Most TV's these days let you pick where the closed captioning resides, either the lower or upper third of the image. Check your menu settings to be sure, but you should be able to set that for upper or lower. Some sporting events use both the upper and lower thirds for graphics...you'll just have to play with it to see what works for you.

I guess I'm used to subtitles doing it (yes, I know they're different) so maybe I expected captioning to recognize the chyron's and get placed above them.

Yeah, unfortunately that can't work the way the closed captioning system is currenty done. The graphics information gennerated by the Chyron becomes part of the program image while the closed captioning data is encoded and sent seperate from the program image. That's how you can tell your TV where to put the CC data, since it's something your TV is adding over the image. I suppose that it's technicially feasable to write some sort of recognition software that would recognize the presence of lower third graphics but I don't know of any TV that has that as an option.

ca.youtube.com/watch?v=zc9ONU1OvTs&feature=PlayList&a...