Sorry for no screenshots, but still. I tried KDE4 (including trunk) on OpenSuse11.0. Everything seemde to work quite smoothly, and I tried different plasmoids. Among them I tried the news-feed plasmoid. And while it seemed to work it looked like.... well, ****. It was basically just a 100% transparent box. It looked like it was missing the Oxygen-artwork completely.

I didn't pay much attention to it, since I was just testing it, and I assumed that there was a bug in my system. But last weekend I tried Kubuntu 8.10, and on that system too the News-feeder looked exactly the same.

So, is this by design, or is there something genuinely wrong?

I use the RSSNOW Plasmoid and it looks fine ( I built it from trunk on my KDE 4.1.2 install ). See this post here on how to install it.

You are right however, yes the news ticker has absolutely no art, and definitely needs a looking at. The text scrolls up and out of the square black box surrounding it.