by Craig Colby
It’s alive!
Once you’ve created a monster, it’s going to get loose.
Humanity has released plenty of monsters in the world - nuclear weapons, trickledown economics and celebrity docusoaps - to name a few. One that wanders through factual television is particularly tricky, the Frankenbite.
A Frankenbite is a sentence created from bits of different sentences in an interview. The sentence fragments could have been said half an hour apart, taken from statements on completely different topics.
One Frankenbite made the news recently when Louisiana Republican Congressman Steve Scalise tweeted a clip from an interview journalist Ady Barkan conducted with Joe Biden. In the tweet, Barkan asks Biden “but do we agree we can redirect some funding for the police?” To which Biden replies “yes”. Here’s the problem. Ady didn’t use the words “for the police” at the end of his sentence. They’d been lifted from a different part of the interview and placed there. The change made it look like Barkan is asking if Biden wants to defund the police, and Biden appears to say he does. That’s not Biden’s stance. The change was noticed by a Washington Post reporter, Twitter then labelled the tweet “manipulated media” and Scalise later removed it entirely.
A spokesperson for Scalise, Lauren Fine told the Verge “Obviously, for a one-minute Twitter video featuring several short clips, we condensed that to the essence of what he was asking, as is common practice for clips run on TV and social media.”
Fine is right about one thing. Television producers condense the contents of people’s interviews all the time. In general conversation people tend to talk expansively. Audiences are accustomed to succinct statements in cut pieces.
However, Fine is wrong about something else. Parts of the interview weren’t paired for clarity. The context of the question and answer were altered. When you fundamentally change what your subject is saying, editing an interview rises off the slab and starts stomping through town.
How common are Frankenbites?
Some colleagues of mine have never heard of them and others use them all the time. One show I worked on relied almost entirely on interview clips. There was little narration. As you restructure a story, eventually someone will say “we need him/her to say this.” If they haven’t said it, there are two options. The first is to take their closest statement and write script that sets it up. That adds more narration. The second is to build that statement from pieces of other sentences in the interview. The second option is the path of least resistance.
So, what happens when someone is misrepresented, especially to the point it harms her reputation? To answer that, it helps to understand the production chain. A researcher or associate producer gets access from the guest, often building a relationship with her to get it. Someone else usually conducts the interview. The interview is handed over to a writer. The writer’s script is given to an editor and story editor. The show they create is turned over to production company executives, who give notes. Further cuts go to the network, who give more notes. No one involved in the cut of the show has a relationship to the interview subject. If the subject feels misrepresented, she can call the researcher who booked her, but often her contact has moved on to another show, perhaps at a different production company. The next option is to call the network that broadcast the show. However, there’s no guarantee the executive who worked on the show will take the call. So the interview subject is left on her own to convince colleagues friends and family that she didn’t actually say the thing everybody heard her say.
Do production teams discuss the proper use of Frankenbites?
I debated the practice with a producer who is pro-Frankenbite. Her take is that it’s our job to help interview subjects tell their story better than they can themselves. Basically, she believes we are editing the script that came out of the guests’ mouths to make it more concise. That may mean borrowing some sentence structure from other parts of the interview to make a statement work in the context it’s being used. That’s fair.
Here’s the problem. A story editor who worked on my colleague’s show told me he created a Frankenbite that didn’t reflect an interview subject’s views. The story editor didn’t see a problem with it because “this is what we do in TV.” If there were rules in place, he didn’t know them. He’s not alone.
Guidelines for the use of interviews are rooted in journalism. People with backgrounds in history, English, advertising, operations, or production management, to name a few, haven’t had that training. I’ve received blank stares from network executives when I’ve tried to explain basic journalistic principles to them.
Who can speak up about Frankenbites?
Unfortunately, directives on the use of Frankenbites must originate from the network. Production companies will do anything to please a broadcaster. It’s a matter of survival. Most workers at a production company, if they have concerns, say nothing. Freelancers can’t afford to speak up. The industry is shrinking and rocking the boat at all means you might not get hired again.
I’ve expressed my concerns to employers, and I think it may have cost me work. Writing this may cost me work. But people need to speak up. We owe accuracy to the interview subjects, the researchers who booked them, and especially the audience. Agreeing to take part in one of our shows is an act of trust. Distrust of the media has never been more prevalent. A lot of great stories aren’t being told because the principals refuse to take part.
Identifying the monster.
Another reason I don’t like Frankebites is that they often sound bad. The speaker’s voice changes inflection in an unusual way after an edit. That’s a big giveaway.
It wouldn’t have been the giveaway in Ady Barkan’s interview with Biden, though. Barkan has ALS and speaks with a voice synthesizer. When he heard about his Frankenbite he was not happy at all. Barkan replied on Twitter “These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts.”
In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the monster’s creator only asked if he could bring the monster to life, never if he should. He hadn’t thought about what might happen after the monster came to life. The media’s monster, the Frankenbite, is already alive. If we don’t start training people in journalistic principles and insisting that they be followed, the Frankenbite has the power to destroy something both fragile and precious – our credibility.
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Craig Colby is a television executive producer, producer, director, writer and story editor. He runs a storytelling consulting and production service for businesses. He can be reached at craig@colbyvision.net.