Oh, What A Tangled Web
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB By Reuven Frank In time for last year's holiday season, Henry Holt and Company published a volume the size and format of a coffeetable book but quite...
...They now agree it has destroyed the news cycle...
...Consider the potential impact of high definition television (HDTV), unveiled by the Japanese a decade ago...
...It made for a nervous experience in a way it would take a neurological scientist to explain...
...repetition distorts reality...
...The issue, alas, is not one the lords of television news agonize about...
...Stalin would have been a customer...
...Instead of lavishly reproduced paintings of some unjustly neglected Sienese Renaissance artist, or illustrations of the elders and rites of a complex society newly found in the remote valleys of New Guinea, these are poorly made pictures, usually photographs, of leading Bolsheviks and Soviet officials...
...To purveyors of fiction—dramatists, storytellers—the new flexibility will be an asset...
...To news programmers fighting the supposed ever-shrinking attention span of their audiences, it offers a temptation to falsify...
...On Television OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB By Reuven Frank In time for last year's holiday season, Henry Holt and Company published a volume the size and format of a coffeetable book but quite different in tone and purpose...
...The book is the product of 30 years of culling and collecting by David King, a former British newspaper picture editor...
...With TV news programs it is different...
...The text is terse and bald, describing under what conditions the snapshots were taken, and when and how they were altered...
...Now that can be done much better...
...The people who run TV news have not considered that...
...It will be a difficult meeting, because they would rather not face the fact that advancing technology exposes journalists to special dangers...
...Magazines have long been routinely altering still pictures—making people taller or shorter, moving them closer or farther apart, adding to a group the face of someone who could not be there for the photo session by "stripping" it in over an anonymous body recruited for the occasion...
...some are trying to look thoughtful...
...Neither were they prepared for the intrusion of the Internet in their business...
...What they have not been known to do is put their minds to the sort of transgressions "next time" will bring...
...Ten years ago the very earliest HDTV experiments, among other marvels, turned a picture of two houses into an entire street...
...No death...
...Most of the pictures in The Commissar Vanishes are laid out in parallel sets of two or more...
...It is their bane that "talking heads" are dull...
...Without rehashing the details, the Internet during the Monica affair has acted like a particle accelerator, taking subatomic bits of gossip and whirling them to such a ferocious velocity that they shatter the rules and accepted practices of journalism...
...This overcomes virtually all atmospheric interference and other disturbances that limit the picture quality we have at present...
...Television news has many flaws...
...Backgrounds can be altered, people moved about, and the most discerning eye will not be able to distinguish true from false...
...That is not true in the case of moving pictures meant to be journalism...
...How many times did it actually occur...
...A recent network newscast asked the valid, if obvious, question...
...There is no violence, no betrayal, no terror...
...Pictures become symbols...
...That has become a rarity, and no one noticed...
...The best film had a different visual texture than pictures from TV cameras...
...They confess sins and intone their guilt and promise to do better next time...
...The process raises few ethical questions because the reader is rarely misled about anything important...
...Nor does it seem likely there will be any until HDTV is with us and somebody does something deceptive, or several do, or many do...
...Sports will be more exciting, dramas more involving, comedians more engaging...
...When those inevitably occur, the lords of television news will meet—and bemoan, bemoan, bemoan...
...What has changed in our value system to make the public, as shown by the polls, so accepting of Presidential sexual misconduct...
...Distinguished from other media rulers primarily by their technology, they rarely consider that how they use technology might affect the probity and even the reliability of their news...
...Those who deal with these matters are almost all word people, former reporters and copyeditors, not former cameramen and picture cutters...
...Some are smiling...
...In movies, this technique is employed to heighten tension, or for some other purpose specific to the script...
...They do not admit the possibility that the destruction of the news cycle was foreseeable, and what it would do to editing could have been expected, or at least postulated, and prepared for...
...They show one noted figure or another with comrades clustered around Lenin or Stalin, and the same picture retouched at one or more later dates to eliminate each individual who had fallen out of Stalin's favor...
...With luck, that will be temporary...
...I think viewers were aware when they were watching film that it was not live, even when they were not aware they were aware...
...Today such equipment is commonplace...
...The evidence is already all around them, yet few voices have been raised—and none publicly—to dispute or even to question...
...No one in television news now would want to go back to film, if indeed anyone who remembers it is still in the business...
...Those who died or were about to die were excised by crude, easily noticed retouching...
...More important, high definition television is digital—that is, each image is broken down into the zeros and ones of the computer universe and subsequently restored to its original form...
...In part, strange as it may sound, this is because videotape pictures are indistinguishable from live television pictures...
...As one of the obligatory experts spoke, her picture was reproduced by showing only every second frame, but showing ittwice, so that the number of frames and the time she took to speak did not change, but seeing her was like looking at a picture under stroboscopie light...
...its unique value is showing things happening...
...This leaves no time for editing, for consideration, for reflection...
...and for a period drama six men in (expensive) historic military uniforms mushroomed into an entire battalion...
...Confronted with the reality, they simply meet and regret...
...But these are just pictures, used as markers of what happened, and therefore more poignant, and more damning...
...The new technology will probably make shocking pictures, celebrity pictures and just plain morbid pictures (like a home video of a suicide) more tempting to news directors competing in a tight market...
...Maneuvering them livens things up a bit...
...How many times have you seen President Clinton hugging Monica S. Lewinsky on the West Lawn of the White House last November...
...The experience teaches them nothing...
...The ad boasts that Olympus' digital proficiency can remove anyone cleanly from a photograph...
...Tape is easier to handle, does not need time consuming chemical processing and is almost infinitely reproducible...
...The transition from film to videotape took place about 25 years ago...
...To date, though, there have been no gatherings of concerned television news executives to discuss, if not adopt, appropriate operating standards...
...Word people think viewers listen to words...
...What is allowable in a glossy magazine's art department is an unacceptable practice in editing television news...
...In the old days, most pictures on television news programs were shot to record a particular event...
...It does not prompt an attempt to anticipate the distortions bound to accompany HDTV...
...The picture of a person speaking suddenly becomes a closer shot and then one closer still, quite irrelevantly to what is being said...
...Then the news executives will meet to admit the sins and promise to prevent their recurrence...
...That is their consensus...
...The editing made possible by the steadily expanding electronic sophistication of videotape, however, often leads to a special kind of chicanery...
...It also effectively misrepresents what is being said in a way no one intended and few recognize...
...While watching any network evening newscast try to see how many pictures were shot at the event being reported, and how many come from some bottomless repository because they appear to suit the reporter's words...
...The British distributors of Olympus camera equipment are currently running an advertisement in newspapers and magazines over there with one photo of President Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky alongside another of Clinton alone...
...Today a tape can be copied in the time it takes to ask...
...They zealously join newspanjandrums of the other media in the routine masochistic exercise of examining how well or poorly, nobly or ignobly, they reported a Presidential election, a princess' traffic death, executive sexuality...
...This redaction was an important tool in his rewriting history...
...Over the years TV news has done extensive reports about the Internet, but those in charge did not stop to speculate on what it would do to them...
...Photographs of the hangings, garrotings or pistol shots behind the ear that killed those eliminated from the pictorial record would have been more shocking...
...There have been fundamental technical changes and improvements in HDTV since, and the date consumers can expect it in their homes keeps being put off as set manufacturers, regulators, networks, stations, legislators, cable executives, and publicspirited kibitzers argue over standards, costs, frequencies, and myriad other considerations requiring consensus before the first picture is sent out and received...
...With the electronic equipment and computer editing programs readily available, legs lacking bodies would not show up in groups shots, a Party leader standing next to Lenin would be expunged without leaving an obvious light spot on the wall...
...To go to the files for pictures when a similar event took place, or for some fitting miscellaneous scenery, entailed sending negatives to be printed and waiting for them to come back...
...They are in a real sense blind to the pictures...
...it also permits very high quality manipulation...
...Technology burst upon TVjournalism when videotape cameras becameportable enough to cover news...
...But the virtues of videotape are its vices, beginning with infinite reproducibility...
...And news...
...News is new each second...
...Perhaps such editing—transferred from movies to syndicated gossip programs to network news magazines and finally to network newscasts—has played some role in changing our value system...
...But sooner or later there will be HDTV The pictures will be sharper and larger, to a degree undreamed of when a 27-inch set was top-of-the-line...
...Even at that time the threat to the integrity of television news presentation seemed obvious enough to be written about by several commentators...
...These are souvenirs, pictures for remembering...
...Like a typical European personal photo album of an earlier generation, it includes people in groups, people strolling, posing outside assembly halls, and the like...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 3
