On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Innovation's Hidden Risks By Reuven Frank ALTHOUGH strongly denied and indeed probably untrue, rumor had it that morning television doyenne Katie Couric's hair was cut in...
...But when news events were filmed, the "raw stock" that captured the plane crash or flood had to be delivered to a processing laboratory, developed, then edited down to a manageable report...
...If it can be done, it will be done...
...The tape was played several dozen times that day, and continually until he quit the race a month later...
...A steadily increasing number of programs, especially sports events, are being produced in high definition...
...Rather, what reportedly—but deniably— drove Couric to consider a surgical solution was the imminent advent of high definition television (HDTV) cameras that look closer and see sharper, delivering pitilessly detailed pictures...
...In those primitive days the only way to speed up the process was to project ablack and white negative and, with a turn of the knob, display apositive picture...
...Today, however, television pictures rarely report events...
...In the 1980s there was a great hullabaloo over attempts by an NBC news magazine to re-enact scenes it had not caught on camera...
...During the medium's early decades, pictures were either live or on film...
...A typical report on all-news cable—or on BBC World News, for that matter—features the anchor speaking live by telephone with the reporter at the scene of some calamity...
...No pundit or nighttime news satirist failed to use it as grist for his mill...
...The footage is not necessarily an image of the latest events...
...It is rare in any television newscast, network or local, broadcast or cable, for the picture to tell the story...
...This past January, on the night of his disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, Dr...
...Howard Dean assumed the unfamiliar role of cheerleader before hundreds of chagrined young campaign volunteers...
...The inquiry into that crash took months, and each report about it, on every network and station that followed the story, used that same spectacular footage...
...What steps have been taken to prevent recurrence...
...Last March, for example, Kosovo experienced the worst violence between the Kosovar Albanians and the Serb minority since NATO bombing achieved a quieting of the conflict there five years ago...
...The new equipment—cameras, control gear, etc.—was prohibitively expensive when the technology was first developed in Japan in the late 1980s...
...Because it was introduced without fanfare as you were watching, you did not notice how videotape changed the presentation and content of television news...
...All this is reminiscent of the mumbo jumbo uttered as color replaced black and white...
...To producers, we were told, this would prove a boon beyond measure...
...The destruction of the World Trade Center has been replayed hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of times...
...in a news context it would amount to lying to the public...
...This is not censorship, but it may be worse...
...Even on the networks' vaunted evening news programs, it is common to have reports put together thus: First a script is written, either by a writer to be recited by the anchor, or by a field reporter who speaks into a recording device...
...According to Women's Wear Daily's gossip column, her motivation for the alleged facial enhancement was not what you would expect: the outward signs of aging...
...Reporters and commentators never shut up to let you savor a uniquely trenchant image...
...When Gloria Swanson's aging features were being filmed for the iconic Sunset Boulevard, a curtain of gauze between the camera and her face glossed over her imperfections...
...But the tape will haunt him as long as he lives...
...The fortuitous presence of a TV camera brought the nation images of the plane making cartwheels on impact...
...Contemporary digital videos—being electronic, not physical—can be replayed and reproduced endlessly without risk of damage or the degradation of quality that characterized film...
...They even talk over sounds—perhaps a bomb exploding or a child crying...
...If you do not have one, an HD program will still appear on your screen...
...it may date from yesterday or five years ago...
...Pictures prevent the blank screen...
...When he says "Osama bin Laden," we see the same shot of a tall, bearded man with a walking stick tramping the stony hillside with the same little chubby guy...
...The pictures show the event, or as much of the event as rapid response can achieve...
...From the beginning the radio news professionals who inherited the infant television had longed for the ability to record and store images the way audiotape preserved sound...
...If Jackson received royalties every time her (blanked out) bared breast was shown on tape, the earnings might exceed her income as a recording artist...
...Tourists tramping through the Louvre and fathers presiding over bar mitzvahs have cameras that record and play back, in full sound and color, with an ease beyond the dreams of the pioneers who had to dispatch no less than a midsize truck to capture an outdoor picture...
...On camera, he seemed to be shedding tears...
...We may have to surrender our belief in the cliché that pictures never lie...
...At least one reporter who was in the hall reported that Dean's rallying cry did not seem as "over the top" as it registered inside the TV rectangle, and was in line with the feelings of his young audience...
...The widespread adoption of HDTV has been awaited, and delayed, for two decades...
...The film was shown on the network newscasts that evening, the photograph in newspapers the next morning...
...In television that is even more horrific than dead air was in radio...
...The ability to render a brigade from pictures of a platoon may ease the pressure on entertainment executives' budgets...
...If you watched the original live pictures unfolding on that dreadful September morning, after seeing them repeated again and again is your reaction the same...
...Just recently we have seen the videophone for all practical purposes do away with military censorship by allowing reporters to communicate directly with their superiors via satellite, leapfrogging broadcast channels that had previously been controlled by the Armed Forces...
...In the early 1980s a passenger plane crashed on approaching a Midwestern airport...
...Meanwhile, technology keeps moving ahead...
...How does it affect the local political balance...
...To them a negative was holy...
...In the run-up to the 1972 Presidential primaries in New Hampshire, after the Manchester Union Leader insulted his wife, Maine's Senator Edmund S. Muskie, a candidate for the Democratic nomination, appeared outside the newspaper's offices to defend her...
...The reporter is not telling the story either...
...The practice was stopped, but it is creeping back unannounced on allnews cable and elsewhere...
...But there must never be a blank screen...
...The unlimited repetition of images common today was unheard of...
...Consequently, pictures of even the most dramatic news events tended to be shown only a few times...
...The pictures were neither dramatic nor especially symbolic...
...The attraction of such devices is the money they will save, not the improvements they will bring to the news...
...The screen during that exchange showed a haphazard array of scenes from the recent violence: young men throwing stones at one another, an ambulance inching through the crowd, a press photographer ducking rocks and looking for a suitable vantage point, his bag of equipment flapping against his rump as he dodged among the mob...
...the anchor has relayed the news, what actually happened, in his or her introduction, and is talking to the reporter about the aftermath...
...Other advances being considered would marry news operations to the Internet so that, for example, a network's news pictures and scripts and those of dozens of affiliated local stations would be immediately available to all parties, and each could put together its newscast by selecting from the various elements at the ready...
...And they lacked reality because the ambient sound, which was recorded with the images, was suppressed so we could hear the conversation...
...Meantime, the tube shows ambulances darting in and out, people on stretchers being attended to, women and children weeping, a policeman directing traffic...
...the technology is "compatible" with older sets...
...Radios are cheaper than television sets, and nothing in the Kosovo report justified the difference...
...Many early hit shows, like I Love Lucy, were filmed so that they could be played on announced network dates and resold to stations for rebroadcast and additional income...
...He sketched in some of the historical background, described the chaos in local hospitals, spoke affectingly of his shame at what his fellow Muslims were doing, and answered all the anchor's questions...
...A PARADOXICAL result of videotape is that photojournalism has taken a backseat in television news reporting...
...In a historical drama a single authentic house could be multiplied into a street of such houses...
...the psychological benefits of seeing someone younger in the mirror...
...political conventions or meetings of the United Nations Security Council...
...Arcane words like "digital" and "broadband" are bandied about in and out of context...
...A staffer repeats the script to someone in the archive department, and pictures are fished out of the files to go with each phrase...
...the example of Fox News' Greta van Susteren, who became a cable news star after subjecting her face to Botox treatment...
...Instead, we view a videotape recorded in the preceding hours or minutes, hastily assembled without regard to narrative structure...
...News is the most competitive arena of the medium, and it would be naïve to expect that in the heat of the ratings race no one will take advantage of HD's fantastic and unlimited ability to manipulate images...
...Inevitably the impact is cheapened, the personal response coarsened, in ways that would not be true from simply remembering...
...The picture does not tell the story, live as it happens—in "real time...
...On the other hand, the military now possesses TV equipment as sophisticated as that of the networks, so it can feed them pictures from sites they have no access to and portray its actions in the best light...
...BBC television, whose use of images in the early days of the medium was the envy of the industry around the world, got the English-speaking publisher of an Albanian language newspaper on the phone...
...Otherwise, there was film...
...only the words matter...
...Next, in the wake of the Super Bowl, singer Janet Jackson's bosom gained the same "exposure" as Dean's scream...
...This, we are assured, will enhance the drama of dramatic programs and heighten the immediacy of live coverage...
...Industry buzz has proclaimed that the age of high definition is here...
...Life magazine taught us that pictures could tell stories...
...The current excitement touts tapeless video cameras...
...This technique horrified film professionals...
...Except for rare instances of live dispatches from the likes of "embedded" cameramen, recycled images are used to keep your eyes from wandering while you listen to the news...
...A high definition lens finds wrinkles on a balloon...
...running one through a projector, where it might be irreparably scratched or torn, was sacrilege...
...When an anchorman says "AI Qaeda," the screen displays the same dozen men in turbans and ballooning trousers on the same set of wooden monkey bars...
...So now that high definition is upon us, it is reasonable to ask what impact it will have on news reporting...
...Whether or not the eight-digit-salaried Couric, who often claims her dearest wish is to be remembered only as a good reporter, ever went under the knife, the rumor itself heralds a new era...
...It requires unusual optimism not to expect network news to make similar use of the creative capabilities of HDTV TELEVISION has from the start demonstrated the potential of technological innovation to rearrange society...
...The picture doesn't matter...
...And there will, as always, be unintended consequences...
...Manufacturers were reluctant to tool up for HDTV while other advances—flat panels, picture frame television, extrasmall and super-large sets—were maintaining their profits...
...Television would enable them to report events: it was a miracle...
...To the vanishing few of us who remember when there was no television, when transmitting pictures through the air into the home was a marvel, this is a sad state of affairs...
...The flexibility and versatility of high definition will similarly soon be part of everyday experience after decades of elusive promises...
...Protecting negatives by making prints took time, money and careful attention...
...That worked for sports, since game times are known far in advance, but live news was almost entirely restricted to scheduled events, e.g...
...Showing footage from anywhere outside established studios involved substantial expenses in manpower and tons of equipment...
...But the focus of the report is not what you are seeing, it is what you are hearing—although occasionally a striking image may cross the screen and distract the audience from what is being said...
...Then along came videotape...
...That is what television news has become...
...An early entry in the long string of HD demonstrations highlighted its capacity to take one picture of a company of soldiers and digitally turn it into an army...
...When the moment finally arrived in the late 1950s, it was revolutionary, but its fruition—what we take for granted now—took a while to evolve...
...Such programs were produced under the disciplines and schedules of ? movies...
...More local cable outlets are also picking up HD signals, and sales of HD units are growing...
...The reporter is answering the anchor's questions: Has responsibility for the calamity been fixed...
...On Television Innovation's Hidden Risks By Reuven Frank ALTHOUGH strongly denied and indeed probably untrue, rumor had it that morning television doyenne Katie Couric's hair was cut in bangs to hide the results of an operation to smooth her brow...
...But it seems the logjam is about to break...
...It sounded like so much hot air, but suddenly one morning every show and new TV set came in color...
...Several networks and station groups are now testing and buying new digital cameras capable of producing images that can be edited and transmitted at 50 times the speed of the recorded action...
...Watching the incident's stunning choreography for the fourth or 11th time, one could forget the people dying inside...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
