A couple of weeks ago, I sat in on a TV interview with my boss. Over the years, I’ve set up many of these, so I knew what was about to happen.
Good questions would get asked. Lengthy, thoughtful responses would follow. There’d be an excellent dialogue and fascinating subject matter explored.
Would most of the responses make it on the news that night? Nope.
For those who aren’t journalists or involved with television or the process of making news, you might not know how little of reality you see of an incident. Or you may understand this in theory, but not really how it’s executed and what it means to your snippet of reality you get exposed to when the story runs on the evening broadcast.
During the interview above, our president spoke for 15 minutes or so. He dialed into 5-6 critical areas based on the subject matter. As a biased observer, I would say he had 5-8 powerful quotable quotes that were unique and newsworthy. They should have made it to the screen. Did they? No.
What aired that night was the reporter framing the issues. He did a good job. He asked the right questions. Our boss’s answers followed, and yes, they were good, but not lengthy.
Question was asked. Two-second answer. Another question asked. Two-second answer. Another question asked. A seven-second answer. End of story.
Adding up the interviewer’s time asking questions and establishing the storyline, combined with responses, it was about a 30-second segment. That’s LONG by TV news standards.
We actually got more face time than occurs in most stories. But did our president’s quotable quotes make the air? One did. The rest sit on the editing floor, as the cliché goes, never seeing the light of day.
That means you, the consumer of the news, doesn’t see or hear the fuller story. You’re left with a snippet of reality, when a fuller explanation was given.
Multiply this by the amount of stories you watch on the television news, and you have a slight understanding of how frequently you are misled, and how misinformed most TV news watchers are. You know a sliver about the reality of an incident, situation or process. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Why write about this? To me, it’s important for citizens to recognize what they don’t know and remember that even the experts, when they are quoted, are not given a full voice to air in-depth explanations. Instead, they are cut short, and viewers are cut even shorter. We are left behind in terms of getting to the bottom of an issue or coming to an informed understanding.
In many ways, this is the “Snapshotization” of what’s going on in the word. We’re getting snapshots, not the full text. We’re reading 280 characters, not a 1,500-2,000-word article. We’re forming judgments with WAY LESS than full information.
We all have to excerpt to survive mentally. We can’t know everything about every issue. But we should recognize what we don’t know and strive to find out more before passing judgment on something that has occurred in the world.
Recognizing what we don’t know is a big sign of maturity. Hopefully more and more people keep growing in this way and seek to see and hear the bigger picture.
(Editor’s note: Stay tuned for Part II of this story next week.)
Good questions would get asked. Lengthy, thoughtful responses would follow. There’d be an excellent dialogue and fascinating subject matter explored.
Would most of the responses make it on the news that night? Nope.
For those who aren’t journalists or involved with television or the process of making news, you might not know how little of reality you see of an incident. Or you may understand this in theory, but not really how it’s executed and what it means to your snippet of reality you get exposed to when the story runs on the evening broadcast.
During the interview above, our president spoke for 15 minutes or so. He dialed into 5-6 critical areas based on the subject matter. As a biased observer, I would say he had 5-8 powerful quotable quotes that were unique and newsworthy. They should have made it to the screen. Did they? No.
What aired that night was the reporter framing the issues. He did a good job. He asked the right questions. Our boss’s answers followed, and yes, they were good, but not lengthy.
Question was asked. Two-second answer. Another question asked. Two-second answer. Another question asked. A seven-second answer. End of story.
Adding up the interviewer’s time asking questions and establishing the storyline, combined with responses, it was about a 30-second segment. That’s LONG by TV news standards.
We actually got more face time than occurs in most stories. But did our president’s quotable quotes make the air? One did. The rest sit on the editing floor, as the cliché goes, never seeing the light of day.
That means you, the consumer of the news, doesn’t see or hear the fuller story. You’re left with a snippet of reality, when a fuller explanation was given.
Multiply this by the amount of stories you watch on the television news, and you have a slight understanding of how frequently you are misled, and how misinformed most TV news watchers are. You know a sliver about the reality of an incident, situation or process. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Why write about this? To me, it’s important for citizens to recognize what they don’t know and remember that even the experts, when they are quoted, are not given a full voice to air in-depth explanations. Instead, they are cut short, and viewers are cut even shorter. We are left behind in terms of getting to the bottom of an issue or coming to an informed understanding.
In many ways, this is the “Snapshotization” of what’s going on in the word. We’re getting snapshots, not the full text. We’re reading 280 characters, not a 1,500-2,000-word article. We’re forming judgments with WAY LESS than full information.
We all have to excerpt to survive mentally. We can’t know everything about every issue. But we should recognize what we don’t know and strive to find out more before passing judgment on something that has occurred in the world.
Recognizing what we don’t know is a big sign of maturity. Hopefully more and more people keep growing in this way and seek to see and hear the bigger picture.
(Editor’s note: Stay tuned for Part II of this story next week.)