Palin Interview - Key Parts Edited Out? (Full transcript)

[mrjuju]

Now before we all jump on the "bias" bandwagon, can I, as a representative of the overworked, underpaid and unappreciated television workers say something?

Any interview that is compared to it's full transcript will look like that. It is not just common, it is the rule of television The problem (normally) does not fall into the bias category, it is a far simpler issue; time.

An average interview lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours (in this case, I would guess 30 - 45 minutes), where the interviewer will ask several questions. Upon completion of the interview, the tape is handed to an editor who has not slept in 3 days and is on his 32nd can of Red Bull (trust me on this, we don't sleep until something is rendering, no exceptions), he will be told that he needs to take this hour of footage, and make it 10 minutes, or whatever the time frame will be. The editor will pray to whatever god he supports that the deadline will be next month, as he has well over a dozen projects he is juggling, all due within the same 48 hour period, but editor gods are fickle, and the interview will need to be finished tomorrow (always tomorrow...).

The editor will then take out the easy parts: small talk, blown lines, questions that don't matter; which will normally kill about half of the interview. He will then start to trim individual responses, which is where the real problems start.

You see, a good interviewee will keep his responses short and concise, which is easy to edit down into sound bytes, editors love these people.

There are about 4 of them in the whole world.

Most people, when interviewed, tend to elaborate well after their point is made, giving a paragraph, where a sentence is needed. When editing, we listen to their answer, and try to infer what, if any, the point they are trying to make is; then we take every thing else and throw it away. Hopefully, that is enough to trim it down to 10 minutes.

It never is.

Once the medium cuts are made, the evil cuts rear their ugly head. These are the ones that make people yell and scream. Sometimes, we have to make them say what we feel they mean by fudging around with sequencing. It is the red headed stepchild of television editing, make no mistake, but it happens all the time. Is it a bias issue? Not normally, no. The problem is that we, as editors, don't have a lot of time to listen to the interview over and over again to get a strong idea of who a person is, and what, aside from what they say, they stand for. We have a day to do the work of a week, so we rush. We hate it just as much as you do, trust me.

Reading this, I really don't get the malicious vibe, as there are a lot of cuts I would have made myself (a few I wouldn't have, but then again I am not under pressure to finish this, so I have the luxury of thought), this reeks of an editor trying his damnedest to get what he felt was the general idea of what she was saying out, and getting it to fit in a nice time slot...

Sure it sucks that someone's ideas have to go through a few middle men to get to you, but let's be honest here, does anyone still hold televised news to any real regard anymore? Honestly? This stuff happens all the time, 90% of it is honest trimming, the rest is a little shadier (Mr. Simpson, what are you doing? Stay back!). Never take a TV interview at face value, always look for a full transcript (they are almost always available somewhere, if you look hard enough)

That was a lot longer than I thought it would be...