[feedback doctor]

That's true. But, at the very least, the character generator had to be programmed to "flash" the text every 15 frames or so. And someone had to be monitoring the source, in order to perform the fade.

Programming a cg to flash takes about 3 keystrokes and can be done in less than a second. And I would venture to say that this cg defaults to 2 flashes per second. As I said, it's likely that someone in another control room was doing something with a CG and had it over some video, and that control room was accidentally 'punched up.' When I was doing production and setting up the CG I would put it over a video source (I usually used the net feed), as when the playback tapes for your production are stopped you generally lose sync and don't see the CG overlay properly.

[Reactionary]

"And I would venture to say that this cg defaults to 2 flashes per second."

It makes little sense to have a character generator that "defaults" to displaying text that no one can perceive with the naked eye.