RNC and CNN

[bcholmes]

So, I tend to think of CNN as being a fairly liberal station by American standards. I was watching the RNC speeches on CNN last night, and I kept noticing the camera work. During John McCain's speech, for instance, he started talking about the things that the Republicans are doing for the children. Even before the words were uttered, the CNN camera was showing shots of children of multiple ethnicities in the crowd.

Later, when McCain talked about the contribution of the men and women in service, CNN already had a shot of a man in uniform walking through the crowd of the convention hall.

As McCain was saying, "we will not listen to a disingenuous filmmaker", CNN already had Michael Moore on screen so that we could see the reaction in real-time.

And I was thinking to myself: these guys must have McCain's speech, and they're directing their camera work to provide more visual punch to McCain's words. Either that, or someone is editing really quickly during the broadcast delay.

And I wondered: how is this different from, say, Leni Riefenstahl?

There was another interesting shot. During a mildly-rousing moment of the speech, the camera was trained on a man who suddenly decided to stand and applaud that particular point. And I thought: that's convenient. That they just happened to have a camera on that person, just as they decided to rise. It was awfully convenient that the guy was perfectly framed in the camera's field of vision.

Comments

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

The camera crew does, in fact, get advance copies of the speeches so they can do exactly what you describe. The "standing ovation" guy probably (but not definitely) was a random attendee, but the choice of when to put the camera on someone who would give a standing O is more dictated by what's in the script. The director, and possibly the technical director, will have done this before and will have a good idea of when the mid-speech applause will hit so they can plan things like that accordingly.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I suppose I *knew* that, but the knowledge wasn't really front-and-centre. Now it's front-and-centre, and I find it kinda creepy.

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

Yep. The more I know of how things work behind the scenes, the more I'm creeped out by just how much the audience (read: general public) gets manipulated.

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

It's...not necessarily so much manipulation as illustration, if that makes sense. Finding something in the place that looks like good video.

When a speech is live, depending on the layout of the venue and how many cameras are available (and at what angles) and who actually does sit where and whether the PD or camera crew can FIND anyone particular in the crowd and what the crowd actually does, and MAYBE depending on the politics of the people running the cameras, you may or may not have a series of things going on that appear to put a positive or negative spin on the goings-on. If you're lucky (or unlucky), you'll catch a representative picking his nose or sleeping or something. I think they tend to cut that except on C-SPAN.

If the hall was packed with Republicans, it's far more likely that those people staged things for the camera people to catch than that CNN deliberately spun the speech. Though it's possible that the camera crew was under orders not to dwell on people standing and shaking their fists at the senator, it's more likely there was no one there doing it.

If a station is under pressure for being "too liberal," reportage might be self-consciously "neutral" (ie, slight spin in a pro-conservative direction). But it's VERY hard to spin live events, except through commentary (and exclusion of images that dramatically change the perspective, which I doubt was happening here).

Did you watch the Dem convention on CNN? What did you think?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I watched each night of the Democratic convention on CNN. I thought Gore and Clinton did great speeches. Max Cleland bored me almost to tears.

I also started to suspect something that I'm now quite certain of: Bob Dole is really stupid. He was a regular member of commentary panels -- usually as part of the Larry King segments. Dole is less charismatic than Bush. I didn't think it possible.