The Art of "Cut and Paste"

The continuing cut and thrust over CBS's The Selling of the Pentagon last week got closer to the matter of "cut and paste" in Vice President Spiro Agnew's phrase. Representative F. Edward Hebert, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, filed an official complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, charging that the documentary's producers misleadingly edited film in order to disparage the Pentagon's publicity effort (TIME, April 5). Representative Harley Staggers not only complained to the FCC but also threatened to open an inquiry by his Special Subcommittee on Investigations. The Washington Post, though praising the import of the documentary, published two more lengthy editorials, again challenging the film's production techniques and accuracy. Not surprisingly, CBS News President Richard Salant saw the Government attack as a Washington witch hunt reminiscent of the prevailing atmosphere during the Ed Murrow-Joe McCarthy confrontation in 1954, and dramatically pictured himself as an "electronic John Peter Zenger."

Guardedness. Two segments from the one-hour program illustrate what everyone was arguing about. One showed the daily 11 a.m. press briefing at the Pentagon. During the session covered by the CBS cameras, the briefing official was asked, according to Pentagon count, 34 questions. He answered 31, begged off on one on grounds of security, and said he would have to "check back" before replying to the other two. In the excerpt CBS showed, the briefing had been edited down to just six of the exchanges, including all three evasions. Any viewer might reasonably have inferred that the Pentagon had been unresponsive to half of the reporters' questions. CBS says that the segment was not intended to show unwarranted evasion, only the Pentagon's guardedness.

Editorial tinkering of a more complex nature was involved in footage on the Peoria speech of one of the "traveling colonels" who push the Pentagon line in public appearances. What appeared on the program to be a verbatim, six-sentence passage from the talk was in fact a splicing of six separate declarations--out of sequence. The Pentagon claimed that the opening sentence came from page 55 of the colonel's prepared text, the second sentence from page 36, the third and fourth from 48, the fifth from 73, and the sixth from 88. In the rearrangement, Agnew contended, the opinions coming out of the colonel's mouth are actually quotations from Laotian Premier Souvanna Phouma.

CBS maintains, with some support from a tape of the speech, that the colonel's own words and Souvanna Phouma's were so confusingly interwoven as to be almost indistinguishable. In an irrelevant, pot-and-kettle argument, the network charges that the colonel himself used his source material (a magazine interview) deceptively by quoting the Premier when he supported the Pentagon-favored domino theory and failing to mention that Souvanna Phouma in the same article warned against spreading the war into Laos.

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.

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 7 1/2 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."

When distortion on the networks does occur, it is usually inadvertent, caused occasionally by incompetence but primarily by the shortage of air time. The entire text of Walter Cronkite's nightly newscast would fill but two-thirds of the front page of the New York Times. "Television news," says ABC Executive Producer Av Westin, "is an illustrated headline service. I know what we have to leave out, and if people do not read newspapers, newsmagazines and books, they are desperately uninformed."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.