Well if you just want the information, it is a waste of bandwidth. However it does give the producer the ability to know how the viewer will actually see it. For instance, I run with no graphics, my own color scheme(orange on black), and my own fonts. The flash will look the same to me as it will to anyone else, but plain text or html won't. Sadly, news is not about content anymore, its about "spin". So flash will allow the "mass educators" to present the stories in a way that spins well for them, and force you to view advertisements as well. Actually, I think flash is useful to advertisers for exactly that reason. Since it is a plug-in, it will load even if you have "images off" in the browser. I think the sponsors got "hip" to the trick of people turning off the "animated gifs", now they are all using flash. Of course you can still circumvent them, with a scheme of copying libflashplayer in and out of it's plugin location....but most people don't do it.