No more -- stop Blitzer before he speaks again
I don't think it's his expressionless eyes or the tightly manicured beard; nor does it have to do with his knowledge of specific world events, with which he displays a certain ease. I think it starts with that voice -- unmodulated and yet overblown, a singsong that seems always to be posing a big question that never gets answered. The sound of it alone, tinny and incessant, perfectly captures the urgency and nothingness of the 24-hour cable news cycle.
What I'm trying to say is that Wolf Blitzer makes me nervous. Also anxious and cranky. Possible symptoms of the Blitzer Effect include headaches, nausea and low-grade dread.
Blitzer, a holdover from the era before the crawl, when CNN was CNN and he became a fixture of international reporting for the network, is not supposed to represent the problem with 24-hour cable news.
But that voice, it's killing me lately. There is precedent for this. It is the infamous case, some years ago, of the woman reportedly driven to seizures by the voice of "Entertainment Tonight" co-host Mary Hart. According to a letter published in the 1991 New England Journal of Medicine by neurologist Venkat Ramani of Albany Medical College, Hart's voice triggered in the patient "a feeling of pressure in the head, epigastric distress, and mental confusion.
"Systematic testing revealed that the seizures were precipitated only by the voice of the female cohost and not by visual stimulation, emotional anticipation, or background music; by other programs with a similar format; or by other female voices," Ramani went on. "During a two-year follow-up, the patient remained relatively seizure-free by assiduously avoiding the specific program and taking a combination of carbamazepine and divalproex sodium (for blackout spells)."
But "assiduously avoiding the specific program" is harder when you're conditioned to flip to CNN, where Blitzer is the eminence grise of the network. For this reason I can't exactly pinpoint when the Blitzer Effect took hold. If pressed, I would attribute these feelings to his overexposure during the Iraq War and the 2004 presidential election, but I can't be sure, for it has carried over to otherwise ordinary news days, with Blitzer anchoring "Wolf Blitzer Reports" daily from 2 to 3 p.m., posing questions and bellowing headlines with that Blitzerian alarm.
"Black smoke rising from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel!" he announced the other day, as if the place were on fire, "a sign that the world must continue to wait for a new pope."
- Knotty Press Exchange Ends in Tie for Clinton Jul 03, 1993
- Barack Obama, Al Gore raise the roof at Invesco Field Aug 29, 2008
- CNN plans new afternoon lineup May 12, 2005
