01 February 2009
Was the BBC Wrong about Obama?
I've subscribed to a site called Poynter, which deals with news issues. I commented on
whether the BBC was right to join up phrases from Obama's inauguration speech in order to focus on his "green" pro-science credentials.
Writers' and Broadcasters' Responsibilities
It's got me thinking. It's an extraordinarily difficult area, and those of us who are in the business of communicating with others need constantly to monitor whether we are offering misleading information in our attempts to make our work readable or watchable.
Now that increasing numbers of people get information from the uncontrolled internet, I hope discussions like this will not start to seem academic.
Roger T wrote:
Funny that Poynter should get excited now, when editing broadcast speeches and interviews has been going on for about as long as the broadcast of sound recordings. Is it worse than taking a few words out of context for a newspaper headline? Or paraphrasing a sentence into a few words and presenting them as a real quote?
(Jim Callaghan's "I promise if you look at it from the outside, I don't think other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos" famously became the Sun headline "Crisis? What crisis?".)
I find subtle distortions more worrying because they can be insidious and hard to counter. One that bothers me is presenting an interview as if it was series of unprompted remarks by the interviewee. That can give a very different impression from the one you'd gain from the two-sided conversation. It usually happens on radio - it's a bit harder to do it with pictures. But on TV, the pressure to provide pictures to go with a story can lead to some dodgy practices.
A few years ago, on TV news, I saw an audience erupting with laughter and applause at a politician's joke that had been heavily criticised as being in very bad taste. But the event had been recorded in sound only, a fact that was casually mentioned on another programme.
Once looked at critically it was obvious that the video footage had been faked up from another speech, so the audience had been laughing at a different joke. In my view that is beyond what is acceptable, but apparently no-one else noticed.
In the end our only protections against misleading information are a multiplicity of news media, and a lively public commentary on what they are presenting. But anyone who cries "wolf" (sorry Jenny) at every edited speech will soon find their warnings disregarded.
Feed
(Jim Callaghan's "I promise if you look at it from the outside, I don't think other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos" famously became the Sun headline "Crisis? What crisis?".)
I find subtle distortions more worrying because they can be insidious and hard to counter. One that bothers me is presenting an interview as if it was series of unprompted remarks by the interviewee. That can give a very different impression from the one you'd gain from the two-sided conversation. It usually happens on radio - it's a bit harder to do it with pictures. But on TV, the pressure to provide pictures to go with a story can lead to some dodgy practices.
A few years ago, on TV news, I saw an audience erupting with laughter and applause at a politician's joke that had been heavily criticised as being in very bad taste. But the event had been recorded in sound only, a fact that was casually mentioned on another programme.
Once looked at critically it was obvious that the video footage had been faked up from another speech, so the audience had been laughing at a different joke. In my view that is beyond what is acceptable, but apparently no-one else noticed.
In the end our only protections against misleading information are a multiplicity of news media, and a lively public commentary on what they are presenting. But anyone who cries "wolf" (sorry Jenny) at every edited speech will soon find their warnings disregarded.