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Comment by space_ghost | Hacker News Reader

There's a subplot in The Newsroom where a producer edits an interviewee out of context, leading to the network broadcasting false accusations of serious war crimes. The producer wasn't careful enough, and a clock visible in the background is seen to jump around. Without that clock it would have been undetectable.

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Life imitates art - when Russia started attacking Ukraine, RT reported a 5pm emergency meeting of their military leaders. Included was a photo showing two of their watches at 11:45. (The report was at about 7pm the same day, so it couldn’t have just been a long meeting)

You don’t even have to change the ordering of the video during editing to craft a false narrative. Take reality TV, for example… if you film people for 24 hours a day for a week, and you need to edit the footage down for a 30 minute show, you can create a huge variety of impressions.

For example, let’s say you want to make someone seem like a jerk… in 168 hours, everyone is going to have at least 30 minutes of actions that, in a vacuum, make you look like a jerk. By choosing only to show actions that contribute to a certain narrative, you can completely change how someone appears to behave.

That's how "reality TV" operates. They record a ton of video, decide what the story they want to tell is, and chop things down to tell that story.

And parodied by the Simpsons here:

https://youtu.be/qEGFaOeUm2A

That episode is from November 27, 1994. That Newsroom episode aired July 28, 2013. Less Simpsons parodying Newsroom and more them predicting the future [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future

Simpsons Already Did It

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It

Michael Moore did this in Bowling for Columbine.

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