I do interviews all the time. They’re almost always live and I can’t recall anyone editing them. Sure, a prestigious show like 60 Minutes is going to have a specific time target, they’re going to pre-tape and they need to match the time, but the way to do that is, just like a live show, inform your guest of the target time and have cues for how much time is left.
Editing can be legitimate, but it all too often breeds dishonesty, allowing the media to manipulate the footage to make those they like appear better and those they don’t like appear horrible. A particularly egregious practice is editing within an answer and then cutting and pasting bits of it together.
There’s absolutely no excuse for cutting anything between a question and answer in an interview. And yet the media did it. It did it with Kamala Harris to make her look better, it did it with Sarah Palin to make her look worse, and it now got caught doing it with Homeland Secretary Noem.
Dropping sections of a response can be used to make an interviewee look smart or stupid.
CBS has now agreed to stop doing it. Good if true, but it never should have happened. CBS News has agreed to post full transcripts which is helpful. When parts of an interview simply never air, never appear and are never accessible, like Tucker Carlson cutting all the crazy stuff from Kanye West’s segment, it becomes easy to hide what’s really going on.
The whole truth and nothing but the truth is a pretty good motto.
