Every so often I’ll be watching TV and there’ll be a documentary or a news clip where it seems like lazy or ignorant media person just chose some near-random piece of sort-of related media
I actually have seen a WW II documentary about the Blitz and, oh look, here’s a clip of a C-47 sandwiched between clips of HE-111s. Well, it’s all black and white so I guess that’s good enough. This isn’t uncommon.
Our weather network, in the early days of the pandemic, had a PSA thanking front line workers (including our military who were supporting our long term care residents), so they had shots of US troops doing good things.
Today the Canadian federal budget was released and on CTV Montreal, for the part about the defence budget, they had a still photo of an F-15. Yep, Canada has a shit-ton of those in our inventory.
Probably not pit-worthy but FFS this really isn’t that difficult.
Actually, if it’s your job to dig up some B-roll right now for something that will be edited and go on the air on the noon or 7 pm news hour in a couple of hours, then you’re often going to find yourself trading off priorities pretty quickly.
On the one hand, some small number of viewers will notice and some smaller number will also care.
On the other hand, this is a disposable news report that no one is going to care about after it airs once or twice. How much time and effort is it worth to find out if the B-roll is anything more than “military stuff to accompany military talk”?
My personal favorite was from a piece about sex on television. They showed a scene of a man and a woman lying on a bed together. But anyone who actually watched that show would know that the man was the woman’s son, and he was lying on the bed with her because she found out that she had breast cancer and he was comforting her. It just seemed like such a tone-deaf scene to use to illustrate their point.
The same thing occurs in print journalism. There will be a story about, say, Facebook, so they’ll include a photo of the thumbs up sign outside the headquarters. Sometimes they’ll use a stock photo only loosely or even not at all related to the story.
A TV station in Houston used clips from a silly comedy movie called “Bubble Boy” to illustrate a news story about a local boy dealing with a rare disorder, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. This was in the worst possible taste and there was an uproar about it. The reporter, the photographer/editor, and the producer were all fired, as they should have been.
This is the sort of bad judgement that people starting out their TV news careers in some dinky market in Montana might show, but in Houston Texas, TV market number 8??? Just unbelievable!
However, I presented this incident to a Media Management college class at the time, and about half the class thought the punishment was too severe. That was 20-some years ago, and I don’t think any of them ever got jobs in the media…at least I hope not.
Well, when I was typing this out I was more or less thinking similar stuff. Though it still bugs me (I’m ex-military and when I was a kid I loved combat aircraft).
You see the same sort of thing in news reports about any sort of incident on an airliner. They just throw in a random stock photo of an airplane that has nothing to do with the incident apart from the fact that it’s from the same airline. I’ve seen some that were obviously like 10 years old, because the plane was in a livery the airline doesn’t even use anymore, or of a plane the airline doesn’t fly anymore.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using stock footage (from your own archives or from a service) as b-roll for a news story. Doing a story on education in general? Any video of a teacher in a classroom is fair game. Is your story about a specific school or district? Then no. You should shoot it yourself or find an alternative. It’s a judgment experienced news reporters, editors and producers have to make every day.
However, using 10 year-old footage of an airline, even though most viewers wouldn’t recognize it as such, is somewhat lazy, I agree.
In Canada there was a bit of a scandal a few years ago when the Department of Veterans Affairs had a commemorative piece for VE day showing German soldiers, which were supposed to be Canadian soldiers:
We need a generic photo of an authority figure in a peaked cap. This should do.
[yes I know that isn’t strictly on topic but I thought it was funny]
Journalists (or at least editors, who have the real power) simply don’t care much about accuracy, and in much more serious ways than B-roll errors.
Due to certain connections I once attended a relatively intimate workshop with the Editor in Chief of a major newspaper, concerning how to interact with journalists, what they need, how to help them to help you etc.
His overall theme was “don’t bother us with inaccuracies we don’t care about, it only pisses us off”. The problem IMHO is that what they don’t care about, and what those involved in the story care about, are at odds. The only thing editors much care about is the accuracy of facts that substantially change the popular narrative, I guess because that’s all the reading public care about much.
For example, I was once involved in a newsworthy incident where an early story wrongly reported that a company that had literally nothing to do with the situation was involved. Now as you can imagine, the wrongly named company was apopleptic. But it took our media consultants days of pleading with journalists to correct the error, while being fobbed off and told to stop annoying them with irrelevancies. To them, whether it was company A or company B didn’t matter - either way it was just some damn foreign company, and whether it was A or B they couldn’t give a shit about.
Another major problem is that journalist are lazy (aren’t we all I guess) and just work off their (or other journalists’) earlier copy, and it’s generally the early copy that is the least accurate. So if an early story says the car was red, and then you point out to the journalist it was blue, they may change it in the next story but very likely it will go back to being red in later stories.
