Can it be done?

It was done. Teletext delivered news, sports results, horoscopes, closed captions, all directly to your TV in real-time. It was quite clever as a pre-internet method to deliver text content to every home.
All the people in the comments here being unaware of this makes me feel old.
- It was not a thing in the places I grew up in. But when I saw it working during a European visit, it blew my mind. That was 20 years ago.
  
  I don't know how it is in other countries, but at least here in Germany teletext is still a thing and works on all the larger channels.
  
  It's at least 30 year old technology. Maybe older.
- The current generation doesn't even know what a VHS is. I'm sorry, time comes for us all.
  
  My nieces once asked to see my rectangular DVDs...
  
  I do. I’ve never seen or touched one, but I know what it is.
  
  Do you mean a VCR? Or A “VHS tape”?
- Teletext in the Netherlands has an app now. People still use it.
  
  Hey, while it looks like a dog's breakfast, it is an incredibly low bandwidth solution for such a useful service.
- On NY1 they just straight up read the newspaper to you on TV.
  
  There are many radio shows around the world dedicated to reading news articles for print impaired people. Great for when you're driving as well.
- Some places didn't have that.
  Like places in Asia jumped from radio to cable tv to mobile phones, skipping intermediate technologies like tv with only one or two channels, computers etc
  
  That surprises me. Many parts of Asia have a big gambling scene; one of the main uses of Teletext was horse/dog racing odds in real time.
- I remember this, but I think it was only one local channel here. It would show community events, snow plow schedules, and things like that.
  Or was that something else?
  
  There were many pages, I'm not sure if you count that as channels? Then the Teletext for closed captions were tied to the channel you were overlaying on.
- Still exists in Sweden, though I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

It was a thing for most of the world, I just don’t believe it really caught on in the US, it was called teletext and was really widely used.
Video explainer
- Can confirm. It was common here in Norway. My dad got most of his news updates and weather forcasts from there, as he was usually busy during the evening news broadcast.
- we still have teletext in Ukraine even though noone really uses it. (and also we don't have analogue tv anymore, but it's still possible to use them somehow afaik)
  there's even an online version of the most popular one (Intertext) which has a realtime chat feature (you can text a specific number to send your own messages, kinda like discord lol)
  http://intertext.com.ua/
  
  It's weird that Noone would travel all the way to Ukraine to really use Teletext. He must love it!
- I kind of miss Ceefax, the BBC's Teletext service. The immediacy meant that headlines were often broken first on Ceefax before TV or radio, but the limitations meant there was little room for overly-verbose fluff. I remember using it in the early nineties for realtime flight arrivals at our local airport, so we knew when to set off to collect my grandparents.
  I remember reading about a system used somewhere else in Europe where you would call a phone line and use your phone's dialpad to navigate the Teletext on your TV - that sounds very clever.
  
  I believe you're thinking of France's minitel (wikipedia) . I never used or saw it myself. Living in a neighboring country, i did see quite some adds mentioning it on their tv stations. Trente-six-quinze-minitel! Club Dorothée FTW! :)

"We need a cheery headline for our upbeat vision of a bright future."
"How about a fuckload of dead people."
"No, no, it needs something else..."
"They drowned."
"You may be into something..."
"And we'll mention some are missing, suggesting that some families will never get closure and will spend the rest of their lives haunted by visions of the nightmare that might have befalled the one they loved."
"By jove! Brilliant! Okay, now about the videophone picture..."
"How about a wife getting a call about her husband from the coastguard..."
- Retrofuturistic cinematic universe
- I love how the way you ended it implied that the dude in the picture is not her husband and he’s seemingly now hopeful that the husband is among the 35.

2023: "can we turn it off?"

"Hm — twenty dead and fifteen missing!"
- "I could have sworn I killed more..."
  
  —Me, currently finishing up the last missions of Dishonored
  
  Spies sappin meh dirigible!
- Me keeping track of Russian casualties
- I feel like this image has meme potential.

In Germany we say Teletext
- In Denmark it was called text-TV and was an integrated part of every channel, own button on the remote and all. It was retired a few years ago since almost nobody used it anymore..
  
  It's still available. https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/100
  The content is mostly auto-generated, but it still serves a purpose for showing subtitles.
- Wrong! It’s called Videotext.
- It's mostly just another advertising channel for premium phone numbers and bs horoscopes, phone sex lines or bs "surveys" where you txt an expensive number. All the content is autogenerated like weather, sports results or program preview.
  
  Ukrainian one has a phone number you can text to post messages in a global chatroom for around 1cent per message
  the chat is still up and full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reason

Yes, it can indeed be done, it's called Teletext. But by the time computers with internet showed up, people slowly but surely stopped caring about it.
At least there's still that red button on my remote that I can press to access some spiritual successor to telete- oh wait, I don't live in a country that has this. ~~So I booked a ticket to the UK~~

Imagine them pulling it off back then, but without coming up with any scroll function!
- And televisions back then were tiny and not great in terms of resolution/clarity.
- The solution is called paging. It's the concept of dividing content into chunks of discrete size, then provide a mechanism to change the currently shown page. The mechanism typically consists of commands such as "next page", "precious page" and "goto page number." This system was initially implemented in paper-based media such as books and newspapers.

https://www.svt.se/text-tv/300
Even exists on the internet in Sweden
- same in Ukraine lol
  http://intertext.com.ua/
  or telegram: @IntertextTVbot
  there are even phone numbers you can text to post messages on it's messageboards for a couple of cents(and they're still up!)
  (and they even kinda modernized that by allowing messages to be posted from the Telegram bot too)
  (... the messages are full of bisexual men looking for partners for some reason...)
- On a similar note, television news shows are called "The TV Newspaper" in Danish (TV Avisen).

Ahh, teletext.
- An invention way ahead of its times, just like Duck Hunt

Ha! Imagine reading text off a screen. So dumb.

It's weird how some of these futurists got some of the details right (viewing news on the TV) while missing the obvious (being able to read / select / zoom-in on one article).
Can you imagine how awful it would be to project a newspaper's front page 1:1 on a TV, then try to read it? Even with a 4k TV the text would be small, and there's no way you could read it from the couch.
- I don't have to imagine. I was there 3000 years ago. In the early days of the web they saved entire newspaper pages (as printed!) as single image files. You'd have to zoom in and pan around the page to read it. It was absolutely painful.
  
  Sir, today every country has a national anthem. Did they have national anthems 3000 years ago?
- I use a 4k television as a monitor for my daily driver. 43” LG UQ8000. So it has 4:4:4 and 60fps at 4k so long as the host supports it over HDMI 2.0. And it’s barely usable at 4k if they don’t, between the lag and the sub pixels, it’s honestly a better experience at 1080p or 1440p cropped.
  With 4k, 444, and 60fps, though, It’s not that bad, even without font scaling, except for certain regions due to the contrast ratio/glare (which isn’t that bad, and I’m not trying to limit the glare, either) or due to viewing angle, being so close.
  It’s not the highest quality, but it’s a serviceable way for me to have an 8.3 megapixel desktop, and it was like $300 so I’m happy.
  Granted it’s also on a standing desk, so I’m pretty close and can get back a little while still being comfortable too.
- I remember hooking my desktop up to a large CRT TV to play StarCraft via composite cables with an adapter. But the resolution didn't work. You couldn't read shit. Could play but not chat with my friends

Finally tablets and phones achieved this a little later than expected.
Still prefer my articles written than having someone read it to me. I'm not 5 cheers.
- Since we're mentioning tablets, then I'd say desktops and laptops achieved this a decade earlier.

Those poor bastards had no idea that by the time this would became reality, most of the results on screen would be junk they don't care to read. News coverage is sold to the highest bidder.
- Do you think it was any different back then?
  
  Yes. Definitely yes.
  There were some pockets of propaganda, especially during election times, but it's nothing compared to the continuous avalanche that exists today.

YABBA DABBA DO

So basically news articles. With a little bit of coding and a printer you can also print the latest news articles and tape it to your monitor.

Unfortunately no, we missed this important piece of technology
- Not really though. In Europe teletext was very prominent (and is still available today, at least here in Germany). It’s basically a newspaper on the TV.
  Now, the only person I know who still uses it is my granddad who wishes nothing more than for the internet to be more like the teletext.
  
  There are apps that show teletext which, acording to some, are quite popular. It does somehow fit into a retro scifi aesthetic too if one's into that kind of thing 😄
  
  Based granddad
  
  It’s also still a thing in Sweden too. Nowadays it can be viewed from a website or an app. There’s even CLI clients so you can view “text tv” on the command line: https://github.com/voidcase/txtv
  
  Insert plug for !teletext@fedia.io
- Advertisement, denial of privacy surveys and paywalls ensured that.

no. it can not.