“ The crawl, as it is called, the unending stream of news capsules that have inched relentlessly across the bottom of cable news programs for seven years, disappeared from CNN last Monday.
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The Flipper Challenges the Crawl - NYTimes.com
The crawl came to life on the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a way to report the crush of news, first on the Fox News Channel, and, 22 minutes later, on CNN. The information scroll has since become an amalgamation of wire service summaries, tabloid story updates and promotions for upcoming shows. It is a cousin of the stock market ticker that began scrolling across cable business news in the 1980s, and a child of the horizontal “zipper” of news headlines that began lighting up the tower of the then-headquarters of The New York Times in 1928.
