Tuesday, September 9, 2008

WHO IS SELLING WHAT?

We saw something which was really interesting after watching both IETV and CNC 3's newscasts on Monday evening.
First, IETV ran a story in their 6:30pm newscast on the reaction to the call for a nationwide shutdown. One such story included soundbites from two people in south Trinidad. The first was a businesswoman (with very pale makeup and yellow hair) and she was followed by a man with a Caribbean accent.
Nadine Hackett referred to the gentleman as a 'citizen', but didn't tell us which country he was a citizen of.

Then later in the CNC 3 newscast at 7pm, we saw a similar round of stories, one of them done by Sampson Nanton. Then close to the end of Sampson's story, who could we see but the same woman with the pale makeup and the yellow hair and the man with the Caribbean accent. Mr Nanton used exactly the same soundbites from the two people, and they were used in the same order as on IETV.

Hmmmmmm. Quite a coincidence that they happened to interview the same two people out of thousands of possible random candidates, and those two candidates said exactly the same thing in exactly the same way for two different camera crews.
And there we (and all your viewers) were thinking that Nadine and Sampson and their respective cameramen pounded the pavements to get those stories and those soundbites.
Well the Heads of News of IETV and CNC 3 need to speak with whoever is supplying them with video and let them know that you don't want the same random soundbites that have already been given/sold(?) to someone else. It's fine if the person is covering a press conference or some other public function and gives the video to numerous people, it may not be obvious.
But in this case it was highly obvious that one person shot that video and distributed it.