Fallout for TV editors after 'Queengate'

The BBC is currently engaged in frenzied soul-searching about whether it deceives its audience, as part of the fall-out from the trail which wrongly suggested the Queen had stormed out of a photo-shoot. The problem is that you don't have to look very far for deception in TV - it is inevitable, necessary, and right that producers should invoke 'the magic of television' to make programmes watchable. Let me give you an example.  Probably 99% of the interviews you see in reports on TV were shot on one camera. The reporter and/or producer pitch up in the interviewee's office, and set up their camera locked-off on the interviewee's face. There is no camera pointed at the interviewer. At the end of the interview, the reporter/producer will shoot some cutaways - that is, the reporter nodding sagely, the interviewee's hands moving expressively, or something else which catches the eye in the office. This will allow them to edit the clip - that is, butt together the two best things the interviewee says, rather than taking a very long chunk; they can use the cutaway to cover the edit, so it doesn't show. If they haven't got decent cutaways, they may use a 'flash edit' or some such, but that will give the game away that the clip has been edited, and distract the viewer.Of course the cutaway is meant to give the impression that the reporter was nodding contemporaneously with the interviewee's words, when that isn't actually what happened.

Quite a lot of people know that this is what happens, and I suspect 99.9% of the rest wouldn't mind if they did know about it; it's perfectly innocent, and doesn't misrepresent in any significant way.  If viewers want broadcasters to send two camera crews rather than one to every shoot, so they can get contemporaneous cutaways, they're going to need to pay a great deal more for their TV; it doesn't seem like the smartest way to waste the licence fee.  But today's Daily Mail makes the scandalous charge that in an edition of 'Flog it!', a lady was seen bidding in an auction apparently bidding for an item which her husband complained she hadn't bid for.  I'm quite sure the husband was right - but isn't this getting a bit silly?  Does it really matter?  So the cutaway of the audience at the auction wasn't contemporaneous with the auctioneer's words; does it really matter? Presumably they didn't have enough cameras.  We should focus only on misrepresentations that do matter - the Queen didn't storm out of the photoshoot, so she was definitely traduced; if an audience cutaway during a politician's speech showed people yawning or heckling when they weren't, that would be wrong.  But producers know that, and they take trouble not to be unfair to people in this way - not least because they wouldn't have a leg to stand on when the complaint or the libel suit came in. 

Comments

[Stan Rosenthal]

How do you rate the BBC cutting away from the climax of Blair's valedictory speech to make way for some more Wimbledon chat? Perfectly innocent or sweet revenge for the Hutton report?

[Feral Beast]

That wasn't actually what happened. The decision to insist on the Daily Politics coming off air was taken by someone in scheduling who didn't understand about the significance of the moment. It was a cock-up, and the BBC apologised for it immediately. I can't see a shred of evidence for it having anything to do with Hutton.