Viewer Beware
Misleading practices can damage credibility.
By Deborah Potter

Whatever happened to that old adage that seeing is believing? In Memphis and elsewhere, local television stations use reenactments on their newscasts. In Las Vegas and Los Angeles, stations add sound effects to news stories. And everywhere, from local stations to network newscasts, what appears to be live or unrehearsed isn't.

The pressure in newsrooms to grab and hold viewers has escalated the use of techniques that add visual appeal and immediacy to the news. Most stations now have the technical capacity to do things with video and sound they could only imagine a few years ago. Anything that can bring a story to life appears to be fair game.

It shouldn't be.

Re-creations have long been a staple of reality-based programs like "America's Most Wanted," but when a network newscast used a dramatization more than a decade ago, the outcry was deafening. In a story about an American diplomat believed to have passed secret documents to a Soviet spy, ABC News broadcast grainy footage of what appeared to be the actual handoff. It wasn't. But viewers couldn't tell; the video was not labeled a reenactment.

The news division apologized and promised it wouldn't happen again, but local stations haven't taken the same pledge. During last November's sweeps period, for example, three Memphis stations aired re-creations in crime stories. One station did it more than once, and didn't always bother to let viewers in on the practice.

What's wrong with that? It's deceptive, that's what. Viewers have a right to expect that what they see on the news really happened, and stations have a duty to label any footage that's more fiction than fact. The Radio-Television News Directors Association code of ethics says it clearly: "Professional journalists should not present images or sounds that are reenacted without informing the public."

Deception on the air doesn't stop with reenactments. Digital editing systems have made it easier than ever for stations to "enhance" their coverage with video and audio effects, leaving the viewer none the wiser. That's exactly what happened in Las Vegas, when KLAS-TV obtained security camera video of a casino robbery in which a gambler was killed and a security guard wounded. The footage was silent, of course. But that didn't stop the station from adding the sounds of slot machines and gunshots to the footage before airing it. Looked real. Sounded real. It wasn't. What had been fact was transformed into fiction. The station said later it should not have added the sounds.

KUSA-TV in Denver learned the same lesson after adding a twinkle effect to a diamond ring in a light feature story. The editor said he never thought anybody would assume it was real because it looked so phony. The news director disagreed and laid down the law that the station will not manipulate video without making it clear to the viewer that it had re-created a scene.

That's a good policy. But it won't make a dent in other common practices that are just as deceptive. Reporters today routinely videotape on-camera segments that conclude with what's known as a toss, adding something along these lines: "That's all from here. Back to you in the studio." When the story runs, it appears that the report is live. The practice has become so widespread, it even has a name. The "look live" is misleading, pure and simple.

It's a given that TV news needs pictures to tell stories, but a newscast is not a movie. And yet television journalists have been known to act like directors, asking people to walk down hallways, open doors and do things over, just so they'll have some video to illustrate a story.

The truth is, any video is not always better than none. "If viewers can tell your shots aren't authentic, then you've lost their trust," says Scott Jensen, a prize-winning photojournalist at Northwest Cable News. What upsets him most about the use of staging in TV news, he says, is that there's almost never a price to pay for doing it. "Still photographers get fired for staging," he told a recent conference in Phoenix. "We get a slap on the back."

What's the harm in all this? After all, the news is still true. The stories are accurate. But viewers are deliberately being misled by dramatizations, manipulations, fake live shots and staged video. When they realize it, won't they wonder what other partial truths they're being asked to accept at face value?

So whatever happened to that quaint, old notion that seeing is believing? It seems to have been supplanted by a warning: Viewer beware.

This article was originally published by
American Journalism Review, February/March 2004