The interview that was edited

A forty-minute interview became four minutes of broadcast, and the subject complained that she had been misrepresented. The broadcaster published the full recording, and both positions survived the publication.

Every edit is an argument. Compressing forty minutes into four requires choosing what the interview was about, and two honest editors would choose differently. The complaint was not that quotes had been altered — they had not — but that a hesitation had been cut from the middle of an answer, joining a doubt to a conclusion she had reached only after reasoning aloud. In the broadcast she sounded certain. In the recording she sounded like someone thinking.

This is the standard difficulty with a medium that has to be shorter than its material. Print has the same problem and hides it better, because a reader does not expect a transcript and a listener half believes they are hearing the conversation. Audio and video carry an implicit claim of completeness that text does not.

The practices that help are small. Marking edits audibly, by a short tone or a visible cut, tells an audience that compression has happened. Publishing the full recording lets the small number of people who care check, and the knowledge that they can changes editing behaviour more than the checking itself does. And a rule against joining two non-adjacent sentences without indicating it removes the specific trick that produced this complaint.

The broadcaster adopted the third rule and not the first two, on the grounds that audible markers irritate audiences. That is probably true and it is also the reason the claim of completeness survives: the medium conceals its own editing because concealing it is more pleasant to consume.