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NBC Upset About CBS's Digital Ethics
naughtius_maximus writes "NBC is peeved that CBS used the live-digital-editing technique mentioned in a previous /. article to cover up NBC's logo with one of CBS's creepy eye logos during the new year's bash. The full story is at Yahoo! News." How much of this is faux righteous indignation on the part of NBC? On the other hand, they did pay for the Astrovision screen that CBS imaged over. Maybe they're still mad about Letterman.
NBC did not have a contract with CBS to display that advertisement, and since CBS owned the transmission medium, they have every legal right to do what they did. Is it ethical? I don't know. I do feel that NBC has no right to ask for reparations.
Was CBS right to do this? I don't think so, but they weren't wrong either. It was just a bad decision and one that undermines their integrity.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
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The biggest problem here is that it's NEWS organizations which seem to be loving this technology. Is it right for journalists to fake out their viewers (in this case) even when it only involves slighting the competition? I don't think so. I think it's journalistist fraud.
Normally when you're watching news coverage, there's a trust that the audience puts into the news that they're getting the real deal. It's an implied agreement that the news will present us with facts (both stated and visual), and that we viewers come to expect that. This is one of the things that separates news from sitcoms and drama series. This is why we don't raise a flap if we get computer special effects in the movies. This is why we get pissed if the news gives us doctored footage.
That's like replacing Boris Yeltsin's head with Brad Pitt's and reporting it as news. Their version of actual events was inaccurate to say the least. I wonder if all ugly people could be replaced with good-looking people with this same technique. That way the mother of the septuplets wouldn't have to worry about her bad teeth. Her face could just be replaced with Pam Dauber's.
The New York Times Circuts section carried an article on this very matter as well. It would surprise some people what length advertisers go to in order to make sure their message is being heard. There was once a man interviewed on ABC News whose job is to count up every single ad visible in every second of NASCAR televised racing, along with the duration of visible time. He then punches this in a spreadsheet and uses calculations to both valuate and evaluate the money worth of each ad spot.
Now advertisers will be pissed because there is no more garuntee that they will be seen on television. Technically the networks have a right to broadcast what they want, but it perturbs me to realize that networks will go to lenghts to block competitor's advertisements, but still interrupt broadcasts with sensational journalism, like the OJ "getaway" and planes landing on freeways.
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
As for the Journalist ethics, Journalists conviently forgot those years ago and do now care who they walk on in the quest for the almighty scoop. If they think they can get away with using this technology, they will use it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nothing bothers me less than to see two giant media corporations go sue each other. I hope they bankrupt themselves.
Look, what if at hockey games, they start putting up blue screen ads, so that the TV networks can project their own ads onto them? Is this really any different than the way ads are sold now? No, not really. That kind of thing is already going on. Does CBS advertise its competitors for free? No. Big deal. So what if they start editing out outdoor advertising. Would anyone object if it was a cigarette ad they'd edited out?
The issue of honesty in reporting, which seems to be one of the major concerns here, is a total non sequitor as far as I'm concerned. Raise your hand if you didn't know that what you see on TV isn't always real. No hands? I thought so.
Jim Naureckas of FAIR seems concerned that this will undermine the credibility of TV news. As far as I can see, TV news already has no credibility, and print and Internet news isn't much more credible. The news is already a part of the entertainment, and is only done so long as it attracts ad revenue.
What a total non-issue.
viewers that it was doing this? If not, they're setting a dangerous precedent.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
40 years from now I'll lean over to my grandson and tell him how I remember so vividly my evening at time Square, "It was so much fun, everyone was screaming and laughing. The ball was getting ready to drop, and the Astrovision had Dan Rathers talking about the event live. Oh Jonny, you should have seen it live - it's just not the same on tv, you know."
Joseph Elwell.
Jakob Neilsen claims that web users have been observed to develop defensive techniques against banner ads. These techniques include scrolling the banner out of view, or staring at the cursor while the rest of the page loads. Advertising effectiveness is falling on the WWW, hopefully it will start falling everywhere. It would be the first step to ending the disgusting consumer culture in the USA.
-jwb
Okay guys, read the article. It sounds like this was an actual physical logo, like a billboard. Not the stupid thing in the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen!
I don't care who owns the transmission, if it's live, I want to see what's there! It's New York, for cris'sake. If they had a partnership with Lipton and digitally changed the big Cup-a-Noodle display or something, I'd be pissed!
(Why? Because I was at Times Square for New Years last year, I stared at that thing for three hours, and I kinda like it. I trust my news for some reality now and then, and if I found out that they lied to me like that, I'd be annoyed.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sure.. they own the broadcast.. but if the general, fair assumption that it is 'live' then it should not be edited. Period. One could launch a class action suit saying that they deliberately did *NOT* give you fair, live coverage of the event, as they claimed to have done, and, in that respect, wasted your evening.
If I framed up a news page with other's content and covered up their articles, I'd be in hot water. So, what grounds does CBS have taking footage of other people's buildings and plastering other ads on them?
Imagine you own a 100 million dollar building in Times Square and arranged some advertising on New Year's Eve. No one sees it.
I hate advertising and don't know why I'm defending NBC, but I think CBS pulled a boner.
I personally think that it's fine for people to censor things. I mean no one had any kind of license agreement, and as far as I know there is no reason they HAVe to display anything on the TV (if they are doing the broadcast medium)... so I don't know that they did anything wrong.. now ethically that's another question.. =)
Matt
miskam evets
Scenario A: Networks airbrushing over each other's billboards, buildings, etc. with different sponsors
This will solve itself, because the networks are on a level playing field -- they will most likely come to an out of court agreement, unless they are all as ill-mannered and belligerent as the CBS president.
Scenario B: Networks inserting advertising onto the billboards/signs of smaller businesses.
I almost HOPE they do this. After all, they could argue that the local businesses are getting free advertising merely by being shown in the background of a TV show, and thus the network is merely reclaiming ad space previously given away for free. I'm pretty sure this would backfire though, so I'm not too worried.
The networks inserting advertising onto anything and everything that moves. And stuff that doesn't.
This is the real problem. Most advertising is obviously advertising, but there is a subset that masquerades as truth. Fake websites, fake movie advertisements, some infomercials, and so on. Most of that stuff is easier to pick out because it falls into an advertising "context" -- a 30 second spot, or whatever. But what if ad agencies realize that there is an opportunity to truly blur the line between advertising and reality? Insert an ad masquerading as truth into a show professing to report the truth? How much would that be worth? I know that fake websites are harder to distinguish from fake movie trailers simply because there are no contextual clues ("Rated 'Y' for Yummy").
Just food for thought.
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"If children weren't copyrighted, no one would have babies." -- Alex Eulenberg
Seriously, anybody here honestly believe TV is a valid indicator of reality? Unbiased reporting doesn't exist (columbine and the hellmouth anyone? How about DeCSS?), and in many cases isn't even well-researched. I regard most of what I see on TV as gossip. The notable exceptions are: the weather (atleast they admit they lie!), Star Trek (which I believe is Divine Truth), and Monty Python re-runs.
The conservative elements in our society take TV far too seriously. Warping children's minds? Sure, flip on Barney and Friends or that Pokemon show. Violence and sex on TV, evil? Well, sex on TV doesn't hurt unless you fall off. As for the violent part... well, watching Roseanne.. *shudder*. Yeah, well.. I guess maybe they were right. Scratch this post. =)
When i read the article about Dan Rather's objection to CBS's use of the technology, there was a genuine flavor of: "no, we really do think that this use was over the line, and that the previous use in whimsey on the morning show was okay".
Well, that's fine and dandy. In my book, even counts as a retraction of the previous stance of "this use does not go counter to our guidelines against digital modification of images".
Hmmph.
Then they go on to mention that the CBS morning show is in trouble, ratings-wise. And that they had spent $30 Million trying to fix it up. Then things became clear. This was all a publicity stunt.
Sure, they probably genuinely were playing around with covering up NBC logos with CBS logos, etc. But the hubub that resulted, the news articles, the allegations, the unethical stance, the retraction, righteous indignation. All sounds like a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt to me. Otherwise, this wouldn't have gotten nearly the media coverage it had.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Just think of the things this could lead to. What are we going to let the media get away with? A stance needs to be taken on issues like this otherwise before we know it all our media is fiction and we are living in "1984".
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
For those that didn't read the article, this was a gigantic bulletin board in Times Square on New Year's Eve.
On the one hand, CBS does have the ability and the right to adjust its broadcasts. Censoring-squares or blurs are done all the time, for reasons from 'decency' rules to protection of innocents in crime footage.
OTOH, they made it look as if their logo was really there on New Years Eve, misrepresenting the broadcast as live and unedited coverage, at least implicitly.
I think the ethical way through this dilemma is actually pretty simple. CBS should have covered the NBC logo with something that was clearly artificial. Maybe a blur, or a black square, or even their own logo - but done 'flat', maybe in a brick-layout, so that it was obviously a computer mask over something being covered. Then CBS edits the offending content while at the same time not creating a misrepresentation problem.
(The question of why they didn't move Dan Rather -is- a good one though... )
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Soon appearing on a TV screen near you:
ROOTERS (BS) -- "Rooters reported that at the inaguration(sp?) of President Donald Trump this past week, CBS used their new "eMass eDillusion" technology to superimpose an image of the president "gettin' jiggy with it" during his inagural speech. CBS authorities claim that it was "some hacker punk that broke into our system", but millions were not spared from the horrible image many believed was a new style in clothing"
Please, as if the thought of doctored images in newspapers wasn't bad enough, now I can't even trust the news on tv!
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
In reference to NBC's comments, I think that their own ethics should be questioned. They make claims against CBS's digital ethics, but NBC is guilty of far worse. My point: NBC's ridiculous, unethical, and panic-instilling movie "Y2K." This seems to be an ethical violation which predicted a disaster of the digital form. This was a severe mistake by NBC and they shouldn't question people's ethics after such a ludicrous disaster movie.
The Yahoo article doesn't make this clear, but Dan Rather is upset because there's a bit of a journalistic-integrity-type issue (spelling?) at hand with this digital editing. This issue was also touched on by a few people in the previous /. article. Basically CBS displayed an image, promoting it as live and implying it as being unedited, but altered the image without telling anyone that it was altered.Many people are forgetting (and most people don't even realize) how easy it is to skew or alter an image or it's perception without using CGI effects; and let's not mention editing techniques. Television is a difficult medium for fair, evenhanded journalism. It's nice to see people on the inside complaining, but it's going to be a hard struggle that gets worse before it gets better.On another note, the surest way to fix things is with an eduacted audience. And be just as wary of counter-news and underground- and alternative-reporitng as you would normal reporting.
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What I CAN see happening is CBS putting an ad over a billboard during their broadcast.
They made a law saying that you can't have a minute flash of an image in a video stream in order to make you crave hamburgers at the movie theatre. This will be no different. A few people will abuse the current lack of standards, people will get pissed and a law to this effect will be passed:
Any video stream marked as "live" may not contain any image manipulation except the addition of visual borders around the side of the image to convey the live status or other information about the feed. The border may cover part of the live feed, but may not at any time appear to be a part of the live stream of images.
Once that goes in to law no one will be concerned about this any more.
Drake42
Just filter them out, like everyone with a trace of a clue is doing. I haven't seen a single banner ad for months.
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Play Match-It.
I'm happy to see NBC going after CBS for faking what we see on TV. If CBS isn't stopped now, the next thing you know, they'll be showing fake exploding trucks.
This is an interesting issue...
On one hand, I don't like advertising -- and it was pretty creative to block out NBC's logo. But on the other hand, I think CBS was wrong to do this. Why? The main reason is that you are no longer reporting what is *actually* happening -- not only are you "slanting" it (as is what usually happens) but you are decieving viewers into thinking that the something is there which is not there. Done well, sure, it's hard to notice, (unless you're NBC) -- but I think it's unethical. Furthermore, I think it's unethical to plaster your logo in other places where it actually isn't, like the buildings and carriages that the story was talking about.
It's great to have the technology to do this. Pretty darn nifty, I would say -- but I think it is unethical to use the technology in a deceiving way.
The bottom line? They can do whatever they want with their broadcast. But I think it makes them look bad when they deceive people -- but hey, what am I complaining about -- I don't watch TV anyway. Yet another reason not to watch CBS.
Some will see this as a sign that the media cannot be trusted. Man, you guys are late. They've been doctoring magazine and newspaper photos for years. I reached my last straw with the flap over setting explosive charges in trucks and then reporting their lack of safety. The media has always been manipulating your news. They didn't need new technology to do it. W. R. Hearst certainly didn't need digital technology for his yellow journalism.
There are good people and there are bad people. It's a law of nature. It should surprise no one that there are bad people in the media.
If you only get your news from one source, or worse, from only one television source, you're a dupe. The only way they can fool you is if you let them.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
They claimed they did it only to make the picture fit in the frame and promised to never do it again.
To bad I can't remeber the details.
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This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
This made me laugh. TV news credibility? News flash kids - that deafening howl in your ears is normal when you reach terminal velocity.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
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"Insert witty quote here."
Rather himself weighed into the controversy Thursday in an interview with the New York Times, in which he said he regretted the TV trickery, saying it was ``a mistake.''
``At the very least we should have pointed out to viewers we were doing it,'' he said. ``I did not grasp the possible ethical implications of this and that was wrong on my part.'
So, Dan actually thinks its kinda "wrong" to lie to people? Wow, journalistic integrity at it's top.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward defended the use of such new technology
Meet Dan's boss.
Asked whether he believed it was deliberate deception on CBS's part, Heyward said: ``The answer is no, I don't think it was. This is part of the evolution of graphics. They get more and more sophisticated...it does raise new issues.''
What? You mean like ethical issues? Like, "Maybe we should tell people what they're seeing is fake" kind of issues?
and
And ABC News apologized a few years ago for a segment in which reporter Cokie Roberts was said to be reporting from Capitol Hill, when she was in fact in the network's Washington bureau in front of a photograph of the Capitol building.
Let's rephrase this, ABC apologized a few years ago when they lied to save a few bucks, after they got caught. Remember...
CBS is owned by CBS Corp. (NYSE:CBS - news) NBC is owned by General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE - news) and ABC by Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS - news).
And all of these are responsible to their shareholders to maximize profits. Nothin' like saving millions with new technology!
This technology is real cute, until it's used to show some Chinese/Iraqi/Evil Empire of the Week troops killing 30 Americans in cold blood to ramp up public opinion to grab new resources for the starving childrn in this country.
/end wild knee jerk reaction
+&x
CBS uses this same method to shoot their logo all over NY landmarks during their morning "news" shows. again, i say "so what".
The thing that actually sickened me was watching the ball drop in times square (on TV) right onto a huge Discover(tm) ad. Nowhere else in the world (that i saw) was advertising space so blatantly exploited.
We're seeing more and more outside ad space (in the USA) being purchased not only for the impressions it will make in real life, but for those captured on tv and in movies, tv shows, etc. By starting to block them in this way, maybe we'll see a decline (however slight) in the selling of every square inch of public property to advertisers.
I have no idea if it was "right" or not but if enough ppl get pissed at CBS they'll stop doing it. I find it hilarious that NBC is outraged at this, as if when they purchased Jumbotron advertising it said in the contract "CBS will not mess with your ads during their broadcasts". Heck, the Real World on MTV blurs logos of companies all the time. Outrage! It is supposed to be "Real". says so right there in the title.
Presentation of news on televsion has been altered since tv began - beginning with what execs choose to show and exclude, including editing of soundbytes and videoclips, and now some digital jiggery-pokery. wake up, people. news is not nor never has been "pure" and this digital imagery trickiness is just another tool in a large arsenal. in these days of advanced digital imaging, i take anyting i don't see with my own eyes with a grain of salt.
i for one applaud CBS' move to use this technology to subvert advertising. let's see more of it! let's destroy an advertising culture infrastructure that is dominating our lives.
I have a TV with no antennae so I can't get any stations even if I wanted to and I have never owned cable. I do have a VCR (still saving up for the DVD player) to watch movies and occasionally have friends tape episodes of Simpsons or XFiles for me. If I to veg out in front of a screen, it's a computer monitor.
- tokengeekgrrl
Isn't this sort of similar to spammer A whining that spammer B used a cancelbot to kill his "Get rich Quick" messages in usenet?
I suppose I should be grateful about advertising though... How would I know what I want without it?
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Don't be silly. When you say that "Their version of actual events was inaccurate," what events are you referring to? That a newscast occured? The news is not what is being reported on. If the story on CBS news was "CBS News has set up studio in Times Square," then it would be something else. But it isn't. CBS has made the presumption that people are cabable of making a distinction between the news and the forum in which news is conveyed. I think most people would agree that that's a fair assumption.
It is not the same as replacing Boris Yeltsin's head with Brad Pitt's, and I think if CBS actually started to make any additions to the news, people would just stop watching.
What fascinates me about this whole situation is that news departments are in the business of removing information to the point of distorting the news, but people only get upset when information is added. You would think that slashdotters would be a little more cynical about the media, but it's the subtraction of facts from stories that have made me give up on popular news outlets in the first place. If you don't like the news, read Pacifica, BBC, Slashdot, and Salon. That's where the real news is anyway. Duh.
I'm curious to see if the FCC will have anything to say about this. Isn't there something in the terms of agreement that networks must comply with that says something about public service? This may not apply to cable since it's a private medium, but the radio spectrum is public property and I'm almost certain that to get broadcast bandwidth the networks have to agree to certain conditions. Can't remember where I read this.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Since I live in Times Square, I'm constantly noticing footage where Letterman's video crew replaces CBS or ABC billboards with fake NBC images. I always felt sorry for Dick Clark. The north view of Times Square is the giant Coke sign. The south view, directly under the ball, was for decades a Pepsi sign. And New Year's Rockin' Eve was always sponsored by Dr Pepper, who didn't want to promote the competition, which severely limited the director's choice of camera angles.
However, CBS News President Andrew Heyward defended the use of such new technology -- something CBS has also been doing recently on ``The Early Show'' in which the network's logo has appeared on buildings and even horse-drawn carriages around the Central Park area where the show is broadcast.
I don't know "The Early Show". Is it news? I make a huge distinction between entertainment and news. Forrest Gump meets several presidents. Big deal. I don't care what f/x they use in my entertainment. If something is presented as news, then I don't want them changing it If a network gets caught changing NEWS images, and tries to shrug it off as nothing special, then I will never trust them again.
This leaves open the question of whether or not the millenium rollover was news. It sounds like Dan Rather changed his mind on whether it's news vs entertainment after the fact. So, CBS showed the millenium live from Metropolis or Gotham City, not New York? Did they ADVERTISE is as New York as opposed to something fictional?
My outrage is based on my view that the millenium was news. If you think of it as entertainment hype, then you can disregard this message.
I disagree with Naureckas's slippery slope. If it's news it should be accurate. If it is fiction, then it should be clear from the context that it is fiction.
(I'll ignore for the moment cases of fake-news-as art like the War of the Worlds telecast or the User Friendly April 1 injunction)
CHOKO LA ROKO...the true guardian of all that is indecent but good...some shall call him...TIM!
I may be wrong in this next point, but I think that its an offshoot of this technology that lets the people broadcasting (american) football games to put the 1st down line on the feild, and not have it overlay a player when he walks over it. I understand that this is non-trivial to do, requiring a semi trailer full of SGI gear.
Now, when people buy billboard ads, they generally don't expect the ad to show up on TV, but it's a big bonus when it does. But ads in Times Square on New Years Eve are obviously expected to show up on TV - in fact I'd guess that's one reason Times Square ads are bought, and why they have value.
If the networks get free reign to replace any ad they like with their own logo or (worse) with another ad, the market value for billboards will fall, and the only "guarenteed" way of getting your ad on TV would be to buy commercial time, and thus the price of commercials would rise even higher. Extrapolating a bit more, consider the implications:
A local affiliate of CBS, KCBS if filming near the site of a car accident. In the background is a billboard for "Mom and Pop's Tractor Co.". Now it happens that KCBS has an agreement with John Deer Tractors that any other tractor maker or seller must be blocked out of live TV, or John Deer will take its $120 million/year commercial contract with KCBS elsewhere. I wonder what KCBS will do?
Of course this seems unlikely and ludicrous to us today, but if this technology is allowed to sneak in and be accepted, who knows where it will lead? Billboards would become even more of an advertising ghetto than they are already, and the networks might be held hostage by corporations even more so than today.
If they'll live edit a logo... and do this kind of editing without telling the viewer he's watching an edited recording... then why should I believe anything they say or show? News reporting has to be raw and uncensored or it's just not credible. This is why I support ACs on Slashdot. They are the Great Equalizer that keeps Slashdot legit. There may be loons, flamers, zealots, and baldfaced liars among them, but as long as they can speak uncensored, I can rest assured that the unedited Truth is being spoken in there too, without fear of reprisal from the ACs employer, etc. Any tainted news or slanted reporting will be quickly debunked by the masses. Slashdot without ACs would be just another biased news media outlet.
shiny Time-Warner DVD entitled "The Matrix" into my spanking new DVD player one more time...
OK, now I understand. The "pod" is my living room. The "plugs" that they're pulling out are my cable connection, my satellite feed, my phone line, my radio/TV antenna, my checkbook, my ATM card, my VISA card, my library card, my driver's license, my HMO card, my ISP ID/password, and my employee ID.
Why the hell haven't I made the connection until now?
You know modern video cameras perform a low pass filter on skin tones to remove spots without blurring other detail?
-- SIGFPE
You are not required to watch any particular news broadcast. If, for example, you find CBS to now be not credible, they by all means: it's youre choice not to watch. They have rights to broadcast what they will on the frequencies that the FCC has granted them privlidges to. If they want to broadcast cartoons or sitcoms, they can, if they want to (without slander, which I don't see any of in this case), they can. If the people then decide that they don't want to watch a non-credable newscast, they have every right to tune into something different, or go read a newspaper. To paraphrase a cliche: Don't believe everything you see. If it's truly important to you, take in all your sources of information and make your on conclusion. No one has ever said that you are forced to mindlessly accept everything on TV.
WRCT Pittsburgh, 88.3FM
Having said that, it seems that re-composing the shot would have been a much more reasonable solution, either moving Dan "What's the Frequency" Rather in front of the sign, or simply changing the angles. This would have avoided the tinge of impropriety altogether.
In reading the related Yahoo articles, I find NBC's (as well as the FAIR representative's) inflammatory declarations quite amusing -- as if Dan and his crew were neo-Stalinists erasing party members from old photographs. "CBS has always been at war with Oceania. We have never been at war with ABC." C'mon, newsy folks, your producers would have done exactly the same thing, and for the same reasons.
I think what's more at stake here (and what's more saddening) is not some "threat" to journalistic integrity due to the digital revolution, but more how much corporate folks love to whine for the microphones. It's like a preschool playground, and Dan wouldn't play fair.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of corporate America "growing up" any time soon is ... well, about as probable as Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw singing "Auld Lang Syne" together on the next Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Eve.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
You already shouldn't be trusting photographs, video clips, etc. since this technology has been out there for years, and this recent incarnation is only special because it works in real-time. Moreover, you fail to realize that in the future, people won't be interacting with images as objects in an otherwise objective and external universe. In the future, with implants and such headed where they're headed, people will be interacting with a modified (improved or depreciated, depending on your philosophy) view of the world. With technology like this, it won't be simply a matter of covering one logo with another. It'll be masking one's entire perception of the world.
Oooogy, oooogy, booogy. I came up with my conspiracy theory for the day; now it's your turn.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Hmm, I did type that in as polluting the atmosphere with his fish processing plant but I guess sigs get trimmed. Reads kinda funny now. Rich
Steve Mann, one of the original Media Lab borg units, was motivated partly by a desire to have more control over his personal visual place.
IOW, he wanted his visor to block out bilboards.
Check him out:
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/
And
in this page:
Discuss.
Asked whether he believed it was deliberate deception on CBS's part, Heyward said: ``The answer is no, I don't think it was. This is part of the evolution of graphics. They get more and more sophisticated...it does raise new issues.''
Evolution smegolution!
Even the trollmastah knows right from wrong. They could have easily moved the chair the anchor was sitting in. They knew what they were doing and even for a troll it was quite obvious.
When we watch a movie, sporting event and the like, we expect to see the luma-overs, graphics and special effect. Not on the news. But is the news entertainment? It didn't used to be but the line has been dulled. In our area, the local news anchors say stuff like "Watch the show at six when we talk about CBS doing bad stuff". They refer to the news as a show not as a broadcast or program anymore.
How does this effect the trolls? It really doesn't, but I had to weigh in. This troll feels that the decaying morality of our media (ok already decayed) our kids are going to have a very rough time. I have four, all under ten and I cringe at the thought of them growing up beleiving that they cant trust anyone or anything.
Trollmastah
It's new years eve 2099 and a new century is less than an hour away. You've saved for this trip for over 2 years, and you're happy to say, you're going to be in times square on new years. New York, the gateway to america, the city that never sleeps, you've seen it all on Letterman, the bright lights, the glamour, the prestige that is times-square New York,NY.
You walk into the square and gaze up around you at what you think is going to be all the adds you've seen so many times, only to see giant green screens. That's right, there is no more bright lights, no more prestige. Just giant green billboard with (little dots in the corner to sync the motion tracking on the real-time digital overlay).
Is this our future?
_________________________
I don't recall if I was watching CBS or not on New Year's Eve, but I'd sure like to see if I can notice what's computer inserted and what's not...
I'd immediately think about things like lighting differences, but with what's available from SGI, I think even those can be calculated out!
So... anyone know where the examples are?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
...2 million people in times square is just not acceptable.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Sure, you can't trust everything you see on the TV, but can you imagine what would happen if someone took the TV images of Ronald Reagan being shot and digitally modified them so that some other major figure was there. Say, a key political or economic figure. You could cause panic in the stock markets, and therefore the entire economy.
In short, TV news stations can carry out acts of economic terrorism. If the courts rule that such acts are legal, for ANY reason, CBS or NBC could quite literally hold the United States to ransom any time they damn well chose, in a way that every court in the land would deem perfectly acceptable. And there wouldn't be a damn thing anyone could do.
Nor would it stop there. Let's say the news chief bet on the wrong team in the Superbowl. No problem! Just edit the scores on the scoreboard, and sue the establishment he placed the bet with for witholding his winnings. As he had video evidence, it's not impossible he'd win.
In short, once you legally allow edited images to be presented as fact, you are opening the doors to activities that would make a politician blush, and all of it would be perfectly 100% above-board.
IMHO, sod the ethics of this one case, look at the potential road this goes down! Be VERY Afraid of that!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It was later discovered that Dateline had purposely rigged the truck with explosives so it would be guaranteed to explode on impact.
IMO, all mainstream media is guilty of unethical behavior to some degree. Be it deliberately clipping sound bites to take someone's words out of context or faking backgrounds of news anchors. So for one media company to criticize another media company for unethical behavior is quite laughable.
Perhaps rather than casting stones at CBS, NBC could be more proactive and propose standards and solutions that would help reformm the industry and increase public confidence and trust. As it stands, I find it increasingly difficult to believe the things that I see on TV and read in the paper.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
It's not that simple.
Calling yourself "The News" implicitly obligates you to try and tell the truth.
The US Constitution gaurantees the freedom of the press. Any reasonable person can see that does not mean "any industry calling themselves the press has the right to print anything they want and not be held liable for slander or misleading the public."
The press is free to tell the truth (unless classified, yada yada). As soon as it knowingly stops telling the truth, the people involved ar no longer "the press", and are liable for libel and slander lawsuits as well as criminal prosecution.
Rule of the universe: Freedom and Responsiblity run in parrallel.
P.S. Don't forget that people without cable may not have any choice but CBS for news.
Okay, whether we like it or not digital manipulation seems to be here and here to stay.
The bare minimum the networks should do is TELL us when they're digitally manipulating and image or a scene. Perhaps a logo at the bottom of the screen for any scene that involves digital manipulation. People should be aware that what they're seeing has been altered in some way.
Now with the advent of the Internet, I think that a more intelligent and ethical approach would be to have a page the viewer can go to and see some sort of streaming video containing the original and modified version. This way the viewer could see what he's missing. Allow the users to watchdog the industry, perhaps then people might have a little more faith in the evening news.
So in other words, it's OK to make it appear that the victim somehow likes or advocates a product? What is the product in question is offensive to the person who has been made to appear to support it?
Taking things a step further, is it also supposed to be OK to put a compeditor's ad on a spokesperson? Should the CEO of CocaCola appear in a Pepsi t-shirt at a sporting event?
It may seem trivial, but it is an act of putting false words into someone's mouth on a news program, and could be financially or socially damaging as well as just plain offensive. How far from that is it to change a witnesses words in an interview. For example, go from: "We were sitting in the park minding our own business when..." to: "We were sitting in the park enjoying a delicious refreshing [beverage here] when...". I know I would be offended.
The television is not a good source of news and has not been for years. The network companies treat the news as just another slot to fill with advertising. The stories are chosen to draw eyes, not for their importance to society.
If something happens, for example a bomb goes off in a public place, you can rely on the news to speculate wildly as to the perpetrators, the more outrageous the better. That way they get more people watching their advertising.
When was the last time you saw a promotion for the news or weather that actually contained information? If the news was really about news the information would be right there instead of telling you to wait until 6pm for the real news. Notice the order of news stories keeps the interesting one until the end of the half hour. It is all about keeping you watching the advertising.
CBS has just been caught doing exactly what they've been doing for years ... selling advertising as news. Why are people shocked?
It not news
AndrewN
- AndrewN
I've read several articles and the slashdot comments on this matter of CBS electronically changing a billboard of NBC's during the former's New Years Eve coverage.
Frankly, I just do not see what the problem is. I am probably as sensitive as anyone here about the danger to journalistic integrity posed by advertising pressure. But this simply did not raise any flags in my mind in that regard.
Journalists have a responsibility not to distort, misrepresent, or mischaracterize news events. But it is a pathetic diminishment of the notion of news to act as if the fact that NBC had a billboard in Times Square as a news event deserving such concern for veracity (Unless the billboard itself was in some manner controversial or newsworthy). Adverstising, whether by NBC or CBS, just simply does not rise to the level of news, and misrepresentation of background advertising simply does not change the character of the events reported on (in the case at issue, the celebrations in Times Square, which are a fairly fluffy sort of news to start with).
The mistake, IMO, made by critics of the video editing at issue is a supposition that pictures *EVER* present a literal and complete truth. ANY news shot is inevitably subject to cinematic framing conventions and selective presentation. I suppose Warhol's _24 Hours_ or some Godard films were notable in trying to resist such conventionality... but in basic terms, you ALREADY must rely on journalists to present an accurate SENSE of what the story is. No picture in itself tells you what is outside its frame, or what preceeded or followed it. By taking one scene over another (and one angle, lens, etc.) the journalists are exercising editorial judgement in CREATING truths. A picture just simply IS NOT the *world itself*.
If you trust your journalists already, you should trust them no less is video editing changes entirely incidental aspects of the picture presented. Obviously, there are bad journalists (and bad owners, especially) who will not have such integrity. But video editing is nothing special here. As an example, look at war reporting where you might be presented with pictures of bodies or destruction... the pictures in themselves do not tell you *who* did *what* exactly, but simply that *something* awful happened. The bad journalists of all sides are quite happy to lie just as effectively using unaltered footage.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Think for a second.. if the big three can do this, anyone can.
extrapolated:
Time Warner employees, upset about the merger with AOL, picket the place.. when the news comes out, the signs, that USED to say "Time Warner SUCKS BALLS" now say "AoL RULES.. we are SO glad to be working here"
THAT is what scares me.. I could care less about advertising.. but I do care about what could be changed to alter evidence.
What do you mean you didnt have a gun when you entered the store? our surveillance camera tapes CLEARLY SHOW you holding a gun in your hand!
its not hard to see this technology used to set people up, to change the news to print to fit, rather than fit to print.
THAT is what im scared of.. they already make 7/10 of the population believe things cause His Royal Mouthpiece Clinton said it (a week into office he took credit for the "new" economy.. and people believed him) but what if you cannot TELL what is real and what isnt?
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I, for one, find people's attitudes toward this almost as troubling as the event itself. *Yes*, you shouldn't trust everything you see and read. *Yes*, the news has been faked for an incredibly long while. As someone pointed out, similar things have been happening for over a hundred years--remember when William Randolf Hearst said to his photographer in Cuba, Remmington, "You supply the photos, I'll supply the war." But even though the news has lacked its integrity for a long, long while now, does that mean we should simply begin to look the other way when they dupe us again? I don't know about you, but I think that people have a right to expect "news" to mean that the footage is authentic--if it isn't as such, it isn't news. . .it's just entertainment (and by right, I certainly don't necessarily mean a legal right). Because such a malfaction has become so incredibly common place, should we begin to simply ignore it from hence forth? Of course not--we should cry out against CBS for doing something so incredibly petty as slighting both NBC and the viewer by manufacturing portions of their footage. If not, the networks will get the silly idea that such activities are entirely acceptable--and if or when they do, it will be entirely our fault for not crying out loud enough.
P.S. Don't forget that people without cable may not have any choice but CBS for news.
Even worse, a great percentage of the population will not even know that CBS has altered the images. Today they are blocking out a competing logo, tomorrow they are giving the news anchors "didigtal facelifts". Its a slippery slope.
Besides, if I really think CBS has the best news, seeing an NBC logo isn't going to make me want to immediately change the channel.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I think this could be considered misappropriation of the content from the astrovision screen.
After all, replacing the logo denied attribution. I'm sure both of the networks identified the product as copyrighted material and reserved rights of reproduction.
By modifying the image they changed the information from "news" to "content", "reproduced it", and then falsely labeled it as their own.
So maybe this is a copyright violation. It sure doesn't seem like "fair use".
Or maybe they were sampling, yeah, it was a dj track....
Maybe this is the 'free market' way of punishing people who stay home and watch tv for hours on New Year's Eve. :^)
You may be right that there's no US law against it. IANAL.
However, someone further below posted a section of the FCC contract which obligates the news to try to be truthfull. I wish I could moderate that one up.
Seriously, there's an important issue here, in that news coverage purports to be an accurate representation of what it covers. While we all know this is frequently not the case, anybody who went through Journalism 101 knows that intentional deception is always out-of-bounds. You don't make up quotes, you don't fake evidence, and you don't alter pictures.
What's News and what's Entertainment? Well let's take CBS at its word: Both "The Early Show" and the New Years Eve coverage were produced by CBS News, therefore it's news coverage, therefore deception is out. QED.
They've been mucking around with this technology here in Australia for a while, changing the adverts that you see on televised football games, etc. As a result, the person at the game saw an advert for Telstra but the people on TV saw an advert for Optus.
:)
This is going down a really interesting path as what we're finding is that more & more people are watching sports on TV, rather than attending. The latest stadiums on the drawing boards are actually smaller than the ones we currently have. Thus, TV advertising is all important to the owners of these stadiums.
Now, thanks to this technology, the stadium owners cannot guarantee prospective advertisers how many people will see their advert. After all, each channel that carries the event may very well change various adverts to suit their own sponsors, etc.
The stadium owners do have some level of response, however. When coverage of various sporting events is being arranged, only a specific media group will get the contract (they go through a bidding process). Thus, it's possible to either 1) up the cost to cover losses in advertising revenues or 2) put clauses in the contract stating that this technology cannot be used to replace adverts.
I'm fascinated with where this will lead to, simply because it totally changes the playing field. Puts the cat amongst the canaries, so to speak
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
When I looked this over, I had a great idea..
.. X-ray specs that work -- I'd buy that for a few hundred dollars! >;-)
If you can associate a shopping list with the groccier, it wouldn't be hard to associate "turn on IR and colour adjustment" mode when some cute girl I like happens to walk by... "Clothes be gone!"
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If CBS or NBC want to doctor up otherwise footage, they should be forced to include a caption saying "portions of this telecast are being digitally altered" and DISallowed from adding a caption such as "Live" or anything else deceiving the viewer into believing what he is seeing is actually what's there.
-jimbo
"Hold me Bob!" "I would if I could man!" -Larry and Bob in VeggieTales
The didn't cover it up completely, however it is obvious that the intent was there. CBS said it wasn't intentional. BS!
I don't know if I'm more pissed with the "honesty" issues or with the fact that this is a very dirty industry to begin with, and this was even out of bounds by the poor standards the networks have.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
It follows that they will eventually be able to project realistic advertisements onto small objects, like my shirt. Perhaps a company like Nike would be interested in paying to have a few hundred people in the stands wearing their 'swoosh'.
If they did that to me (and I somehow found about it) I would be awfully upset. Nike is a repugnant corporation, and I wouldn't want them putting 'words' on my back. I wonder if I would have any legal recourse? -- Is that false representation?
Did anyone actually screen grab this? Like, one image from NBC and one from CBS?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sounds like it is time for a new project: a version of Junkbuster to remove ads in realtime on tv.
Then watch *all* the networks (including CBS) dive into "righteous indignation."
"Viewers have no right to edit out our adverts!" Snicker.
This sig is false.
So CBS has decided that it will digitally edit in these ads. This technology has been available for some time already and has been used in things like hockey games and car races for a while now.
I think the issue is that we can no longer view video, even live video, as fact. This has long been the case with photographs. Why do we still trust newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post? We trust them because experience has shown that when they say "this is how it is" they end up being right. This holds for the text they print as well as the images.
CBS has chosen to insert these computer altered videos into their production, so when they tell us "this is how it is" we have experience that tells us "it probably isn't", so we really ough not trust them.
This is the risk that the media faces when they do something like this---CBS has lost a lot of credibility by their actions.
I can say for sure that I will not be getting my news from CBS if I can avoid it. Do I think that we need a full blown boycot of CBS? I don't know, but I would encourage anyone I know who's interested in getting real news to avoid them. I just don't think they can be trusted.
Has anyone got a screenshot from the broadcast so we can see exactly what this thing looked like?
Is the quality so good that you wouldn't realise it was faked while watching it?
This is a dog eat dog world. The only way that huge corporations like NBC and CBS know how to survive is by using every trick they can to trounce the opposition. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but CBS/NBC aren't funded by tax payers, are they? If not, then they have no case to answer legally (morals are another issue). In the UK/Ireland, the national broadcasters are funded by a "TV licence" which each household must purchase from the government, so in a sense the buck would stop at the government if anything like this happened on a national tv station here.
At CBS/NBC, I would imagine the buck would stop at the board of directors, who's SOLE vision of the company consists of nothing more than dollar revenue. They are money making companies, with shareholders to answer to, not the general public, and incidents like this only serve to highlight that you can trust nobody but yourself in this world.
J.
Tyler Durden is my hero ;)
How we know is more important than what we know.
While I hate banner ads, I hate adverts cloaked as content much much much worse. Haven't yet found a way to edit that stuff out automagically.
This sig is false.
Is it live, or is it Bill Gates caught reading Slashdot?
This could be interesting ground for the networks. They actually used "Luma" sampling a couple of years ago and got in trouble. I believe it was Dianne Sawyer, Supposedly at the white house or the capital building.
Once the virtual images are superimposed over the actual live picture, whether of a football game or in a news story, the virtual images appear to viewers at home to be as real as anything at the scene. People who walk in front of landmarks replaced by virtual billboards appear to television viewers to have walked in front of the electronic billboard, making it appear completely real.
Just like the above, she wasn't really there, she was standing in front of a blue screen in a studio in New York. The networks put a spin on the practice and called it " Look Live", It got some attention for a couple of weeks. In one camp they had the ethical journalists stating that it was not right and on the other they had the execs saying that it added flavor the news.
This is not too much different. Placing any kind of "Look Live" or "Look Anything" behind a live news broadcast is misleading. As far as placing the first down marker etc. on sporting or entertainment programming would more than likely be ok.
The question now boils down to is the news entertainment? Was the show produced that night a "News" broadcast in the first place or was it an entertainment program? Or are they the same. I thought the show was just that, a show. Just like Dick Clark and all the others. I didn't expect to see real content unless something bad happened and it turned into a news event.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
if the ball drops on New Years and you can only see it on TV...does it make a sound?
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I heard that tv stations do this during the broadcast of sports events (yankee games at least) where they would use CGI to change a billboard in the statdium to that of one of their advertisers.
That seems a little more tricky then this case, the stadium advertisers paid for those signs believeing that they would be seen on TV also (their contract might have stated otherwise, i don't really know).
Anyone know more about this?
This reminds me of the new addition to NFL broadcasts. Anyone else notice the yellow line that signifies the first down marker? Well it doesn't exist except on your screen but it sure looks real to me. Personally, I love it, but I have a friend who went to a game and wondered out loud where the yellow line was.
Scary.
-- jar
here is the quote, obviously some liberal CENSOR doesn't like my opinion. Its called free speech. My opinion is just as good as yours. If you don't like it then move to red china. Our job is to give people not what they want, but what WE decide they ought to have. (Former President of CBS News) - Richard Salant
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Something tells me whoever sells the rights to broadcast sports events to the networks has airtight contracts making sure that the ads around the rink will be seen.
Exactly. When Channel Nine did exactly the same thing during a cricket broadcast in Australia, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, owners of the stadium, were MIGHTY annoyed. They threatened to withdraw Channel Nine's rights to televise anything from the MCG and the issue eventually died.
I believe a similar course of action will play itself out in the US - the stadiums (stadii?) depend on those signs for revenue, and will soon stipulate no "live editing of signs" in contracts.
"In person, WAP'ed up and making your life a misery!" BOFH, 2003
While I agree that the most important consequences from this deal with the credibility of televised news; the improtance of the advertising itself shouldn't be over looked. Some people are indifferent to this issue because it revoloves around the advertising of monstoruous companies. I agree advertising can be annoying, but in a capitalistic world it becomes incredibily important. Without it there would be no network television at all (it would all have to be subscription cable). Forget about running large sites of interest on the Internet, there would be no way to cover expenses. Many services would become subscription based becuase no one would want to support anything that wouldn't break even. Without advertising, we'd be watchign the Superbowl on Pay-per-View. If people have the ability to alter or remove advertising in a certain medium, advertisers will become more leary of paying for advertising space and then will hurt the users of that medium. Which means that free services are going to have to find another way to break even. Its sort of like the mentality behind the movie "Network". So this shouldn't be shrugged off as some unimportant fight between media giants, because in the end, it will affect you.
Wow, that's a funky reading of the constitution. At least, I *assume* that your point is loosely based on the constitution. Having just read it again, it sounds kinda funny.
Sure, the newspapers can be liable for libel (pun intended). Libel is slandering someone, but only if what they write is untrue. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff to prove that said libel is untrue.
There is no such crime as "misleading the public." Tellya what - why don't you try to sue some major media outlet for "misleading you" into buying lots of food for Y2K. Note how long it takes for you to get laughed out of court. Better yet, try to even find a lawyer who's willing to go along!
"The press" isn't obligated by any law to tell the truth, or not to mislead. They lie and mislead all the time.
No comment at this time
I say: ditch Leno, put Conan in his time slot, and find a way to make sure Richter stays around after March. But that's just me.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"This show is rated M(ALSV DM). It contains Adult themes, strong Language, Sex scenese, Violence and is Digitally Modified in parts".
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
If you have nothing to hide, why mask yourself behind annonymity?
Ask yourself why there is the presumption of innocence in this country (USA) and why you have the right to remain silent and cannot be made to testify against yourself. When you learn the answers, you'll have answered your own question. Salem Witch Trials... The House UnAmerican Activities Committee... those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Interviewed crime witnesses wearing superimposed Yankees caps. Sniff, sob, it's such a tragedy (Go Yanks!).
Chechen rebels with credit cards superimposed in their hands:
AK-47 - 500 rubles
Fatigues from the Afghanistan war - 50 rubles
Brutal revenge against the Russian oppressors - priceless.
Heck, maybe sponsors will pay to trash their rivals using this technology. That car with the failing brakes that caused the pile-up? Not a Ford, of course. Stick a Toyota in there. Breaking news: two hundred people are being held hostage on an American Airli- ummm, make that Air France, jet tonight. Employee goes on a wild killing spree at Microso- umm, make that Apple.
Jounralistic ethics? Come on, we're talking money here.
In a world without walls, there is no need for Windows.
yep, i love that yellow line. If you look you can catch them "switching" it on sometimes. The first time I saw that, I thought outloud wtf? It's pretty slick. When someone steps on the line, it looks like they really step on it. When a shadow is cast over the field, the yellow stripe is darker, just like it is really there in the shadow.
There was an episode of Max Headroom(go figure, a show about TV) that covered this. Some network bigwig that didn't want blanks to be released, suddenly advocates the release of them. He actually didn't say it, but went along with it since a "digital rescan" of him saying so was done by Brice(I think). Wow, once again stuff done on Max Headroom comes true 14 years later.
*lengthy shocked silence*
*grin*
Kewl. Well, on to the next subject... ;)
I do not see how televising a live event such as the ball dropping in NYC and putting the CBS logo over the NBC logo is illegal or ethically incorrect. I do see how this is so if we saw logos on the christmas tree behind Boris Yeltsin with his resignation speech or on the plane for the hijacking or if these logos in any way modify the "news." A new years celebration is not news - its an event. Rather is correct, however in saying it would have probably been a good idea to tell the viewers they were doing this.
I feel compelled to make one other comment with regard slippery slope. To the best of my knowledge slippery slope has long been considered faulty logic and reasoning by the academic community. It is not to be used in what would be considered a "sound" argument in a logic class. I was disturbed by the comments of Jim Naureckas in the article itself. Apparently he thinks that this could lead to them putting sponsor's "t-shirts on crime victims." He forgets that CBS still wants advertiser's dollars and if it got out that they did some of this the bad publicity would cost them much more in advertising revenue than they could possibly gain by selling this to an advertiser. I also doubt a single advertiser would go along with the idea.
Because CBS used this technology to change an advertisement does not mean they are going to use it to distort the news. The truth is if they ever did it would be such an obvious distortion another news agency would pick up on it and it would take years for CBS to clean up its reputation. Only the enquirer goes to such extremes as doctoring photos. The press is simply biased - they rarely tell a lie but they slant there story. If it is a slippery slope theres a brick wall waiting for CBS at the end of it and they know it (this is why we have competing news agencies instead of one state-run agency).
So will Nike-sponsered athletes have three (digitally-added) stripes on their shoes in the future?
CBS, like most news outlets, reported that NATO lied about video of a missile hitting a bridge in Kosovo -- the video had been compressed and did not accurately reflect the elapsed time (the real incident took far longer to unfold than the video).
What CBS did on New Years is *exactly* what NATO did -- they presented a set of images as if they were live, unaltered video images when in fact they were tampered and doctored with.
Just another example of how intellectualy bankrupt modern news collection and broadcasting is. Saw a recent story about how pressure is building for the networks to add music in the background during news stories to heighten drama, etc. Hasn't happened yet but it certainly will.
Thank god for the Web -- while the major network news programs (and much of its print counterpart) are turning into little more than well-scripted soap operas, the web is providing the sort of fact checking and peer review that the traditional media will never give us.
I'll vote for that. There should also be an explicit statement that the tv is produce/owned/manipulated by huge companies that push their own interests and slant everything. So, perhaps a [P]ropaganda tag would be added too?
"Dan, there's something you should know in case you talk to anyone about the Vivmotrinox clip."
"Yes, that was heart-rending. Did you notice as I interviewed that brave man, the patient in the bed next to us died?"
"Er.... no."
"Whudddyuhmean 'no'?"
"Dan, don't talk about that to anyone. We fixed it. When the clip aired that patient did not die. It's not like he was the subject of the interview, you know. The sponsor wanted it more upbeat. You know, it's a story about hope."
"I see. Well, I'm sure his family will be delighted to hear of his miraculous rescue from death."
"Don't carry on like that, nobody will recognize him. We changed his hair color and put a mustache on him! Everything's taken care of."
"Everything?!? Ev... Now, I hope you're not going to lie to me, friend. Have you been 'taking care' of my hair on TV, too?"
"Dan, baby, that's our job! Oh, one other thing?"
"You're going to tell me anyway, so just spit it out like a good fellow. What?"
"Your closing, that 'The benefits of this treatment remain to be seen, but this patient's fight is an inspiration to behold'?"
"What about it?"
"We lost the 'to be seen, but'. Don't worry, it looks very natural, they had to morph to your 'b' mouth position and hold it about ten frames to match the timing with that damned leaf falling past the window. Piece of cake. You looked great."
"AND WHY, MIGHT I... scuse me, and why might I ask was this _belated_ script change made?"
"The sponsor. Wanted it to come off more upbeat, you know?"
"Chroma Keying". Usually done against a blue, or more commonly these days, green background.
Yes, they did, yes they did get in trouble, an apology was aired on the next newscast. The New York Times covered this in their article on the subject today, in print.
Cheers,
-- jra
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Can they PLEASE get rid of that damn yellow line showing 1st downs in football games! Jeez! That thing is annoying as heck! And credability? My Gerbil has more credibility than that thing.
I remember (being old) that at the end of "Mutual of Omaha's wild Kingom" there was a statement of the form "All scenes, whther real or constructed, represent authenicated facts".
Perhaps news programs now need to make similar statements... or at least when such statements would be true.
What CBS did is not just wrong, it is evil.
For people who don't understand the implications of this sort of thing, read 1984 by George Orwell.
People should take note that it is not NBC that is truly the injured party in this case. The general public is the victim.
Don't be a victim, watch the watchmen.
"Hey... don't be mean." --Buckaroo Banzai
The issue of honesty in reporting [...] is a total non sequitor as far as I'm concerned.
Fair enough, but seeing as you've talked about it here what you say is questionable. There is a huge difference between choosing to report only certain facts, selecting from among pictures and reporting limited viewpoints and creating pictures, making up facts and falsely ascribing viewpoints.
I am assuming that it is these categories that you place the unreality of
Raise your hand if you didn't know that what you see on TV isn't always real
If not then I'm afraid my hand is down. I'm aware that I'm subject to propaganda, staged-media events etc., but I don't believe that Dan Rather is a cyberspace construct, I don't believe that the footage of Kosovar Albanians is all made up. I do take these things with a grain of salt - I ask "why are they telling me this?" and try to fit it into a larger picture of the world.
I'm assuming that you feel the same way too, so, and this brings me to the nub of my posting, won't the effect of your posting be to discourage /.ers from listening to any media and trying to make educated guesses? Why bother listening to anything? Why not just hid in our own cynical, solipsistic holes, never coming out to see the light of day?
The fictional view of the world that this portrays reminds me of the worst excesses of po-mo "truth is the outcome of the veridiction operations".
The big news is that this is like altering a photo in a newspaper or faking a source. It's a step further, and just because things are bad now doesn't mean that we give up.
I really think that that is the central issue, not the two giant media corporations go sue each other.
but more subtly wrong is your speculation that "unwantedness" destroys the lives of a people. Hmmm... might lead to periods of anguish and suffering, I'll give you that, but I'll betcha most "formerly unwanted" people cherish their lives just as much as you do, and would even kill you in self-defense if you tried prove to them that they should be dead.
Much nicer. You should do desktop-picture sized ones :)
Example I can recall: a few weeks ago on NPR I heard a famous newsman recount how everyone thinks they heard a big-band interrupted to announce the beginning of WWII but that's only because it was fabricated after the fact for a documentary.
So, since CBS has every right also to show your picture on TV if you are watching the fireworks, do they have every right to put a Microsoft cap on your head, and you have no right to ask for reparation? I can't imagine that you would agree with that, but without inventing an exception it fits within your framework.
...they deleted it and replaced it. A good eye that was watching closely might have seen the difference in a still, but who is paying attention. I'm not saying that it was newsworthy that an NBC logo was in view, but it could have been something.
/. where any jackas* like myself can state their interpretation, point to the facts that they have uncovered and the truth can be gleaned from this overflow of information.
Scenario: Let's say that a drunk and hopped up on amphetamines exec from ABC was flashing his as* on the live broadcast. That's embarassing to them.....would they edit it out? I think they would, particularly if no one was going to notice. This would make them obfuscators of fact, not something that I value in a news agency.
I for one will never trust ABC news again, not that I particularly enjoy relying on the mainstream media for my news anyway. I greatly prefer something like
Blah!
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
...they deleted it and replaced it. A good eye that was watching closely might have seen the difference in a still, but who is paying attention. I'm not saying that it was newsworthy that an NBC logo was in view, but it could have been something else.
/. where any jackas* like myself can state their interpretation, point to the facts that they have uncovered and the truth can be gleaned from this overflow of information.
Scenario: Let's say that a drunk and hopped up on amphetamines exec from CBS was flashing his as* on the live broadcast. That's embarassing to them.....would they edit it out? I think they would, particularly if no one was going to notice. This would make them obfuscators of fact, not something that I value in a news agency.
I for one will never trust CBS news again, not that I particularly enjoy relying on the mainstream media for my news anyway. I greatly prefer something like
Blah!
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
The revenues that the placement of the ads in an arena make helps to pay for the existence of that arena. The only reason that the cost of placing one of these ads is so high is that they are seen on national television. Take that away and you devalue the existence of the ad, thereby taking away the revenue to the arena and :. taking away the arena.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Just 1 point though!
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
I think that was his entire point.
Placing the logo on me creates an implication that I endorse the product. Placing a digital logo on typical advertising space does not create an implication of an endorsement.
It's a fine line, but a logical one. Putting a logo directly underneath the NBC logo would imply a relation between NBC and the digital logo, and thus would be actionable. Blocking out the NBC logo doesn't create any such implication, and NBC doesn't have any rights regarding what CBS broadcasts.
So, I'd object to CBS putting an MS logo on my cap -- but they could replace me with a digital image of someone else wearing a Microsoft cap on their broadcast.
With this technology available, might broadcasters be obliged to obscure these ads in real time? More interestingly, might this practice be made mandatory? Would legislation be passed requiring this?
Personally, I'm very anti-tobacco -- this isn't intended as pro-cigarette FUD -- but an issue like this could create the ugly precendent needed to make this a widely accepted "legitimate" practice.
It will be interesting to see which way this will go when it comes to advertizing at sports events.
If the TV company that's carrying the event can replace all the ads on and around the field of play and even on the players' shirts with ads for their clients, then the clubs and the organizations that run the sports won't be too happy about it.
Putting your company name on a top European soccer team's shirt for a year can cost you upwards of 10M Euros. And then to find that your competitor's name gets pasted over it...
We'll be hearing more about this one, methinks.
I see an possibly worse example: Ads on the side of a school building where a shooting has taken place. At some point, someone will do it.
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Intelligence is definitely a recessive trait.
1> Captain Amazing from Mystery Men, the do-everything, save the day superhero with a publicist that makes him look wholesome and gets him all sorts of corporate logos/sponsorship to wear.
2> ONtv in Hamilton, ON, Canada that has gone to a set that is completely CGI for their daily evening news program. ...just make sure none of the news anchors wear blue.
With the first thing, would it not be more of a concern that our heros (more in the realm of sports) are literally owned by corporations? Wouldn't it be more worthy of concern than the introduction digital editing into the newsroom? Kids especially look up to them as mentors and people who they want to grow up to be. What kid other than Alex P. Keaton ever dreams of becoming a Walter Kronkite or Barbera Walters type?
The second thing, the news is always going to be a construct of somebody's mind. Back in the very beginning of the gulf war when CNN was the only broadcast coming out, what was it that we were all glued to the TV and radio listening to? The fact that missile bombardment was happening or the fact that a man on a phone being rebroadcast across the world was taking cover in his hotel room watching missiles fly into buildings around him?
Even after this little logo fiasco, the world will go on, big corporations will find new ways to try to dictate our needs to us and the construction of the news broadcast will evolve as producers get their hands on new digital goodies.
What should hopefully and ultimately keep everything in check is competition.
Cheers
To illustrate, you say that placing a digital logo on "typical" (there's the catch) advertising space does not create an implication of an endorsement. Well, so I guess you are saying that CBS should not be allowed to paste their logo onto the Transamerica building, or onto the Epcot Dome... but they might be allowed to paste it onto the sign at the top of a plainer office tower that happens to be a competitor's corporate headquarters? Or only on "advertizing space" like billboards that companies have paid rent on just like they pay the rent on their office tower? It just seems difficult to draw a clear line to me.
I'd rather look at it not as a Talmudic exercise of drawing conclusions from a set of axioms, but from point of view of what are the practical results we wish to achieve. Commercial speech is more regulatable than political speech. For children's television, for example, ads are required to "look like" ads. (I'm not endorsing the efficacy of that law, but I understand the motivation.) Seems to me that a just as good a rule for the future (forgetting about what has happened) is that if you pay someone to put up your ad, there it is. If CBS doesn't want to show it, they don't have to point their camera that way. They can put a disclaimer off to the side saying Coke is paying us to remind you that they would never put up an ugly billboard like bad-old Pepsi in the picture.
Just for fun (I'm not really arguing this) I enjoyed considering this "chutzpah" defense: your honor, when you turn your head in the direction of this billboard, you are not seeing the actual billboard, you are constructing that image in your head from the stream of photons which is arriving at your retina. I have simply altered the stream of photons just like CBS did by applying a coat of paint to the billboard. The original ad is intact right where it always was!
The old Dianna Shore show was sponsered by Chevrolet. The opening of the show was a pan of the New York City skyline.
;-)
They matted out the Chrysler building
good job cbs... here are some other options: perhaps during the tienamen square uprising you could have put a backwards nike cap (just like tiger!) on the guy who stood in front of the tank. when that guy from columbine climbed out of the window all bloody perhaps he could have been wearing a t-shirt for a new bruce willis movie... the bottom line is we've been dealing w/ product placements for a long time already in hollywood (ET ate his reeses pieces, etc.) and w/ sporting events (tiger, etc.)... while this practice is unfortunate it is still ethically permissable as it is in the context of entertainment... sadly, there is an almost non-existant line today between entertainment and journalism and cbs' actions only prove that those lines dont matter too much anymore... if everyone can accept "journalism" w/ dramatic music and 're-enactments' as fact, then why should bogus advertising upset anyone... neither is a true representation of reality.
The Income Tax was enacted. Some people thought to limit the tax to 10%, but others carried the day with the argument that this was automatic permission to increase the tax to that outrageous level.
:-).
Others thought we were at the beginning of a very slippery slope. They were laughed at, probably by the same academics you refer to.
I think Slippery Slope is a pretty good argument
D
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There are many people who claim to only watch TV "for the news." Well, this kind of crap is enough reason for me to abandon the news altogether. Seeing is not believing when ratings are at stake. Kill your TV
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Doesn't this imply that those buildings and carriages (businesses in themselves) support CBS and are paid for their services? How surprised would the owners be to find that they are advertising for CBS (or any other corporation that a media outlet cared to show) without their permission?
Blocking NBC's equipment isn't a big surprise. But what about the owner of the building that the Astrovision is mounted on? Who owns that and what gives CBS the right to change the appearance of the building to suit their company agenda (ie no competitor's images)?
I think CBS is crossing a line. Endorsing products or services without agreement or even knowledge should be considered unethical and possibly illegal (although I couldn't quote any FTC laws on it).
First off the New Years Eve event was NOT News.
Secondly the AD was even less news.
Thirdly when have you ever seen news that was not edited? When you watch the news they are always picking where they are placing the Camera,what footage they want to air and how much of it they want to show. They also choose how they want to comment about what they show. There will always be some sort of editing in the news even "live" news. Plus they did this billboard editing for profit motives. What kind of profit motives would they have in altering people or places? Except for putting ads on peoples T-shirts, I can't think of a rational reason why they would start to do this in a way that would really alter the "news" you are seeing.
There was also a recent soccer (?) game in which the players were reportedly running around cans of deodorant. I only heard of this and didn't witness it - I wish I had seen it! An interesting use of the technology, to be sure.
You're right, that is *my* funky ass reading of the constitution and these are my own ramblings. IANAL and so-forth. Just as priests should not be the only people to attempt to interpret religous scriptures (atheists would agree with this, as they interpret it as a bunch of hooey), lawyers are not the only people who should attempt to interperet the constitution and law.
I was speaking of the spirit of the constitution. Obviously, people have felt the same way about this before. Witness the trouble one of the networks (NBC?) got in for using explosives to make car's light on fire because that's what they were telling a story about, and gosh dernit those dang cars were supposed to light up!
The CBS logo superimpose is not so bad, but it's a dangerous precedent for "the news". If a reporter films a riot and then re-broadcasts it and claims it's live, they would be in deep trouble. Does the fact that it was only edited two (or so) frames ago by a computer change the fact that it is edited material being sold as live?
Just more ramblings...
The only cases in which First Amendment isn't applicable is when it's libel/slander- or any other attempt to defame and damage a person. "Misleading" isn't a crime, and does not change who gets to be called the "press." But there certainly ARE other Constitutional concerns. Namely- state action. The airwaves and radiowaves are given to private companies IN TRUST of the public- they're public property (technically, a public good). Granted, this doesn't apply to cable networks or the internet. But there certainly is a rationale that if companies betray the public trust by which they are granted use fo the airwaves, then the public has a right to take them back. Of course, the only method to do so is the FCC and the legislatures, which of course are pretty much owned by the companies its supposed to be regulating. So maybe that's not really a very plausible rationale... Though losing billions of dollars of airtime might just be punishment enough. These little slips of course, aren't anywhere enough to justify this- though I could tell you horror stories that might..
lying isn't something you need geek technology to do.
IMHO, it's an admonition not to be too conceited or egotistical in one's dealings with the rest of the world.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Ah -- I didn't understand you, so you didn't understand me. I was dealing with the question as a matter of what current law is (as far as this IANAL knows), instead of what "should be done". Under current law adjusting the image is not actionable, but creating a false impression of endorsement is.