Eccentric: Audio fraud

Like most of us, I go through phases of lunching out in front of the television or radio after a gruelling day at work.

As a news junkie, I tend to turn on current affairs programmes and let the world wash by. I’ve always been blessed by an innate cynicism but lately my scepticism has been justified by what I can only describe as an increasing incidence of audio fraud.

I’m not talking about the kind of trickery used by talent shows like X-factor. Ever since the introduction of crude echo and reverb, live performances have been sweetened, justifiably in my opinion. Given a choice between an out of tune performance and a touch of autotune, my long-suffering ears would much prefer the latter. And in that I’m no fan of the froth and trivia of Simon Cowell’s money making schemes, a touch of audio wibbly-wobbly-woo doesn’t madly bug me. No, my concerns are all together more far reaching.

In recent months I’ve been alarmed to hear interviews conducted on one television or radio station reappearing at a different time elsewhere. But these are not repeats. They profess to be ‘live’, ‘real-time’ interviews but conducted by different interviewers. The answers are identical even though there is sometimes an altogether different slant to the question.

It’s an easy stunt to pull in this digital age. The interview is stored on a hard disc, the answers logged as sound-bytes and the questions scripted for any number of presenters to apply their own amusing/insightful/clever slant. Questions are then ‘asked’ as if the interview is live, and the engineer pushes ‘go’ in the control room to fire back the relevant pre-recorded answer.

This is Brave New World stuff, a legacy of 1984. We are presented with fiction as if it was real. And what is worrying is that the line between creative presentation and truth is being blurred. I’ve heard this trick perpetrated at least a dozen times. Interviews with A or B or C are repeated with different presenters asking a variation of the same question to a pre-recorded answer. But now we’re nudging into more worrying territory as the actual questions are being modified, which of course puts a totally different slant on the answer. In short, rather than reporting the news, I fear that certain stations (including the BBC) are fabricating it, applying an interviewee’s answers to questions a million miles removed from the one that he or she was actually answering.

If we can no longer trust the veracity of the media, how can we make considered decisions about the world in which we live? If fiction is presented as fact, we are indeed entering the world of Big Brother, George Orwell stylee rather than Channel Five ‘reality’ pap.

And here’s the crux… ‘reality’ has become the most abused word in the media dictionary. It now refers to an edited, polished, manipulated version of a truth that often only ever existed in the minds of a team of scriptwriters. But for this fiction to permeate the objectivity of our daily news casts doubt upon the integrity we need.

If, as an audio engineer, you are asked to apply your skills to manipulating reality in such a way, please ask questions. Is this really so far removed from the practices of former Eastern European regimes that we despise so intensely?

Surely, if an interview is worthy of repetition, we should demand both questions and answers rather than accepting fabricated questions that allow a presenter or editor to doctor replies in a form to suit a different agenda from the original broadcast?

As audio technicians, we have a crucial role to play to guard the integrity of our media.

Please…

Eccentric

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