So I finally posted some content on my SnapChat last week in regards to Tucker Carlson’s departure at the News Channel with Searchlights. It’s unclear what the hell is really going on, but that’s not my point today…
It’s all about superficiality and parasocial relationships the Boomers and the remaining Silents (folks born before the mid 1940s.) While a number of them remain off the Internet grid, their social media is old fashioned cable, and the talent on camera.
This is a complete airing of The O’Reilly Factor in summer of 2001. They were using Quantel’s Paintbox for full screens and ID animations but at some point that ol mini was taken to the curb. But in the Talking Points memo, you can see that infamous Chyron “iNFiNiT! effect”, the default blind effect that was often fired off a change of titles. CNN was still on iNF!N!T!, going back to 1994 as well as NBC News and MSNBC. I thought for a while the Chyron iNFiNiT! was used but thought they went to Deko by this point, maybe for some productions and master control (where the cube bug and later crawl space later on.) Hearst and Gannett stations had standardized on Deko, and stations like WCVB-TV’s 2000 graphics package was cued off a Deko. WMUR-TV was an early Deko adopter, the 1997 graphics package and doing some other research implies they were using it well before the Hearst takeover of 2001.
According to industry scribes, FNC had adopted Vizrt for their animation of their IDs in 2001, and at some point Fox had used Pinnacle (later Avid’s) Deko “Computer Graphics” generator it seemed to be in 2004 in a uniform graphics change.
The side shoulder graphics were tacky for it’s time. A bit dated on the font, and it was bulky a/f! It wasn’t the last time the 80s looking ITC Avante Garde was used at the network, a decade later when on their second VizRT graphics package. It was horrible.
In the late summer of 2001, the graphics artists at the Fox News Channel introduced a new “bug” (industry lingo for the logo that’s featured in the lower third of an older TV set) to basically confirm what never had ever been confirmed before it. TV Sets can burn in. 
It was well known for computer related screens that if a certain type of text would appear in the same area for hours and days on end, that the bulky cathode ray tube screens would burn in. In fact over time, near the end of CRT TVs, “flat screen” which means no bulging or rounded curves on the corners, this effect was less harmful.
But the issue began for many Fox News Fanboys (and maybe some fangirls) when the network launched in 1996, nearly 5 years after major TV operations moved to Paintbox, Chyron’s iNFiNiT!, or Pinnacle’s Deko, and the advancement of Adobe’s Photoshop and the popularity of Apple’s Macintosh systems, this lead to the first time in television history that modern computer generated graphics would appear for longer periods of time. As a result, many reported burnins, and as a result Fox News Channel, created a 2-dimensional cube of it’s iconic logo that would rotate slowly, on a 10 second cycle.
Sometime in the last few years, FNC dropped the cube, and returned to a “static bug” on the lower third. The Fox Business Network would launch in 2007, but didn’t have a bug that would rotate, other than some glow effect. FBN shared FNC’s look in late 2018 or early 2019.
Can LCD or OLED flat panels be burned in? The answer is yes. And it can cost you money, even News Corp’s money. When Fox owned WFXT, they built them for all intensive purposes a new facility for their news in 2003. Three years later, Roger Ailes had ran the O&Os and introduced the O&Os the cube logos for their stations to mimic FNC. They paid $10 million in 2001 dollars to build out the expansion (2001 was the time of the project, while the fall of ’03 when they launched it.) News Corp is known to be stingy, but they kept their flat panels in their newsroom studio, even when the news wasn’t on, so you could see the old horizontal logo when the logo changed in ’06. The Beacon Street Studio also got damaged from the lack of proper brightness controls or just for the love of god turning the screens off when there’s no news programming!
In short: FNC’s and FBN’s creative people should research maybe doing a “dark mode” for their crazy primetime yakkers to prevent this from happening and prevent what happened 20 years ago to happen again!
