Tuesday, May 26, 2009

You couldn't move your camera, NBC News?

I hate to nitpick the news, but I just had to say something about the way NBC News covered President Obama's announcement of Sonia Sotomayor as his pick to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. This is the sort of thing Phil Farrand would call a "production problem": For most of the time Obama talked about Sotomayor, with her standing to his left (our right), NBC allowed this stand with a square at the top to block our view of the lady. True, it was a semi-opaque square rather than a fully opaque square, but would it have been that hard to move your camera so there wasn't that distracting square over her face? Well, maybe it was, for after all, there must've been every major news organization in that room. CBS News had a boring two-shot with Obama and Sotomayor head on, but at least her face wasn't covered by some distracting square. What NBC News could've done is zoom in on Obama a little bit for his remarks. There was a lot of range between the shot with Biden, Obama and Sotomayor and the close-up of Sotomayor when she took the podium. Was it really that important for NBC to have a partially obstructed view of Sotomayor? Didn't they know in advance that she's say a few words?

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