Update: The Case of the Disappearing footage of the disappearing Audio…SOLVED!

After making my previous entry on this subject I got an email from J$ swearing up and down that the audio dropped out and suggesting I use headphones. So I grabbed a set of headphones and he’s right. The cut out is unmistakable. It’s too subtle to be heard with your computer speakers unless you crank the volume way up. I had increased the volume on my speakers originally for just this purpose…only it turns out I didn’t crank it loud enough.

But the chance this was a technical malfunction as J$ argues is all but impossible. The odds are against it because the odds of audio accidentally cutting out twice just after Obama finishes speaking are too low to be credible. Ergo the audio was deliberately knocked out in the editing room. So Michael Moore was right and FNC tried to make Obama look bad? Not so fast…

As I showed in the previous entry, we now know that the FNC video is actually two different parts of Obama’s speech spliced together. So this is what likely happened. Someone at FNC was editing the video for select sound bites. The first soundbite was Obama talking about pulling out of Iraq. The second was Obama talking about the war on terror.

Have you ever watched the news and seen a sound bite played where someone’s talking and then you stop hearing audio for a second or two and then the camera returns to the news anchor or the news anchor starts doing a voice over? TV News routinely wipes out the audio after the end of the segment it wants to highlight. In other instances the video just freezes…that’s another way of doing it. These are meant to be used as cues.

So the conclusion is obvious. These two clips were meant to be used separately on the air and not spliced together. But someone decided to put the two together for the web but did it quick and sloppy and didn’t trim off the “dead air” parts. So Michael Moore is right that FNC cut out the audio. But he’s wrong that it was done deliberately to make Obama look bad. The only thing FNC is guilty of is having a lazy video editor and a not at all alert web staff that allowed the clip to go online in that form. This whole controversy would have been avoided if people had just done their jobs properly. Case closed.

Update: Bingo! Mediaite confirms my theory…

Fox News explained to Mediaite what happened today (Spud over at InsideCableNews had it pretty much right on). The video editor took two clips that were meant for television individually and they included padding at the end of each. The video producer used the clips to create a segment for the web. Just like the padding in the middle, there’s more space at the end of the clip that actually includes Obama continuing to speak without any sound.