The Misanthrope's Corner.(TV news 'crawl')(Brief Article)(Column)

To say that someone "keeps up with current events" is inherently flattering, a compliment denoting seriousness, civic responsibility, and all the other right stuff. An honor student enclosed in a good citizen wrapped in a home owner, you might say.

I used to keep up with current events but now I "follow the news," which, I have begun to sense, denotes qualities of a very different sort. We could play around with various descriptive adjectives -- "furtive" and "hunched" come to mind -- but the best way to define it is to restate what it is that I now follow: the Nooze.

What, exactly, is the Nooze? Well, for starters there's the now- ubiquitous crawl, the ribbon at the bottom of the screen that enables us to follow still more Nooze while we are following the Nooze. The crawl came into being with 9/11, when terrorism took up so much airtime that they had to find some other way of reporting everything else. After a month or so the crawl was no longer necessary, but by then it had become one of America's "instant traditions," like the public hand- holding of presidents and first ladies begun by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Every news show had a crawl, and none dared be the first to stop.

The crawl is now a repetitive, ungrammatical melange of eccentric doings that is impossible to ignore. If terrorists took down another landmark building nobody would notice because we are too busy reading the crawl.

Since becoming a Noozehound, I have been dominated by the crawl in two ways. One is my neverending quest for the Ultimate Crawl. It's my Golden Fleece, my Holy Grail, my El Dorado, and I think I've found it. It sailed across the bottom of the screen a few months ago and there hasn't been anything to match it since.

It said: "A survey of Ukrainian prostitutes found that most took to the streets to avoid office work."

The obvious question here is why anyone would take a survey of Ukrainian prostitutes, and the answer is even more obvious: to have something to put on the crawl. CNN probably sends teams of crawl- fillers to remote corners of the globe to research whether riding bareback on wild ponies affects the testicular-cancer rate in Mongolia. The crawlspace is full of Nooze You Can Use, but it came too late for me. As a college graduate in the sexist '50s, I was consigned to boring office work, and I can testify that nothing makes a woman more desperate than being surrounded by typewriters and calculators when she knows what deus ex machina means. It's a wonder all female liberal-arts majors didn't become tarts.