Emblematic of this live radio experience were Edward R. Murrow's News reports from England, especially during the Blitz,which began with what became Murrow's signature opening, "Hello America. This is London calling." Murrow's phrase became synonymous with the newscaster and the CBS network. It was the human voice to the inhumane insanity of men at war.

(Murrow, by the way, was the iconic journalistic icon whom Keith Olbermann was channeling in his nightly commentaries on MSNBC before his unceremonious departure from the network last week.
Murrow was also the main focus of the fascinating biopic, Good Night and Good Luck, starring George Clooney--well worth your renting.)

In the 60's, Crises of all stripes and magnitudes became the near-exclusive playground of the 800 lb. gorilla, television, with filmed and occasional live coverage of wars and other crises and more felicitous events like the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, one of the first transatlantic TV broadcasts. Murrow also anchored the first network transcontinental live TV broadcast. Broadcast network ruled news.It was a network's crown jewel. Its prestige. Its identity.

Then, some 30 years ago, a 24-hour news network, Ted Turner's Cable News Network, CNN, was launched and ten years later it realized and cemented its place in the pantheon of journalistic moments. This "moment" broke into the open when Bernard Shaw, the network's first primetime, prime news anchorman spoke from the Al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad, and said, simply, "Something's happening outside," the media's coverage and the world's viewing of or participating in national and international crises had changed irrevocably.

That "something" to which Bernie Shaw was responding in perhaps the modern newsworld's most under-stated broadcast observation, was the explosive beginning of the American-led coalition's bombing of Baghdad, the effective commencement of the First Persian Gulf War, on, January16. 1991.

CNN, cleverly and rather fearlessly, was the only live, network broadcasting news game in town. Since then, we've become accustomed to watching live coverage of war and rumors of war, of revolutions succeeding and failing, heroes being made and dictators being undone. CNN, its anchors, field reporters and their collective moxie and guts, ushered in the new era of live coverage of natural and man-made political and social upheaval. The rest is literally history.

As I write this, we don't know what the short- or long-term outcome will be of the people's revolt against the America-friendly but brutal dictatorial regime of Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak. But dramatic changes are clearly underway, right before our viewing eyes and into our listening ears.

On January 25, 2011, street demonstrations in Egypt, began, coinciding with the obligatory "celebration" of "Police Day, acknowledging the roundly hated Internal Security organization of Mubarik's government, Egypt's equivalent of Russia's KBG, East Germany's Stasi, the late, overthrown Shah of Iran's SAVAK, and other brutal domestic police and intelligence organizations.

We know that, just as we're watching to find out, to take in, to speculate and conjecture and listen to "experts" opine on events and their possible meanings and implications, so are President Barack Obama and all kindred West Wing principals, governmental personnel and agencies. They have more information sources than we do, more "boots and ears on the ground" and eyes in the sky than we do, of course. But, we're all watching the TV, sharing this communal wafer of live, instant communication.

We're all watching the cadres of professional and citizen journalists, in the studios, on phones or Skyping in hotel rooms in Cairo, and on the streets in Alexandria, exhaustively, day and night and day again, bringing us the world as it happens-or at least as their cameras and eyes see it happening and their biases and sensibilities offer interpretations in this fog, this chaos of unrest and turmoil.

Around the country, around the world, various groups sympathetic to the Egyptian people living under 32 years of Mubarak's questionably legitimately elected government, are marching and protesting. This is all covered by the media, reported on Facebook and, in Egypt, where possible, given intense media control by the government, adjusting, adapting, coordinating, mobilizing and listening to pundits and experts trying to promote or predict the future, the end game, with their words, their digital images and their anxiety over what will be the next game-changing move.

Citizens and politicians in nations around the world are glued to their multi-media information streams, desperately trying to figure out "what does this mean for us?" Research shows that as news anxiety rises, news consumption rises accordingly as hope leads to the belief that more watching will bring more clarification which, in turn, lowers anxiety. That generally works in the same fashion that more drugs will reduce the desire for drugs. In other words...

Types of News consumers: From Bulimics to Anorexics, and beyond

In times of crisis, people inhale great gulps of news, information, images and commentary. How they consume these foods for worry and thought runs a wide spectrum. There are at least a handful of crisis media users types across the range of media platforms including TV viewers, print readers, listeners or Internet surfers of video, bites, clips and tweets:
bulimics (for whom all life stops and attention narrows down to "the crisis"). They epitomize the crisis-as-theater-or-entertainment Type.
abusers (listen/watch/surf at work. The crisis interferes with but doesn't stop life.
peek-a-boo snackers (check in every hour on the hour from their daily schedule)--true information gatherers.
sensible diners (nightly news, morning paper),
anorexics ( avoid all crisis and honker down and drill deeper into normal life-distracters --"where the hell are my Soaps [or the Jets-Steelers game]?)

Then there's the special type -- The Skin Gamers, those who have loved ones over there or those with political ambitions or responsibilities hinging on unfolding and outcomes: think of exiles looking to return and govern, like Iraq's Ahmed Chilabi or Afghanistan's Hamed Karzai or Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). For them, it's constant scanning. Their lives or those of their loved ones literally hang in the balance of the resolution of the crisis.

For the rest of us, we watch in our own style of crisis news consumption, raising our anxiety levels, watching oil prices spike, pondering the possible Domino Effect in the Middle East after the people of Tunisia chased their home grown, decades-long dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, out of town. We wonder if Al Jazeera's coverage of Cairo and Alexandria's powerful unrest may ignite similar unrest in the restive clutch of tinderbox Arab or Islamic societies. These are dynamically fragile nations with population majorities of frustrated youth, beggared underclasses, and gold-coast minority power brokers. Still other watchers s frown, swallow and ponder Israeli reactions.