Tuesday, November 25, 2003

More Bush Ad Notes...

The official presidential website has a video feed of the 2003 State of the Union address. The "one vial" flub-lette is left as it was originally spoken, and not cleaned up as it was for the campaign advertisement.

Click here for the White House webcast archive of the State of the Union Address. The sentence in question is very near the end.

I don't think the issue here is the size of the correction the Audio/Video people made to the tape, since all they did was remove a split-second pause and a minor mispronunciation. As argued in the New York Times piece, this is the type of thing that is "cleaned up" by reporters in print media as a matter of course when transcribing quotations. However, they cleaned up a quotation for use in a voiceover (if you haven't seen the ad, the visual cuts to the president immediately after the tidied-up audio). We are accustomed to looped audio in our movies and to airbrushed cover models, but we expect our politicians to be un-retouched. Spin is one thing. Doctored audio tracks are another.

In short, no matter how small the fix, that was not how it really happened. We have a right to have things presented to us how they really are, not how they would be in a perfect world.

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