CHARLIE Gibson’s ABC interview with Republican veep candidate Sarah Palin produced a lot of complaints from Palin fans. There’s not much anyone in the campaign can do about journalists like Gibson misstating candidates’ “exact words,” but there is something that candidates – and anyone else interviewed by a possibly hostile media – can do to make sure that things get played straight in the editing process.
You just have to break the camera monopoly. Luckily, that’s become easy.
An episode of “The Simpsons” a few years back centered on Homer facing bogus sexual-harassment charges. A TV news show (“Rock Bottom”) interviewed him and edited his innocuous statements to make them sound incriminating. (To make the joke clear, the hands on a clock in the background were in a different position for almost every word). Ultimately, Homer was saved only because Groundskeeper Willie turned out to have shot video that exonerated him.
Real life isn’t “The Simpsons” (though politics are seeming more and more cartoonish these days). Still, TV is all about the editing – and even modest tweaks can drastically change how an interviewee comes across.
So, when you sit down for an interview (unless it’s live), you’re putting yourself, like Homer, at the mercy of the editors. Usually they’re honest, but not always.
But there’s a remedy now, with technology being what it is. If I were a candidate, I think I’d bring my own camera to interviews, shoot the whole thing and post the unedited raw video on the Web.
The technology for this is easy – I’ve got a little Sony HD video camera that records on a chip and fits in a coat pocket or purse – and putting video on the Web is a snap, too.
Of course, the knowledge that this will happen is likely to be enough to keep people honest – but if anything is edited unfairly, the full video will tell the tale. No need to wait for Groundskeeper Willie to appear.
TV journalists won’t be happy with this, of course, but it’s hard to see a principled basis for objecting.
In the past, the tools for broadcast newsgathering were expensive and specialized, and much of the media’s power came from the fact that no one else had them. Those times are long gone, and candidates, and journalists, are going to have to adapt.
Of course, there are risks for candidates, too. A gaffe-prone candidate, or one who’s just bad at speaking extemporaneously, might want to present only edited videos to the public – especially if he or she can count on the news media to be generally sympathetic.
But that just makes the whole exercise more valuable to the public, as whether a candidate is willing to make the raw video available would provide a useful data point on whether the candidate is confident – and whether the press corps is in the tank.
I predict, however, that we’ll see this strategy adopted soon, quite possibly in this election cycle. The news-media monopoly continues to decay, and technology continues to march on.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, blogs at InstaPundit.com.