You can't help but notice it... the anchor back in Washington says something, they toss to the correspondent on the other side of the Earth, and you get a few seconds of silence as they just stand there waiting for their cue to rain down from the sky in bursts of ones and zeroes.

I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but I just noticed on FOX News that when Tony Snow tossed to the correspondent in Jordan, FOX put a full-screen transition animation with sound effect/music to cover a large portion of the satellite, relays, and A-to-D router delay. I can't remember if it had a fly-in map or not.

Very clever magician's trick to wiggle the fingers on the left hand while the right hand is reaching for the stowed-away rabbit.

Also, a lot of videophone reports are being framed with the correspondent's location, which unit they're embedded with, a bug or two, and the ever-present ticker. The impact of the reduced resolution and pixelation of the phones is reduced considerably, and it doesn't depend on some wired-up producer in some glass booth in Atlanta or New York to scream a cue over a flaky IFB connection when their news system can't compensate for delays, let alone can the producers backtime manually in their head anymore.

Just as the military is refining and testing procedures to run their operations more smoothly, so is the media.

One final note... just as pilots train on flight simulators, it wouldn't be a bad thing for J-schools and major networks to consider running Satellite-Delay Simulators for producers, correspondents, and up-and-coming anchors.

Of course, with a glut in the talent market, who needs to waste money on training when you have a whole crop of disposables to pick and choose from, especially when those you train only end up getting picked off by the competition.