THE “CHYRON” IS HERE TO STAY!

…The message on the bottom is a “chyron”

TV’s chyrons can be snarky, they can be trolls, and they can fact-check.

How many of you know what a “Chyron” is, or how to pronounce it?

A chyron is an electronically generated caption superimposed on a television or movie screen, usually at the bottom or in the bottom left corner of the screen.

The word is pronounced: “Ki-ron” with a hard “i”, and it came from the name of a wise and powerful centaur in Greek mythology.

These “on-screen banners” were once boring, artless labels such as: “President Holds Press Conference,” or “Fire Destroys Home,” etc.  They were about as exciting as an airport arrival-and-departure board.

But today, they’ve become a part of almost every news broadcast, and are as familiar as the news anchor sitting behind the counter.  Within moments of the start of a newscast or panel discussion, the info-billboards on the lower third of the TV screen begin their silent unfurling:

In an era of shrinking viewer attention spans, chyrons seem almost to have come to life and achieved self-awareness. Now chyrons not only tell viewers what the news is, they tell them what to make of it.

The irony is that TV news started as a medium of moving images. Chyrons are about text, and type, and headlines. They’re a throwback to a pre-TV age, when people actually read the news.  Which means that if the chyrons had a chyron of their own, it might read, “Chyrons: We’re Just Like the Headlines in Your Newspaper.”

Here are three examples of chyrons from three different networks:

• “German ambassador to U.S. responds to Trump’s NATO summit slams,” reads the headline on CNN.

• “With friends like these: Trump remarks irk some NATO members,” says the banner on Fox News at almost the same time.

• “Retired U.S. general: Putin is ‘happiest guy on the planet’ after Trump’s comments,” the caption beneath MSNBC’s talking heads declares a moment or two later.

Today, TV’s chyrons can be snarky, they can be trolls, they can fact-check, and they can offer new issues in real time such as:

• “Trump signs MLK Day proclamation after calling African countries ‘s***hole’ nations.” (MSNBC, January 2018).

• “Trump: ‘I don’t support WikiLeaks’ (He loved it in 2016.)” (CNN, April 2017).

• “Trump: ‘For the last 17 years Obamacare has wreaked havoc’ (Law signed in 2010)” (MSNBC, July 2017).

• “Trump: ‘We’ve done a great job in Puerto Rico’ (Most of island still without power)” (MSNBC, October 2017).

Chyrons began to evolve as real-time fact-checks during Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches.  But more recently, as a means to lift a rhetorical eyebrow over some questionable presidential statement or dramatic development. 

Trump himself reportedly pays close attention the bottom-of-the-screen banners, watching them on a muted TV during meetings and reacting angrily when they trumpet another presidential scandal, or false statement.  Chyrons, in other words, have become potent agents of influence.

They have become so important that TV reporters, such as Greta Van Susteren, who has hosted political programs on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and now Voice of America, said the following: “I would tell the network: ‘You can ask me what you want, but no writing on the screen.’”

When cable channels began airing Trump’s harsh and noisy campaign rallies on live TV, the reporters couldn’t, or twouldn’t, speak over Trump. The only thing that could be put between the candidate’s blunt, and many times untrue pronouncements, was an on-screen banner.

So the chyron became a real-time vehicle for challenging Trump, who was a candidate and later a president who often lies to all of America.  (per The Washington Post Fact Checkers:  Today, Donald Trump averages 7.6 falsehood per day.)

The chyrons do the heavy work of squaring Trump’s record while simultaneously adding some winks and eye rolls in the parentheses.  Here are some examples:

• “Trump: I never said Japan should have nukes (He did).” (CNN, June 2016).

• “Trump says he watched (nonexistent) video of Iran receiving cash” (MSNBC, August 2016).

• “Trump: “Voters don’t care about seeing tax returns,” accompanied by an underline reading, “Poll: 78% say Donald Trump should release his tax returns.” (CNN, September 2016).

This is why our president continues to refer to “real news” CNN as “fake news”.  Trump knows when he is lying, but he also believes that the more he repeats the lie, the better the chance that his base will start believing it.

It is true that CNN and MSNBC do use fact-checking chyrons the most.

Of course, Fox News wouldn’t dare do this to Trump.  But they sure did serve up some mighty troll chyrons for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

One example: “A tale of two candidates. . . Hillary in hiding while Trump’s out on the trail.” (October 2016).

Thus, the chyron solved a problem that the networks created in the first place, said Jane Hall, a journalism professor at American University.

“They gave [Trump] such a platform for so many rallies that they had to figure out a mechanism for pointing out that many of his repeated assertions weren’t based on fact,” she said.  “He’s live on the air promulgating things that are prove-able, not true. [The networks then] decided, here’s the way to deal with it.”

“But chyrons have also been a boon to Trump too, who has exploited the brevity and constancy of them to his own political advantage,” Hall said.

“He’s a master at messaging, at using the same phrases over and over, like ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘carnage’. . . that fit easily into a chyron and reinforce his message,” she said. “It’s impossible to get any context across in a chyron about those things. Print [reporters] can put the facts and the context in. TV really can’t. It doesn’t really have a mechanism for that.”

Chyrons also became a way to grab viewers’ attention as they surfed through hundreds of channels.  A dramatic or intriguing banner can stop a channel-flipper cold, and can keep wavering viewers from turning away. That’s why the chyrons change so rapidly nowadays: They create “urgency” for viewers.

“In order for people to stay connected to something on a TV screen, they need consistent reinforcement that the story is developing, that there’s new information,” said Marc Greenstein, vice president of design and production for NBC News and MSNBC.   “The chyrons help do that. The urgency of live TV is one of the remaining core strengths of broadcasting.  Chyrons also help grab the eyeballs of the many people who watch TV while glancing at a second screen, such as a smartphone.”

Finally, the sensory bombardment of the chyron does reduce our ability to be critically analytical, which intensifies any confusion, and that may make viewers more susceptible to false or inaccurate information, such as that provided by the president.

I believe that getting rid of the “ticker” type of chyron, as MSNBC has done,  is the proper way to go, as it does clear out much of the clutter.

The reality is that the “chyron” is a good thing and it is here to stay.

Copyright G.Ater  2018