No, not Anderson Cooper. A visual calm (well, not quite that) has come to CNN. The cable network has retired its bottom-of-the-screen news crawl (“The Ticker”) and replaced it with rotating phrases/headlines (The Flipper”) that actually stay static on the screen long enough to be read (and sometimes even have something to do with what the anchor is saying at the time). CNN exec Bart Feder is touting the lack of visual clutter, the cleaner “screen space.” This from the channel that brought us presidential debates with such on-screen graphics as the “perception analyzer” and pundit scoreboards.

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.