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Originally Posted by 1010011010
Depends on what the viewer is viewing. If I wanted to figure out how you were biased, I'd pay attention to the angles you used relative to the subject and light source, what you chose to use as background. Assuming you get to make these choices.
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And that's a good point, which is why if at all possible I shoot politicians at a neutral angle even though I tend to prefer mixing angles up for creativity. The only times I shoot from a low angle on a politician is when they're way up on a podium that I can't climb on - i.e. when the President's in town, the secret service won't always let me on the level of the president, and I have to shoot from below him.
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Fox News, for all it's claims of "fair and balanced" generally pulls out all the stops on low level manipulation. Pay attention to who has the sun in their eyes, who gets the lapel mic v. a dildo, or who reports from peaceful sylvan settings and who reports from the side of a road. Which talking heads get more continuous-shot coverage? Note when and how active and passive voice syntax is used in introducing pundits.
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And in all fairness, the choice of mic isn't always up to the journalists - - if it's real windy you need to use a shotgun (er. . .dildo) mic because most lav (lapel) mics get their asses kicked in even a moderate breeze. I've always said microphones should be heard and not seen, so whenever possible my subject, no matter who it is, gets a lav mic tucked behind the clothing so you can barely see the little clip, then the wire gets run down inside the shirt so you can't see that either. My pet peeve is seeing some other station sticking a bigassed mic with their station-logo micflag on it into someone face. The station and the mic is not the story, so unless it's an extenuating circumstance we should NEVER see the mic.
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There seems to be an ever dwindling number of independant opinions in the media conglomerates, and I wonder whether we've let things go too far already.
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can't even BUY airtime on their networks to get their issues heard. What are your thoughts on that?
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depends largely on the station. I've worked for stations that won't run bad stories on their advertisers. It sucked, I hated it, and made a HELL of a lot of noise about it. My current station wouldn't care if we lost our biggest advertiser due to a negative story about it, provided the story is 100% accurate. This is one of the reasons I will have to be dragged kicking and screaming from this station
This problem usually stems from the fact that news directors oftentimes aren't rising from the ranks of the journalist, but from the ranks of the advertising department. A lot of ND's are more worried about profit than news, which effects the product not only because of stories on advertisers, but also because they just won't buy the equipment needed to do a good job telling stories, and because they'll want nothing but tragedy, tragedy, tragedy, without paying much, if any, attention to the good stuff that's happening in the community. Good examples of this kind of programming can be found in pretty much the entire Albuquerque news market. KSTP over in Minneapolis is another example of the "if it bleeds it leads" "journalism" that most reporters and photojournalists hate with a passion.
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I watched CBS on election night. The only time I saw a smile after the Bush win seemed likely was when Coors was defeated.
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I watched CBS that night too - we were live from one of the campaign HQ's that had it on our station and it was causing feedback so we had them change to a competitor, which happens to be CBS.
Rather is an embarassment and should not be held up as an example of good journalism. My reporter and I predict he'll be gone fairly soon, since he appeared to slowly go insane as the night wore on, and since he's been a distant third in the ratings behind Brokaw and Jennings for years now.