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The network's fundamental defense, however, applies to both electronic and print journalism and goes far beyond the Pentagon documentary; CBS contends that the transposition of film footage was mere technique and that the screened product was a fair summation of the colonel's rambling oratory. "The important thing," says Salant, "is whether or not you are journalistically honest in your editing, not whether you present a verbatim transcript."
Few editors would disagree with that position, yet it ignores a vital difference between print and television journalism. Newspaper and magazine readers as well as their editors understand that what is printed is a comprehensible reordering of reality; written stories normally can and do make clear, through both words and punctuation, where significant reordering has occurred. By its immediacy, TV creates the illusion of verisimilitude. The average viewer, unfamiliar with TV's editing, was doubtless misled into believing what he saw and heard on the documentary—an Army officer during part of a speech. Because televised material is digested more easily and has greater emotional impact than news in print, distortions in editing cut especially deep. One partial remedy might be to superimpose a subtitle like "Edited Excerpts" on condensed speeches, just as some segments during the televising of space explorations are labeled "PreTaped" or "Simulated."
Caesar's Wife. Salant would have the near-unanimous support of all journalists in rejecting one Post proposal —that the subject of a film interview be granted approval rights over the final cut. That suggestion, Salant said, "strikes at the very core of independent and free journalism." No one in the press or Government suggests that TV not be allowed to edit at all. Journalism, whether print or electronic, must select and synthesize. But pictures lend themselves less readily to this process than words—which is one reason why print journalism is capable of subtlety and depth that can almost never be achieved on TV. It is also why editing TV news requires a special kind of vigilance.
Often TV editing actually makes subjects look better rather than worse. People who speak redundantly and in non-sentences in an interview may appear articulate and convincing after editing. One former CBS producer recalls how "I spent much of my time making Eisenhowers sound like Demostheneses." But bias, conscious or unconscious, sometimes leads an editor to play down those parts of a speech, news conference or interview to which he is unsympathetic. Bias aside, TV cutters frequently overplay the sensational element in a statement and miss the sense of it.