1. A system to detect garbled closed captioning data, comprising: a receiver to receive an encoded video data stream containing closed captioning data; a decoder to decode the encoded video data stream, and to reorder frames in the encoded video stream into display order; a closed captioning data detector to detect closed captioning data in the decoded, reordered video data stream; a data extractor to extract individual data elements from the detected closed captioning data; a data counter to count a total number of data elements in the closed captioning data as a total data element count, and to count a total number of data elements in the closed captioning data having a particular characteristic as a total data element characteristic count; a memory in which to store the total data element count and the data element characteristic count in the memory; a garbled closed captioning data detector to determine a metric as a function of the total data element count and the total data element characteristic count; and an alert generator that generates an alert in accordance with the determined metric.
4. The system recited in claim 1 , wherein the particular characteristic is one of a word length that is greater or equal to 10 characters and a range of word lengths such that the lower bound of the range of word lengths is at least 10 characters.