The Atlantic:
McCain’s Mixed-Up Timeline. This is why you never believe an interview done with ‘jump-cuts.’ If you don’t see interviewer and interviewee in the same shot, your reputation is at the mercy of the video editor and her/his superiors. Do they like you, or not? You’ll never know, until the video airs.
In video, the editor is God. S/he can make you come across as intelligent and admirable, or can make you the embodiment of the Antichrist, with a couple of well-placed cuts and dissolves.
I’d like to start a high school course based on this, “Bullsh-t Detection 101”. I used to illustrate this effect simply and easily back in NY, when I had access to gobs of video equipment. I’d start by interviewing you, asking about your feelings about McCain or Obama (whichever you support). I’d quickly take that footage, pull out the answers that didn’t use a name, cut in some stock questions I pre-recorded. Such as,"What do you think of Adolph Hitler?” Can you imagine your horror at hearing yourself say, “He’s just the greatest person - to listen to him speak, gives me a sense of comfort” about dear old Adolph? Illustrates the risk and weakness of a jump-cut interview immediately. This is functionally the same thing CBS did, cherry-picking interviewee answers - and it is just as misleading.
Watching news, if you’ve been in the video biz, is never a passive activity. One becomes sensitized to the use of such techniques. I’d love to give high schoolers that toolset.
I’ll bet there wasn’t time, given McCain’s schedule, to do re-takes. I assume his interview was vetted by his staff, and they approved this change-up. The editors and producers could be complicit in rendering this little fantasy, and I’d send them off to shoot crime scenes in one of those well-worn news vans for a few weeks, if so. Flexible editing morality destroys news organizations’ credibility. However, if this kind of revisionist editing was done because the editors and producers felt sorry for the struggling older man, I sympathize, but it was wrong given the level of job Mr McCain is shooting for.
Either way, complicit or just ‘feeling sorry’, his ability to answer a question coherently is just as important as any other aspect of his candidacy. This goes for both Mr McCain and Mr Obama.
That last sentiment worries me. The “don’t pick on the old guy” mentality is the illness the media never recovered from during the Reagan years. Don’t overestimate the ability of the American press to turn a deaf ear to a deaf ear.
[I’ve only read this article about the situation; if there are mitigating factors, I’ll stumble upon them and modify this tomorrow.]
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