Creating Reality in Factual Television

The Frankenbite and Other Fakes

Manfred W. Becker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000202021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Creating Reality in Factual Television analyzes the uneasy interaction between economics, culture, and professional ethics in reality and documentary television storytelling. Through the "frankenbite, " an editorial tool that extracts and re-orders the salient elements or single words of a statement, interview, or exchange into a revealing confession or argument, the book explores how and why editors manipulate truth in factual television.

The author considers how the editing of documentary television is increasingly following reality television's dictate to entertain instead of inform, how the "real" and the "truth" fall victim to the demand to "tell entertaining stories, " and how editors must compromise their professional ethics as a result. Drawing on interviews with 75 North American and European editors that explore their experiences and opinions of reality and documentary television practices, and their views on their responsibilities and loyalties in the field, Creating Reality in Factual Television illuminates the real and potential ethical dilemmas of editorial decision making, the context in which decisions are made, and how editors themselves validate the editing choices to themselves and others.

Addressing a dramatic development in contemporary media ecology – the age of "alternative facts" – this book is a useful research tool for scholars and students of documentary film, media literacy, genre studies, media ethics, affect theory, and audience perception.

1 An academic inquiry of the edit room

Picture editors remain on the margins of media scholarship despite playing a key creative role in the field. Even though there has been progress in the study of collaborative arts, the director or producer is still considered to be the solitary creative source that determines the success of a program. This is at least partly because the well-established aesthetic of continuity editing that advances the linear development of the narrative renders editing an invisible art (ACE 2017). This is true for both cinema and fiction television. The goal of continuity editing is to make cuts invisible to viewers so that they can focus on the events and emotion of the narrative rather than the way the program has been constructed. Traditional entertainment requires suspension of disbelief in order to affect the audience emotionally. If the audience notices the editing, their attention is drawn away from the narrative and emotion of the film, hampering an engagement with the meaning of the story (Bordwell and Thompson 2012). “If no ‘meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption,’” countering the very purpose of mainstream television production (Hall 1993).

Therefore, the fundamental aim of the editor is to have their work go unnoticed. They hide their creativity, even though their role is central to post-production. With the advent of digital editing, however, editors have become responsible for many areas of post-production that earlier belonged to other crafts and practitioners. For example, in the past, picture editors only cut images, while specialists in diegetic sound and visual effects covered other aspects of the editing process. It is now common, and not just on lower budget television productions, for the picture editor to integrate music, create visual effects, and lay in sound effects or other non-diegetic sounds.

In fact-based television, the editor’s main burden is to harness the untidiness of ordinary life. Unedited footage on its own – the medium’s purest form – is already problematic, but with the need to interpret the footage shot-by-shot in the editing process the ethical challenges grow exponentially. An editor examines all that was recorded in the production phase for its nuances, and then combines it with additional non-diegetic audiovisual material, giving the recorded material a new context and bringing forward meanings that the actual footage may have concealed, or even fabricates new realities. In reality and documentary television, the editor’s responsibilities reach into the creative task of writing and structuring dramaturgy. Disjointed events add up to cohesive stories; isolated statements are developed into patterns; the coincidental turns into destiny; a display of arrogance becomes defining hubris, and a fair representation of the real is sacrificed.

What we might call “the practitioner’s dilemma” has been an aspect of the documentary form since its beginning. Ever since John Grierson (1947) first used this term in 1926 (13), scholars, audiences, and practitioners have struggled to define the parameters of the documentary form and its relationship to truth. If categories such as documentary and fiction once offered a means of creating order out of division, the current age of cross-pollination between genres necessitates reassessing what is at stake when television programs labelled documentary take on increasingly variable forms (Beattie 2004). Observers of current trends in broadcasting agree that the traditional documentary aim of enlightening is steadily being eroded and replaced by forms of entertainment-oriented non-fiction programing (Kilborn 2006). This change has fundamentally altered the working conditions of practitioners like the editors I interviewed, who work in both reality and documentary television.

Since the form’s inception, documentary makers have presented a narrative or argument by deliberately arranging recorded images and sounds to create a depiction of the real world (Nichols 2001). Documentary shares with other nonfiction forms an uneasy connection to an ambiguous “reality.” In addition, its disputed distinction from fiction raises persistent questions essential to the nature of nonfiction programming itself (Ian and Turton 1992). For example, a term like “fact-based,” which implies truthful accuracy, cannot serve as a descriptive synonym for non-fiction programs. Despite a considerable literature on these issues, a gap remains in the discursive aspects of cultural production, professional identity, and applied ethics.

Media academic John Ellis (2008) argues that, “the discovery and communication of truth is what motivates a documentary maker, and the desire to make something new comes as a consequence of it” (118–119). For artists, he argues, it is the other way around. It is the community of reality and documentary television practitioners that reflects and sustains the genre’s traditions and innovations. Traditional documentary, reality television’s precursor, makes distinct assertions about representing what took place in front of the camera with honesty and truth (Nichols 1991), and a practitioner’s ethics focus on this essential feature of the form. While documentary makers acknowledge that all mediated communication is to some extent crafted and there is no such thing in media as a neutral mirror of reality (Ibid.), they nevertheless believe they can deliver transparency and reflexivity. Historically, the documentary form made claims to both journalism and art, and while the former involves certain ethical duties of integrity, the latter permits, as renowned media scholar Brian Winston (2000) says, “a measure of artistic ‘amorality’” (132). Winston sees artistic license as the key issue of debate between practitioner and participant, because the consequences of representation are experienced most directly by those in front of the camera. As a result, the editor as practitioner is obliged to reduce harm as much as possible to subjects. Yet, a core question remains: how does a practitioner lay claim to a sincere presentation of audiovisuals if that practitioner considers himself or herself to be an artist? It is the tension between art and fact that continues to fuel debate within the scholarly community and is one of the foremost issues in the interviews I conducted for this study. The gaps between practitioners’ ideals and their actual experiences – and the realities of their working practices (autonomy and the ways it may be constrained) – are what this book is ultimately about.

Listening to the practitioners

An examination of changes in the world of fact-based television programs requires consideration of the views and experiences of the program-making profession. This book is constructed upon a research sample of 50 editors working in North America and 25 in Germany. The results of my research reach beyond surveying a professional field, however. I believe they are relevant to society as a whole because they show that reality editors are aware of the larger impacts on society that can arise from their work to the same degree as their documentary colleagues are. Many of my respondents acknowledged that the programs they create contribute to a mass media industrial complex that is instrumental in shaping viewer perspectives of the world, and therefore influence how viewers act as citizens in society.

I argue that media scholars have not sufficiently taken into consideration the production realities facing practitioners; in fact, the gap between scholarly discourse and production practices is a theme that emerges repeatedly here. Any assumptions and ideas about potential ethical conflicts should be tested in the context of everyday practice, which is one way to advance the debate on television program production and ethics. I emphasize the need for a balanced critical approach that is grounded in concerns about fact-based programs – documentary and reality television – and concentrates on issues that relate to the creation rather than the consumption of these programs.

Absent from current television analysis is an acknowledgment that new approaches to examining media production are required to correctly understand and critique its implications. While research into post-production practices has revealed that contemporary nonfactual television represents a break from traditional documentary (Murray and Ouellette 2008), the necessary academic debate over current practices in the medium of television and their effect on practitioners has yet to take place. Missing is a description of on-the-ground production practices as everyday work and the meaning practitioners make of these practices. This book seeks to kick-start these discussions by providing an account of the main issues surrounding media ethics in the context of the transition of traditional documentary to reality television. It offers a view from the inside in terms of the considerations, attitudes, and experiences of picture editors working in both reality and documentary television. Practitioners should not be conceived of simply as artists or, alternatively, as mere cogs in an industrial machine, but as individuals who practice within a set of particular conventions, circumstances, and compromises.

Several serious attempts to analyse reality television accept the form as a complex media construction concerned with a number of social, economic, and political changes, and argue that the form has had an impact on cultural aspects of contemporary society (Escoffery 2006). For example, journalism scholar Jelle Mast (2016) argues that in the debate over reality television practitioners find themselves caught between two unproductive poles. On the one hand are criticisms of individual incidents or extreme cases of moral wrongdoing, and on the other are generalized positions that ignore specific circumstances. Although useful for sketching a wider perspective grounded in political-economic structures and sociocultural tendencies, both approaches overlook subtle differences in the field. They also miss out on supporting the assumptions in their argument with empirical evidence such as may be gleaned from talking with those working in reality television post-production. The issue of ethics in the making of reality television remains unresolved, and academic perspectives on the area of post-production in nonfiction television are sparse at best.

Where does all this leave an ethical code of professional conduct for the makers of fact-based television? And is such an ethical code achievable? Realistic? Even desirable? This book addresses these questions based on conversations with editors. Communications scholar Garnet Butchart (2006) observes that the idea of truth should be central to any discussion of documentary ethics. Ethics arise when a deadlock develops between the competing interests of entertainment and responsibility to be truthful, usually with the marketplace on one side and the care, privileges, and duties of practitioners, viewers, and program participants on the other (Ibid.). However, researcher Willemien Sanders (2010) argues that, aside from Butchart’s findings, the current discourse on nonfiction programs and ethics does not involve any overriding principles or ethics. Instead, the scholarly debate tends to focus on specific situations that raise moral concerns. Scholars debate the practice of traditional documentary ethics, concentrating on the responsibility of the practitioner to (a) the program’s participants, with a focus on caring for them; and (b) the viewers, with an emphasis on truth telling. In other words, their ethics turn on two axes.

In the remainder of this chapter I define some key terms used throughout this book, provide a theoretical framework by which I analysed the editors responses, and draw out some key themes such as how editors perceive their work, the ethics they deploy, their understandings of their role in society at large, and the importance story plays in exercising their craft.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An academic inquiry of the edit room
• 2 Reality’s roots
• 3 The Tyranny of Story
• 4 Dancing with contradiction
• 5 Reflexive editing or informed audiences?
• Appendix A: open ended questions for editors of reality and documentary television
• Index