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Unfortunately it appears no one has ever heard of any similar occurance of "fooling around" in thousands of hours of TV for thousands of viewers.

Although your explanation is plausible, it is not probable. This X is consistent with other behaviour in the media, and given that in millions of hours of viewing no one can think of a similar event - it appears intentional.

I would expect the only unintentional part of this story is that the people responsible will be caught.

I believe it was done intentionally, but I don't think the graphic overlay was created specifically for the job. Instead, I think someone mucked around with a piece of equipment knowing that it would generate the black "X". This gives them plausible deniability after the fact.

That is, the black "X" image is probably some valid output of the device, indicating lack of signal or whatever, and the technician knew it could be made to do this. So he tweaked it a few times during the speech. When caught, he easily plays the "mistake" card.

Although your explanation is plausible, it is not probable. This X is consistent with other behaviour in the media, and given that in millions of hours of viewing no one can think of a similar event - it appears intentional.

Rational indeed, you've nailed it on the head. Yes, this is not an uncommon editing symbol, yes, there are plenty of ways to accidentally get this on the air, no it does not happen.

We're back to the Mapes story, in a way - it is up to the network to provide evidence that this is not all that unusual of an event (yeah, right) and that it was truly an accident (again, yeah right.) Proving that it was unintentional is impossible, in all reality. Even if this was some freak accident where one of the editing bay computers was pulling data down from the speech and somehow got set to get fed directly into the board and the folks running the board pulled the editing bay computer onto the air...

Sorry, not going to happen. Even giving every benefit of the doubt, the simple reality is that no one will believe them at all. The RATs will snigger about how some MSM unit pulled a fast one, and the Republicans will be ticked that they were watching Fox and now can't claim they'll stop watching CNN since they already don't.

The most sane response from CNN should be 'The person responsible has been sacked, and we apologize to the White House for the irresponsible actions by our employee.' No one would even bother to know the technician's name, and really, no one would even have to be fired (but it'd be nice if they did.)

But instead we'll see the same old typical liberal response when they get caught with their pants down... Lie. Ghads it gets old.