I stumbled upon this TV news “fakery” classic from the early 1960s, which comes care of CBS veteran Daniel Schorr’s memoir, Clearing The Air. Schorr is lunching his boss, CBS chief, Bill Paley.
Schorr tells of a luncheon in Paris during which Paley congratulated him on a CBS documentary about East Germany. “Its dramatic climax,” writes Schorr, “showed Walther Ulbricht, the East German Communist leader, upbraiding me for my questions and finally storming out of the room in full view of the camera. ‘What I admired most,’ said Paley, ‘was the coolness with which you sat there and looked at him while he was yelling at you.’
“Breaking into laughter, I said, ‘Surely you understand that the shots of me looking cool were “reverses,” filmed after Ulbricht had left the room!’ No, Paley had not understood, that … I proceeded to explain in detail the conventional post-interview procedure for shifting the camera and focusing it on the correspondent to repeat the principal questions, plus a gamut of absorbed and skeptical poses, all of this to be spliced into the interview to add variety and facilitate editing. Paley was fascinated. ‘But isn’t it basically dishonest?’ he asked finally.”
The moral? Don’t laugh at Bill Paley.
2 responses to “TV News: faking it in the good old days”
I assume reverses and re-asks are still standard practice in broadcasting? What’s your guess on how long before a v-blogger manages to capture such a session and gets it on to the net to the disgrace of some famous talking head?
Surely Alan Yentob has already gone one stage further, pretending to be at interviews entirely shot by someone else.