I’ve written a few times in this space about things that really get me cranked … about robocalls and other things; there have also been other posts in the distant past that I can’t find at the moment.
But I have yet another pet peeve to share with you … all the stupid, distracting crawlers and logos that occupy the bottom part of your TV screen when you’re trying to watch the news. You know what I mean … the “breaking news” headline about some cat stuck up a tree, the “weather update” that tells you to tune in at 11:00 for a weather update, the endless crawl of the stock ticker across the screen, and the spinning, pulsating logo of the station in one corner. AARRGGHH!! CNN and Faux News are notorious for these distractions, but every pretty much every news broadcast down to the local level is guilty. Here's an example , which in this case occupies about a third of the screen and provides multiple distractions:
This one, presented by House Republicans in an attempt to portray their view of the complexity of health care reforms proposed by House Democrats, is an excellent example of including unnecessary detail and unclear connections to confuse an already difficult issue:
Good luck with extracting useful, decision-quality information from either of these slides.
Remember two famous adages: William F. Buckley's famous admonition to "eschew obfuscation," and the often-ignored advice to KISS - "keep it simple, stupid."
Have a good day. Say what you mean, without obfuscation and distraction. Everyone will thank you.
See you tomorrow for the next installment of Great Moments in Editing. More thoughts then.
Bilbo
6 comments:
Screenjunk is most annoying when you're trying to watch a comedy. It intrudes the real world back when you're engrossed.
USA Today is big on chartjunk.
I like the pretty colors in the second chart so it must be a good chart.
I'm glad you cited the names for it!
This irritates our family as well.
Then you add the fact that most days we have on our CC because we can't hear well and we can't read the CC because of all the screen junk. oh the fun.
I don't like the crawls at the bottom of the screen, but especially when they are ads. Those charts are undecipherable.
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