Doctoring of Live Coverage

[Satchmo Distel]

Etienne posted this on the punditry thread but I think it's important enough to have a separate discussion. What the fuck is going on here?:

http://deadspin.com/5923264/sorry-mario-balotelli-didnt-really-make-this-german-fan-cry-how-tv-lied-to-you-during-euro-2012

I realize that crowd shots are irrelevant to the actual game but this kind of thing still distorts the event because it turns the fans into puppets who are just there to provide doctored 'money shots'. It's almost like crowd porn, in the sense of being faked.

[G-Man]

Doctoring of Live Coverage

That kind of thing isn't new though. Newsreels did the same back in the day, and I recall feeling betrayed when I learnt in the 1970s that German TV inserted pre-recorded crowd noises into their highights coverage of Bundesliga games.

Still, it's a good thing that The Sun didn't do the Euro 2012 broadcasts. You'd have the match interspersed with as-live footage of Hitler orating wildly, German troops invading Poland and Il Duce's trains running on time.