http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section4-6.html?pagewanted=print
A few days after 9/11, Lori Bergen was watching television news and, in her words, "slowly going insane." She was glued to the tube but couldn't focus on what she saw. Bergen, a journalism professor at Kansas State University, blamed "the crawl" - that stream of headlines, sports scores and weather updates constantly slinking across the lower portion of the TV screen - for her inability to concentrate.
"It was distracting, how it was moving all the time," she says. "It made it so easy to drift away." So Bergen took a piece of duct tape and placed it on the bottom of the screen. It let her focus. And it made her wonder: Was she the only one who became distracted?
To find out, Bergen and a Kansas State journalism colleague, Tom Grimes, along with a researcher named Deborah Potter, designed a study in which students were asked to watch a set of stories from "CNN Headline News."
Half the time the crawl was at the bottom; the other half it was edited out. What the professors found was that students watching the show with the crawl remembered about 10 percent fewer facts than those who watched without it. To Bergen, it was more than a personal vindication. It challenged the notion, trumpeted by media executives like the former Time Warner C.O.O. Robert Pittman, that today's young people somehow absorb information differently than previous generations did.
Learning by constantly nibbling at bits and bites from multiple sources at once - what people in the business and computer worlds call "multitasking" - just doesn't work well. It makes you only more distracted, less effective.
CNN seems to have gotten the message - sort of. Some of its on-screen graphics have been reduced in size from about two-thirds of the screen to less than half that. "We don't want to overshadow the main picture or the anchor," says a network spokeswoman, Christa Robinson.
But the crawl is not going away, she adds: "Catering to multiple interests at once is just in sync with viewers' body clocks. That's just the era that we're in."
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