UK News Outlet Shoots Self in Head

An article in the Guardian may portend the end of TV news as we know it, at least for viewers of the UK outlet Channel Five. Apparently "TV fakery" (an oxymoron?) has apparently become an issue there recently. (Here is a bit more about that.) Truthfulness and accuracy in news reporting is an ongoing issue, but the problems and list of remedies mentioned in the article about Channel Five are utter nonsense, as shown below.

NB: The full story about the BBC apparently showing a clip of the Queen being asked to remove her crown, is clouded at best. Here is one account. This follows on an earlier story about problems with a phone-in show. The result is a full-fledged crisis of confidence and heads are already rolling. My interest in this remains the Channel Five response.

They include: the ban of reaction shots--gratuitous shots of the reporter listening (or "listening")--whose function is to bridge what would otherwise be jarring jump cuts.

Another: "Contrived" walking shots in which people are filmed strolling towards the camera are also out. "These are ghastly," Kermode said. "They are artificial, so we should ban them."

"Cut-aways", shots that include content being talked about, again to avoid jump cuts, will be banned, along with post-facto shots of reporters asking questions, deemed to "rarely look genuine".

The article concludes by asserting that these changes "can help restore trust in our medium and make our programmes more creative too."

Both the objections cited in the article--to "untrue" material in news reports--and the proposed corrections miss being relevant by a wide margin. That is, "TV fakery" in newscasts has, paradoxically, little to do with the "truth" of individual shots, or even whether they appear staged, so the "corrections" proposed, and, even whether there was a problem to begin with, are clouded with simplistic thinking. The truth of the matter is much more interesting.

First off, the dichotomy between visual narrative and "the truth" has been around for well over a century, even if not at the forefront of the public's concerns. It became clear early on that while single photographs and film shots have a demonstrable, one-to-one correspondence with "reality", when they are combined into a series, suddenly a new and unexpected element appears. This new element is the "reality" created and experienced in the viewer's mind from the narrative inferred from the juxtaposed shots. This implied reality, the reality experienced by the viewer of a series of shots, is not simply the summed "meaning" of the constituent shots considered in isolation. Rather, this "narrative reality" is a near-continuous series of inductive leaps, an evolving interpretation of "what's happening" as shots clash, one with the next. This continuous "jumping to conclusions" to make sense of each shot transition results in a new experience, a narrative flow, what is experienced when watching a series of shots.

The Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Podovkin, inflamed with revolutionary zeal and open mind, investigated the emergent meanings generated by shot juxtaposition. The fact that his seemed to be a perfect illustration of the Hegelian Dialectic didn't hurt in the fervid atmosphere of 1920s revolutionary socialism. Recall that the Hegalian Dialectic was appropriated by Karl Marx to describe history as a sequence of proposition, antithesis, and synthesis, each transforming into the next, compelling headlong change. It is not hard to see these steps being retraced in the magic of shot 1 being juxtaposed with shot 2 resulting in an idea, the synthesis.

Podovkin reduced this to a simple experiment: He took a shot of an impassive actor and then cut it together with a bowl of soup, a sick child and other shots of what the actor was "looking at". Viewers felt that in the first case, the soup, the actor had done a good job of conveying his hunger. In the second case they felt the actor had projected sympathy, and similarly for the other shots. Now, in each case, the shot of the actor was identical, not just similar, so the synthesis, the attribution of "hunger" or "sympathy" was an artifact in the viewer's mind.

Eisenstein also gave a nod to Hegel, but gave some academic underpinnings for this theory of montage. He showed that many compound characters in Chinese illustrate the same principle. For instance, the characters for "sun" and "moon", when combined, result in a new concept, "brightness". Emboldened by this new take on how the mind works, Eisenstein put theory into practice with the multiple juxtapositions of the forces of tyranny against the people in his memorable Odessa Steps sequence, wherein the hopes of a crushed people finds expression in the awful decent of a baby carriage down endless steps to the sea.

These lessons in how to see were taken to heart by the world's movie going public, which over the years has become immeasurably more sophisticated and adept at interpreting the visual information presented them. Recall that when movies were first shown, a shot of a train approaching was enough to cause people to run away in panic for fear of being run over and early films were shot full-figure because of the gnawing feeling audiences had that the actors were "cut off" by the frame in closer shots. Viewer sophistication has grown immeasurably in the subsequent century.The vocabulary of conventions available to television news is a very limited subset of theatrical film, determined largely by the constraints of shooting news, but the same skills are used to watch both media, as must be self-evident to anyone who has seen movies and TV.

Given the ubiquity of what might be called standard practice for TV news production, it is difficult to understand the flap about reaction shots, "nodding" shots and the rest. I give my thoughts on them, point by point.

Reaction shots: By dint of being restricted to one camera, any efforts to improve the visual flow and remove jump cuts will have to be done with shots that have been shot out of the time sequence of the interview. Yes, the reporter is not "reacting" to anything in particular, but such a "reaction" is understood to be a neutral place keeper to enable the substance of the (edited) statement to be absorbed more easily by avoiding obtrusive jump cuts. (Reaction shots are even used when not strictly necessary, as a form of visual relief, because the eye craves variety.)

Reactions shots "work" for a variety of reasons.

Given the mysterious workings of visual perception, a shot of A, followed by B, a shot of someone looking, is understood as "B is looking at A". Although A and B may have been separated by thousands of miles and more than a lifetime in the real world, the perceived visual narrative is still simply "B is looking at A", ceteris paribus [all things being equal]. How effective this illusion is depends on how well the shots match, the direction speaker and reactor are facing and whatnot, but the illusion of "B is looking at A" seems to reflect how people are wired to interpret a flow of imagery. Think: If this impression were not created in viewers, visual narratives would have to take a very different form.

Another function of reaction shots is to give the viewer a "role" in the presentation, albeit indirectly. If the viewer observes an interview or speech "in person", s/he would naturally look around to gauge how the speaker's ideas are being received, and, how your impression about how others feel compares with the way you feel [and, thus, whether you are in the middle of a friendly or hostile crowd]. Since everyone does this, seeing anyone react is in some way equivalent to seeing oneself react.

Another convention is to implicitly use the reporter as a representative or avatar for the viewer. The reporter is understood as being allied with the viewer or all viewers, so the reporter's reaction is read by the viewer as being a stand-in for his own reaction. This and the previous are similar, but different.

Reaction shots are a formalism but they are also consistent with the way the visual systems works, not as a continuous stream, as with mechanical movies or TV, but as a stuttering series of rapid starts and stops of the eyes, called saccades, effectively "cuts" from one "shot" to another, for nearly everything we see. This is another physiological basis for visual narrative, and probably explains why we so readily accept that "B is looking at A", simply because this sort of inference is drawn countless times every day with regular visual perception.

So, reactions shots are all but inevitable: The final question is whether they are "false" when not the literal reaction of reporter to interviewee. I think this is not important, as the apparent and actual differences between a "fake" reaction shot and the one "real" one at that point in the interview (from a certain viewpoint, etc) are devoid of meaningful difference. So, in my opinion, "true" reaction shots are rarely needed and it makes no real difference whether they are "faked". On the other hand, using an appropriate reaction can give several positive benefits even when the shot is "fake" (though it does have to be appropriate).


Flagging every edit within an interview, which might well be intolerably tendentious and confused without such edits, becomes very burdensome to viewers who wish to simply comprehend the issues the story raises, rather than engage in an epistemological study of representations by the television medium. Stripping interviews of reaction shots and reasonable illustrative material ("cut-ins") only emphasizes the gaps, making it more difficult to follow the sense of the story. Quotations in print solved the need to selectively extract portions of an interview long ago. Given the imperatives of visual narrative, TV news practice is equivalent, with relevant filler material covering bothersome jumps.

However, if "truth in reporting" is a big issue, there are innumerable effects, such as a short flash, than can be used to mark edits in an interview in a way that does not call attention to itself the way jump-cuts do. Such techniques might be useful in situations where unflagged edits would be otherwise said to change the meaning of an interview. I would hesitate to present every interview this way simply because it would be overkill.

The "contrived" walking shots complained about are generally introduced to give some dynamism to what would otherwise be simply a series of talking heads. Yes, they may be contrived or arbitrary, but I think their wholesale removal would be even worse. And, besides, what would replace them?

How banning reactions, cut-aways, and out-of-sequence questions would restore trust is anyone's guess, and it certainly would not make programs "more creative". Better would be to apply all these techniques to make the viewer's experience more pleasant with good judgment and sensitivity while being true to the spirit of reporting the truth rather than being slavishly literal about conventions that are understood to be conventions.