On the morning of September 11, 2001, it was business as usual on TV news.
CNN was reporting on Nokia stock prices, Bryant Gumbel was sampling fettuccine alfredo on CBS’s The Early Show, while on Today, Katie Couric was chatting with Harry Belafonte about a new music anthology.
For much of the previous decade, Americans had been preoccupied with celebrity scandals, like O.J. Simpson’s murder trial and the death of Princess Diana. During the summer of 2001, the news media had seized upon the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy — yet another salacious story turned into infotainment.
But everything changed at 8:46 am, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
On September 11, roughly 90 percent of Americans followed the events on TV. CNN was the first national network to break the news, cutting from a commercial to show “a very disturbing live shot” of the Twin Towers at 8:48 a.m. Initially, it still appeared to be a terrible accident. By 9:03, when another plane hit the South Tower, it became horribly apparent that the country was under attack.
A deluge of updates followed: Plane crashes at the Pentagon and Western Pennsylvania. The collapse of both towers. Flights grounded across the country. The White House and the Capitol evacuated. It was entirely too much information, coming too quickly to be conveyed in the traditional broadcast format or by a single voice. So the major cable news networks added a “ticker” (or “crawl”) to provide a constant stream of brief updates for their viewers. The innovation, so obvious in hindsight, allowed viewers to keep up with the latest alerts in real time — much faster than any anchor or correspondent could read them from a teleprompter.
Fox News was the first to add the ticker, at 10:49 a.m.: “A DAY OF TERROR IN THE UNITED STATES… TWO PLANES CRASHED INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK… WTC TOWERS COLLAPSED… MANHATTAN IS SEALED OFF.” CNN followed suit minutes later, while MSNBC — which, like Fox News, was then a relative newcomer to the 24-hour news business — added its own crawl around 2 p.m.
The news ticker was not exactly an unknown concept in 2001. The iconic Motograph News Bulletin in Times Square — a.k.a. “The Zipper” — had been flashing headlines from around the world for more than 70 years. But before September 11, the feature was used sparingly on TV, usually to display stock prices during financial news programs or share storm warnings in specific regions.
By December 2001, however, constantly scrolling headlines became a permanent fixture on TV. The New York Times Magazine cited “the crawl” as one of the breakthrough ideas of the year.
Typically, the Crawl consists of about 80 items, which take 10 minutes to cycle through. There’s a simple rationale: in the past two months, news has become impossible to channel through a single televised human. Short of having anchors shout over each other like dueling auctioneers, the Crawl is multimedia’s best alternative to Babel.
In the immediate weeks following the attack, as the world learned more about Al Qaeda’s plot and the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan, the Crawl served a clear purpose. “It becomes a way to tell the whole story,” said David Rhodes, then at Fox News. “When I started working here, [Fox News chief] Roger Ailes said, ‘Always have something on while something is going on.’ Well, something is going on all the time now, so we have to keep the viewer informed.”
TV executives, concerned about the bottom line even in times of national crisis, also believed the Crawl would appeal to two lucrative demographics: young people who were used to multitasking, thanks to the relatively nascent internet; and wealthier folks, who could easily read the scrolling text on their big-screen TVs.
But, rather quickly, it also became a way to distract viewers with an infinite stream of less-than-essential updates, relayed with the same sense of all-caps, must-know urgency. By September 25, Fox was already spicing up its ticker with tidbits about Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA. Personalities at the network, who covered the initial events of September 11 with restraint that seems surprising in retrospect, quickly pivoted to calling for indiscriminate bombings and ranting about flag pins. In January 2022, Fox News beat CNN in the ratings for the first time, a position it has maintained for nearly a quarter century.
The ticker didn’t go away in a week, a month, or even a year. It became a way to aggregate reporting from other sources and cover stories pushed out by breaking September 11th news. It offered a handy way to keep viewers tuned in, especially if the main story didn’t hold their interest, or the broadcast cut to commercial when the scroll was mid-sentence.
The New York Times uses extra-large headlines on stories it deems to be extremely important. But the ticker achieves the opposite effect by presenting all stories — from celebrity gossip to military actions overseas — as visually equivalent. The ticker remained a fixture on cable news through the aughts and beyond — long after the wreckage at Ground Zero had been cleared and “mission accomplished” had been declared in Iraq. (CNN even tried to kill the Crawl in 2008, only to bring it back five years later.) By emerging at a moment of profound national tragedy and then never leaving our TV screens, the Crawl contributed to a sense that the country has been in a state of perpetual crisis for 25 years (which, arguably, it has).
From early on, media critics raised concerns about the ticker and its effects on the nation’s already-frayed attention span. In October 2001, a piece in The Austin American-Statesman described watching this iteration of the news as “the television-watching equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your tummy. And wiggling your toes. And flapping your elbows.”
This concern was well-founded. According to research by Michael Keefe-Feldman, a graduate student at Georgetown University, viewers retain less information when newscasts are cluttered with tickers:
Even a news story that is important to a viewer may be more difficult to comprehend and retain in memory when presented on a cable news screen that is frequently shared with a ticker, a station logo, stock quotes, a lower-third banner offering provocative story titles and an upper screen split between a news anchor and video footage or an interviewee.
These words were written in 2007 — before smartphones and tablets were ubiquitous, before Zoom meant we grew accustomed to talking to each other through little boxes on our laptops, and before Hollywood started to dumb down TV shows so they would be suitable for “second-screen viewing” (a.k.a., halfheartedly watching while scrolling on our phones).
The cable news ticker served a vital purpose in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Viewed in retrospect, it was both a convenience breakthrough and an ominous harbinger of the information overload to come.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian