Let's NOT go to the Video Tape

I was watching a story about the astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak the other day on one of the cable news channels. It was about the possibility she would plead insanity to the charges against her. In the middle of the story pictures flashed by of some woman pacing around what appeared to be a cell in what looked like prison surveillance video. Was that Nowak? I wondered. Where was this woman? Was it meant to show she was disoriented and “prove” she was “insane?” Viewers couldn’t tell because there was no identification of the video. If you watch a tad of TV news you see this kind of thing far too often; file video that’s not labeled. During most cable TV news interviews now we are treated to cover shots (also called b-roll or cutaways) that purport to be related to the topic, but these are often not identified. Is this file tape shot a year ago? Is it a live shot? Where do these clips come from and why are they there? Is the viewer supposed to simply know the connection? A friend of mine was working in sports at a TV station awhile back. His show producer wanted video for a high school basketball game that had just concluded. She chose some file tape of a game several weeks earlier when the team was playing a different opponent. My friend objected. He pointed out that the video was misleading because the story was about tonight’s contest. He lost. The old video ran as if it were tonight’s game without labeling or comment. And the producer marked my friend as a “trouble-maker.” Truth in labeling was too much trouble, apparently. Of course, the story didn’t require video at all, and certainly not misleading video. How many times have you seen a story about Iraq filled with video that doesn’t seem to be connected to the story being reported? How many interviews have you seen that flash “exciting” video, like someone walking away from a camera someplace and you are left wondering “what the hell was that?” The SPJ Ethics Code says you need to: “Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.” There is a lot of questionable file footage in TV news these days. It shows laziness on the part of producers, reporters and editors, but it is also confusing and misleading to viewers. It is a visual lie. Lies, spoken or in video, should not be acceptable to good journalists, period. Jerry Dunklee SPJ Ethics Committee