Happy Birthday, News Crawl

I feel like a sap even writing about this. The television news crawl is celebrating its fifth birthday this week. Oh, sure, news tickers existed before 9/11, but now they're a fixture on cable news channels, and sometimes on network news shows. I think that TV news tickers existed on foreign news shows prior to scrolling onto American news programs. (This isn't a very well researched posting, I'm sorry. If you want facts, go to Powerline or Snuff Film Fans for Truth.) But with the massive amount of breaking news and information on 9/11 and the days and weeks following, news programs brought out the crawl, and it has remained at the bottom of our screens, distracting us from the main news stories (just the way they want it...). And the crawl on Middle Eastern news programs moves in the opposite direction, offering a graphic illustration of the epic clash of civilizations currently being waged. One time I was watching CNN and they showed a clip from Al-Jazeera. The site of the two scrolling news crawls moving in opposite directions gave me a seizure. Not really, but I'm going to sue Al Jazeera if their news crawl harms me in any way.