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Visually interesting footage still carries editorial weight that can sway news judgment. Example: one night last week, NBC Producer Robert Mulholland rejected a plane-crash story with the comment, "No flames in the film. Too quiet." But generally, the networks have matured since the days when "Shoot bloody" was the watchword of Viet Nam War coverage, and they are constantly evaluating their own performance. Last week NBC News President Reuven Frank reminded his staff in a memo that "misleading practice" has been forbidden for years and noted, "I get as weary of being called on to be Caesar's only wife as you do." By and large, the networks' editors have done well in maintaining their purity. The only major recent controversy, other than the Pentagon program, concerned a polemical antihunting film shown on NBC. In it, a female polar bear with two cubs is apparently stalked by helicopter and gunned down. Actually, as Producer David Wolper admits, the killing was simulated by splicing in footage of a bear being felled by an anesthetic dart in a game-department tagging program.
Jump Cut. Even before they can make basic editorial judgments about the relative news value of stories, TV producers must overcome mammoth technical problems. Film and tape must be acquired from all over the world via Air Express or cable or satellite; when they come, there is too much footage and too little time, particularly on the major nightly newscasts. Normally, the three competing network shows have ten to 15 hours of film and tape at their disposal each day. Air time to display it usually amounts to twelve to 15 minutes. Roughly 7½ minutes of the half hour goes to commercials and station breaks, the rest to items simply read by the anchorman because they are late-breaking or do not lend themselves to illustration. Perhaps seven important film stories are fighting for time each night, and a producer and film editor (in New York or at a network bureau) are assigned to cut them to size.
The story in the raw includes visual background, interviews, possibly speeches, plus an opening, closing and bridge narrative by the correspondent. By the time the film has all been run through and vetted frame by frame on the Moviola, the ratio of on-the-air footage to cutting-room-floor surplus is approximately 1 to 20. The deadlines are so relentless that few TV editors have the time to transpose film even if they want to. Just splicing together two frames of film can take up to 20 minutes, and a filmed interview can take even longer to assemble if the editor is trying to splice a single answer from two different parts of the film. A typical problem complicating such splicing: between questions, the interviewee may light a cigarette or unbutton his jacket, producing an audience-jarring "jump cut" if the splice is made. The solution is to switch to a "cutaway" in between, generally a reaction shot of the correspondent.
Even on documentaries, where time is not a problem, transposition of sequence, as in the colonel's speech on the Pentagon show, is against standing orders at all networks. David Buksbaum, ABC news producer, who learned his trade under Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly at CBS, says: "When we edit, it never gets out of sequence. And if someone would edit out of sequence, the guy ought to be fired."