Like Rudolph Giuliani, the news crawl was great on 9/11 but was soon useless and despised. Now CNN is killing it, and hopefully Fox News will too, if the Simpsons mock them again.

Supposedly the cable news network threatened to sue (UPDATE: not really) its News Corporation siblings at the Simpsons in 2003 over the clip above, in which Fox News' already-infamous "crawl" is mocked, depicted running headlines like "Rupert Murdoch: Terrific Dancer," and "Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay."

CNN's ticker might have been less politically controversial, but it still irritated many viewers to no end, including Lewis Black, who famously demanded the ticker be removed from underneath him during a CNN interview two and a half years ago (video of that is also in the clip above).

After rolling it out on 9/11, 22 minutes after Fox, CNN is retiring the crawl to give its screen "a less cluttered look," reports the Times.

Instead there will be something even more freakish-sounding at the bottom of the screen: a "flipper," which will be a line of text, usually related to whatever's on the screen. The text might "flip" over to show new information, but in a way CNN claims "doesn't give viewers a headache."

CNN: Always striving to patronize viewers a little bit less than the competition.