard on a higher level and real journalism and news returns to the airwaves someday.