You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Real News vs Fake News.
I just had a serious discussion.
It was a news discussion. It was a calm discussion, but a passionate discussion.
It was two men talking about the philosophical nuances of what journalism is.
I am a trained journalist, with a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism from an esteemed Journalism school.
I felt like whipping out my credentials and beating the man in the head with my diploma.
But I stayed calm.
We talked about editing and news and what is fabricated. We discussed what is real news, what is canned news and what constitutes creativity.
Though the conversation was civil, conducted in quiet tones, I felt my blood pressure elevating.
In the end, I was basically accusing the other man of not being journalistically ethical.
We sat 6 inches apart and I used phrases like “But that’s fake.” “That’s a lie.” “What if we went to court and I had to explain why a portion of that is not real.”
So what’s fake and what’s real?
The day starts like it always does, with a traditional interview.
It’s the dead of winter. I don’t think anything is alive. I don’t remember birds chirping. I don’t remember crickets humming. I am pretty sure that the air is still and quiet. In fact, when it comes to interviews, this one couldn’t have been quieter had we shot this on a Hollywood sound stage.
I like still and quiet. It’s easier to understand people when they speak in a southern brogue that is one part mush mouth and one part dental disease.
When it’s quiet, people don’t compete with jet airliners over head or tanker truck roaring by.
Quiet is good.
So I cut the A roll to the story. It’s the interview with the kid we are focusing on. The A roll is a track of video on top of a track of audio. Simple.
Then comes the B roll. The B roll is the video pictures laid over the reporter track I add to the story.
If the A roll says the sun was in the sky. The B roll should have a picture of the sun laid down on the time line marking that sequence.
It’s not brain surgery.
If the A roll says the train was rolling down the tracks. The B roll should show a train rolling down the tracks.
Hopefully that train is so overwhelming, the sound of the train, laid down on a 2nd audio channel is so loud, you have to crank it way down to an almost imperceptible level.
I interviewed the kid in the still air of a frosty Tennessee afternoon.
It was quiet. It was serene.
I laid down the The A roll, kid talking in quiet front yard.
But when I view the completed story later, I hear something squawking.
“Are those flying monkeys?”
I look at the man. He won’t look at me. He knows I hate this.
WTF?
When did flying monkeys soar by? Did I miss the flying monkey’s when I was asking the high school kid about his boring ass high school life.
Flying Freakin Monkeys?
I’m pretty sure if flying monkeys had flown over head I would have noticed.
I would have called my boss and said “Hey boss. I just captured the 1st flying monkeys since the Wizard of Oz. I’m changing my story to a world exclusive for you. Call Cecil B Demile.”
Flying Monkeys. Yes. That’s what I would have said.
Flying Monkey’s invade Lebanon. Flying monkeys loot liquor store, steal feral cats, impregnate a man’s Buick.
Flying Monkey Stories would skew heavily on Good Morning America.
Flying Monkeys and Dancing with the Stars Next.
Instead, I was telling a boring story about a boring high school kid.
OK. More on the flying monkeys in a moment.
As the story unfolds, and the time line zips by, I see another audio edit that is questionable.
When I laid down the A roll, the audio behind the school lady was silent. We were in a school parking lot half a mile from the nearest road.
You could have heard a snail fart it was so quiet. Again, quiet is good when you are interviewing people.
Loud farting snail noises are distracting.
So when I see the B roll, there is suddenly truck sounds filling the background.
Not little trucks, but gigantic, logging trucks.
I wondered if I did the interview at a lumber mill. Were we on an interstate or a quiet high school parking lot with no kids anywhere.
“What is all this?” I ask.
“I’m a creative guy,” he responds.
“I’m creative too,” I say “But this is news. If it ain’t there, it aint there.”
“But I want to pump it up, give it some feeling, that’s how my brain works,” he counters.
If the sound was there when you shot it, great!
That’s called NAT sound.
But if you are at a fire and the fire isn’t popping the way you think it should, then you have two options. Deal with it or don’t.
I stare into his eyes. We are on two different journalistic levels.
I don’t care.
I am a journalist. I’m old school.
“If the fire ain’t crackling, dude. That’s reality. That’s news.You don’t grab a fire from 1978 with good nats and lay that in over yesterday’s condo blaze. If you do it’s a lie. It’s a damn lie. It ain’t real.”
He doesn’t want to argue with me. He’s not thrilled.
“We just see it different,” he says.
“No. Not really,” I counter. “It’s news, man. It ain’t a god damned beer commercial.”
I didn’t see John Madden running through a big beer poster screaming Less Filling Tastes Great.
Pump up the fat man running nats!!!
“Sorry your honor. The entire piece is a manifestation of our creative self. The reality of the realness wasn’t real enough. I throw myself on the real mercy of the court.”
“It’s no big deal. I’ll just take it out,” he says.
I have no doubt he is going to take it out. That’s a given. But I’m wound up.
I think back to another incident like this. A colleague of mine was assigned to shoot the 4th of July at the local park. He missed it. He just missed it. Maybe he was drunk or his camera broke. I can’t freakin remember. So what does he do. He grabs the 4th of July tape from the year before. From the Freakin year before. He cuts a piece of rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air, and puts it in the bin.
FROM THE YEAR BEFORE.
AAARRGGHH.
10 minutes later the anchor is on live TV saying something like “fireworks blasting across the North Carolina sky JUST ten minutes ago.
HE SHOULD HAVE SAID ONE YEAR AND TEN MINUTES AGO.
It made me feel terrible then. I hate it now. It was a so what. But everything in life has a price. News is not pure. It is affected by dozens of external forces. It is slanted by the camera man who shoots it. It is prejudiced by the writer who writes it. It is tainted by the very news director who said go get it. Everything man touches is soiled.
But when you purposely defile news, it’s no better than a used condom in a greyhound bus station.
Does it matter if flying monkey’s are smoking crack in the background of a simple interview with a simple kid in a simple story?
F yeah.
It does matter.
Not on my damn watch. Take your babbling brook from Idaho and shove it. Take your crackling fire from Detroit and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
If you don’t have it, then you don’t have it.
If you are gonna put in birds chirping from 1988, I don’t want to know about it.
If you gotta fake it then you are in the wrong business. Half the creative battle of news is getting it, for real. Anyone can download the sounds of gerbils fornicating on you tube.
But you know what; unless you laid your shot gun mike in the cage by the spinning wheel next to the gerbils as they got their gerbil groove on, SQUEEK SQUEEK then you didn’t get shit.
News isn’t always pretty. News isn’t always sexy. But news has to be real. You can’t fake interviews like you can’t fake orgasms. It’s wrong, someone is going to get hurt.
The next time you hear a flying monkey in the background of my piece; guess what. You are going to see a flying monkey in the foreground of my piece. Because if there’s a flying monkey then that’s the news. And if the monkey doesn’t squawk loud enough, I wont’ be going to my sound effects library and conjuring up flying monkey fornicating sounds.
I got me a broadcast journalism degree God Damn It!
Life’s Crazy™