Don't You DARE Fall Asleep While John Edwards is Talking!

[Cleon]

Is this supposed to be a news program? Or is it entertainment?

If it's a news program, the fact that the guy fell asleep is part of the story, and it's ABC News's job to simply report the story, warts and all - not sanitize it.

Ok. Wow. I'm seriously stunned that I have to explain this.

Whether it's "news," "entertainment," or a "This Week in Big Hair" commentary is completely irrelevant. Not even a wee bit relevant.

Directing camera work involves doing certain things to set up your shot--there's a bit more to it than just pointing the camera and turning it on. There are certain things that are obvious--you need to work the lighting, focus, sound, etc. Other things are a little more subtle, such as placement; how far the camera is from the subject, where the subject is within the frame, etc.*

Still another thing you look at is backdrop; not just whether your subject stands out against it, but also whether there is anything there that distracts the viewer from the subject of your shot. A guy sleeping while your subject is speaking would be "Exhibit A."

Another thing that the director would notice is that a guy sleeping would make the material look uninteresting, and as a journalist, you definitely don't want that. When you're shooting material, your primary goal is to present it as the most interesting thing in the universe.

Seriously, even if the director's only professional experience was working as the photographer for his high school newspaper, he'd know enough to remove the sleeping dude from the shot.


So let's have a run-down of the possibilities again:

1. ABC removes Sleeping Dude from the shot out of basic journalistic professionalism.
2. Sleeping Dude wakes up and gets out of the shot of his own accord.
3. Edwards' campaign staff removes him, because he's distracting and making Edwards look boring.
4. ABC removed him because they support Edwards and want him to look good.

Now, maybe I'm just being a biased left-wing hippie who hates America, or maybe I'm just trying to do that "critical thinking" thing we keep talking about, but it seems to me that possibilities 1-3 are all equally likely, reasonable, and innocuous.

Possibility #4, on the other hand, is a little bit of a reach. If you're going to claim that this is a case of media bias in action, you're going to have to show me some sort of evidence in favor of #4 that does not apply to the other three.


(* To see what I mean, google through some news photos and videos. You'll notice that very rarely is the subject of the shot in the exact center of the frame; it's usually at least a little off-center.)

 

[Beerina]

Live removal in video would not be a realistic option. They do it in movies because they can spend time, frame-by-frame, tailoring the fix, similarly to what can be done for a single picture, but obviously much more time consuming.

Live events do have manipulation, of course, such as fake advertisements and "first down lines" and hockey-puck-glows, but those are specialized situations which have been well-engineered in conjunction with the cameras in use.

Arbitrary image manipulation from an arbitrary camera, live, and undetectable (no shimmering of the edge of Edwards' body) is probably still not yet possible.

If nothing else, they'd have to quickly hand construct the "empty chair", since they would have had no visual reference to what it looks like. That's a whole can of worms right there.

It occurs to me that if you were a video engineer specialist called in, your first reaction would be to erase the man and the chair and just fill the region with an extrusion of the wall above him. Not to place an empty chair, which would be even more extra work.


Nah, proposing he was removed is akin to proposing a space disintigration ray -- it's multiplying your entities needlessly. The most parsiminous explanation is the guy got up and left, most likely because someone poked him and told him to.

 

[Cleon]

Beerina--I don't think we're talking about the image being removed from the video. If they'd done that, they might as well have done the whole thing and not left Sleeping Dude in for a little bit.

I think we're talking "removed" as in, camera cuts out, staffer goes in and asks the guy to move, camera cuts back in. At least that's what I'm talking about. I can't speak for the Newsbusters people. (Not that I'd put it past them.)