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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

I once interpreted for a crew recording "man on the street" interviews. I had no experience working in TV, I was a last minute replacement.

At the beginning of the day, the producer listed the opinions he wanted to get. "Ok, we'll get a middle aged guy who says this, a younger couple saying something along these lines". He knew exactly what he wanted at the start of the day.

There were three camera crews working most of the day getting interviews. I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.

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I was at an election briefing at a large media organisation a few years ago, one of the chief editors told the journalists "We can't stop you using vox pops, but please don't use them much" and that (paraphrasing) "they are usually awful, we know they add color but they detract from the story and become the story"

Of course "Person confirming stereotype" attracts clicks and shares, is easy to do, and that's good for career progression. Actually finding out what's happening, explaining what it means, the who, what, where, when, why of the story, that's hard.

Much easier to say

"Mr X thinks this is terrible"

Than say

"This is terrible because...., but it's good because...."

Man-on-the-street interviews should record the entire footage for transparency, without any cuts, for transparency, so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.

And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.

> And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.

A couple of people-on-the-street interviews will never ever give you an accurate representation of "a large percentage of the population".

Edit: see also this comment- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889236

I am reminded of this story:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/04/08/less-ameri...

(also here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/0...

)

Most people answering a 2014 poll (hopefully uniformly sampled) could not locate Ukraine on a map of the world, with many placing it in Africa, East Asia, Greenland or even the US; but the more interesting part was that the farther from its actual location was people's guess, the more they were supportive of US military intervention in Ukraine.

In my less pessimistic moments I like to think that many are not quite that uninformed and the interviewers find enough by sheer numbers interviewed.

What gets me is how easily inexperienced people are led to saying exactly what the interviewer wants. And it is blatant: they don't even pretend that isn't what they are doing on live news anymore.

Eventually they'll figure out at what street corner to stand to find people with the leanings they want to film, if they're intent on coloring the reporting. At some point you'll also have to let go and trust the reporter or the outlet they work for, which admittedly is an increasingly challenging decision, these days.

Don't even have to do that, literally everyone passing them by could have been instructed on what to say, out-of-view.

If there's a solution it's probably something akin to research preregistration.

If there's a solution

Isn't what you're asking for just polling?

Aren't we trying to solve the trustworthiness of street interviews?

You can't. They are unrepresentative and meaningless as a means to inform.

They don't need to do that. Interviewing people on the street already selects for the kind of people who wander around shopping malls in the middle of a weekday, ie those who don't work 9-5, very much not a cross-section of society. The sooner vox pops disappear altogether the better.

I got interviewed for one of these man in the street things for a local newspaper. I had just completed jury duty and was about to grab an early lunch and head into work. The reporter paraphrased my words very slightly when it went to print but the intent and meaning was the same so no complaints from me.

Should, but nobody will watch that unless they themselves are investigative journalists. It adds a lot of noise to something that's already low on signal.

Nobody will watch the 6-18hours of raw footage.

The footage is for verification only. No one will watch the whole thing, but people can scan through it and notice if the conclusion most people are giving different from the edited shorter final production video.

It's not needed for everybody to watch this footage, summary video can be presented. It just should be linked somewhere for those who want to see the results and verify summary themselves.

Yes. But I still think that nobody (lets say <1%) will watch this.

It might be enough. Like open source - not everybody needs to read the source code, it is enough when one knowledgeable person does that and makes a stink when they find something fishy.

Very much this. "The average person won't ..." is a huge fallacy. This also applies to repair (that knowledgeable people are able to do it is enough because they can sell it as a service at economically viable prices).

Then don't show any of it

Reminds me of a movie I saw as a kid. Can't remember the exact situation. But some celebrity, super-hero or whatever got asked by a journalist something ala "why did you say you hate this city?" and they answered "I have never said 'I hate this city'". Then what was aired was the last of that sentence, only the 'I hate this city' part.

I think that's the Scooby Doo live action sequel.

"I think Coolsville sucks!": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-think-coolsville-sucks

Haha, that's it. Thanks! Funny that it even has its own knowyourmeme page.

Arrested development has this gag as well with “I killed Earl Milford”. Here it is:

https://youtu.be/41mYxGQL1qg

Things they told us at boot camp:

It is ok to tell them your name and rank.

Expect everything else to be twisted.

Luckily I have never been tested in such a situation, I guess it will be pretty hard to stick to this in the long run.

As with everything, the Simpsons did it too. I think it was a grest piece of media literacy education to me as a kid.

so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.

Let's be honest, you already know that just from the context of the question and which show is doing the interview. If the audience is deceived it's only because they want to be.

Yes indeed. During the 1990s I first became aware of this as a comedy trope.

Loads of TV shows were using these techniques to make the public say all kinds of crazy shit as if they were widely held opinions.

It was funny because back in the 90s it seemed like, well at least to me, that we still trusted journalists and we didn't have social media. So seeing interviews obviously manipulated was funny.

I can also remember Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror guy, showing the same footage from a set up reality TV show[1].

By just using editing he could show the same event but with very different interpretations.

Instinctively I think we all know that but seeing it done as demonstration is shocking and fascinating.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRW1cPGYgoQ

I only really noticed this when I watched Making a Murderer on Netflix. After each episode my opinion switched between "They were definitely set up by the police" and "They're definitely guilty." If the show had ended after one or the other episode I would have probably firmly held either view. Definitely impacted the trust I put in any media. Or rather the trust in myself to not be manipulated.

I'm also there with you, that was quite the roller coaster and impacted my trust fairly deeply. Although the totality of the evidence made that one pretty clear to me after researching further than the show; I felt like there was some bad faith cherry-picking going on, which is extremely effective on me but only while it lasts.

A similar series with all the levers cranked to the maximum is "Killer Ratings" on Netflix - just an unbelievable story out of Brazil that left me questioning everything. And that one I couldn't resolve in my head; it still bothers me today.

Another bad Netflix one is “ Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case”. It’s packed full of armchair psychologists and very little factual analysis (and way too long).

In the past one could look at just about every Michael Moore documentary ever.

It seems if you want to push a fringe or poorly supported narrative on something then there is little better format than pop documentaries.

I was once interviewed for a national TV channel about the security of open and proprietary systems. Since I wanted to present a balanced view, I started with a disclaimer, saying that open source can not be equated with a higher level of security by itself, but then I proceeded to present a couple of arguments about the advantages of open systems, and I specifically stressed the need for crucial communications components (like SSH) to be open.

Guess what, it turned out they made a program on "how Linux is less secure than Windows" and cut out my whole interview leaving just the initial disclaimer that, taken out of context, seemed to justify their agenda. From that time on, I refused any kinds of interviews for TV.

Makes you understand the strange verbiage politicians communicate with a little, doesn't it?

I've had a similar experience. I'll never submit to a vox-pop interview again; they presented my remarks out of context, and manipulated me.

I mean the sad thing about this one is that of all the vox pop content producers, Asian Boss doesn't do nearly the worst manipulation or selective editing. (The worst ones make people sound like idiots, which is unfortunately pretty easy.) Some of their content is genuinely powerful for it and frankly this video on the whole is pretty amazing by the thoughtfulness of the people they interview. It's too bad that they had to arrange something to get a pro-unification viewpoint on camera, but it would've been ok if they'd just owned up to it with a brief caption introducing that person as who they are. The real problem is they didn't do that and I do agree with TFA that it's a bad ethical lapse.

It's journalism by selective editing. Fairly widespread practice.

The extremely budget modern version is the "Public Reacts" article that's a few paragraphs of bare editorial followed by 6-12 tweets with about 6-12 likes each.

Fairly widespread is undercutting it. It's universal practice.

People hold journalists to crazy high standards of integrity and soothsaying, and the older I get the more it boggles the mind that grown adults still cling on to this.

Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.

It's not just about money for the journalists themselves. Visit a journalism school and you'll find very few students there looking to maximize their earnings.

It's a lot like other fields such as science or arts. People entering these careers knowlingly accept low pay and/or difficult working conditions in exchange for other kinds of satisfaction. For some it's intellectual curiosity; for others its artistic ambition or applause.

For journalists, it's the psychological satisfication of using political influence to spread their beliefs to others.

The actions of journalists cannot be understood according to a simple profit model. (The actions of their bosses can - they hire journos who will accept low pay, with the implicit exchange that those journos can use the position to satisfy their activist impulses. Fanatics work for cheap.)

> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.

Not universally true. There's some big corporations like News Corp that from a top level are in it to make money and push a right-wing narrative, but lower down there's a lot of journalists that do things for the public good. Think about the journalists that handled Snowden and Manning's revelations, think Wikileaks, think the journalists that got footage from Gitmo proving the US is committing war crimes, think those that reported on the Panama and Paradise Papers, on Epstein and 'the elite's pedophile rings, the list goes on.

These people have risked and sometimes lost their freedoms and their lives. Would you do that if it was just about money? Or are you just projecting your own motivators in life?

> Journalists work for private corporations

Indeed - that's the drift of Manufacturing Consensus.

To add to that: TV journalism is a form of entertainment, especially sofa-chat news-lite and vox-pop. Vox-pop, especially, is always manipulative. Interviewees always seem to be idiots, because audiences don't want to feel more stupid than the "man on the street". The information content of a vox-pop segment is zero.

Not sure why you put private in front of corporations. You should try watching the political stuff the public networks put out in Canada.

> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money.

Sure, but let's not pretend that stuff like NPR is devoid of bias. They are clearly choosing their teams as well, even if they don't do it for money.

The article is accusing Asian Boss of something different - planting a YouTuber for the appearance of an impromptu interview about Taiwan.

Yep

Like articles with embedded twitter/reddit posts in them. Sure it gives a primary source for whatever topic/view you want to support - but aside from "one person might think this" is pretty irrelevant.

> I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.

Watching Meerkat Manor when I was younger taught me that any narrative can be archived with a bit of editing

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