Viewer Discretion Advised by McCall Jeffrey;

Author:McCall, Jeffrey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1343718
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

On-Screen Crawls

One need not be a psychologist to know that even alert people can only grasp so much information at any one time. Then take average audience members, many of whom are doing other things while trying to watch the news, and try to figure what television news organizations are trying to accomplish by running on-screen crawls. This practice has more to do with pushing an image of hip modernism than with informing audiences. In particular, the crawls are designed to appeal to younger news audiences and get them interested in the news, the assumption being that young adults raised in an era of computers and multitasking can process the on-screen video and the wordy crawls at the same time.

Much academic research has focused on the limited capacity of audience members to receive multiple inputs while processing mediated messages. Basically, if you are paying attention to the newscaster, you are missing the crawl’s information, and the other way around. Trying to go back and forth between the messages, which are not synchronized in any way, likely leads the viewer to misunderstand key elements of both stories. While news managers insist that viewers like the crawls and that the motivation is simply to provide more information, research indicates that the practice is not helpful from the standpoint of informing an audience and its only possible benefit is image promotion. Researchers Lori Bergen and Tom Grimes of Kansas State University, along with Deborah Potter of the NewsLab, conducted experiments that concluded that viewers cannot effectively process parallel messages at the same time and likely lose some meaning from the message they focus on because of the distraction caused by a competing input. Further, in spite of the common wisdom about younger viewers being able to handle multiple messages, the research showed the young viewers to be no more efficient in processing information than the general population.

Thus, crawls might produce a trumped-up sense of ongoing urgency, but their utility is generally nil, particularly when the crawled headlines are filled with fluff and routine news items.

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