Both because I believe in transparency1 and because I find this amusing, I want to give people a bit of visibility into the 30-second soundbites you see embedded in broadcast news stories.
As I wrote yesterday, I appeared in a 26-second soundbite within a larger (about 3 minutes) segment of last night’s NBC Nightly news. This was arranged by the media representatives I’m working with to get the word out about what’s happening at VA and in the federal government in general.2
Before I explain the details of how that soundbite was created, here’s the TLDR: the team working on the news segment went into it knowing the point they wanted me to make on the air and about how long they wanted it to be. My interview consisted of them prompting me into giving them the soundbite that satisfied their criteria. No judgment here, this isn’t good or bad per se, it’s just the reality of how things work, which I’m sharing because I thought people might find it interesting.
Here are some additional details for people who are curious…
At a prearranged time, I joined a Zoom meeting arranged by the NBC Nightly News production crew working with Peter Alexander, the NBC White House correspondent who narrated the news segment. Alexander and a number of producers were already on the Zoom when I joined.
When I joined the meeting we dove right in with no delay. Alexander explained to me that we were just going to have a conversation. He then asked me a couple of questions, which I answered. I’m pretty sure the first question was warm-up for the money shot, i.e., the second question, whose answer was what they wanted to actually put on the air.
After I answered the second question, Alexander told something to the effect of, that last thing you said was really the key, we really want that to be the message we get across here, but we want your answer to have a bit more of a punch, so I’m going to ask the question again a slightly different way and give you a chance to have another crack at it. To be clear, those are not the exact words he used; I don’t remember the conversation well enough to quote him, and I don’t want to claim that I am. Basically, the idea that came across to me from what he was saying is, “Give me another soundbite that makes that last point you just made, but make it shorter.”
So he asked the question again, and I answered it again, shorter.
I think we went through one more iteration of that before he was happy with my response. Then he dropped from the meeting after thanking me, and the producers asked me to stay on for another minute to deal with some practicalities.
The team clearly had already reported the story enough that they weren’t using me to get information, they were using me to be the face of information they already had and wanted to convey to the audience in the segment.
The reason the producers asked me to stay on a bit longer was so they could ask me to send them a picture of me at work for them to use in the run-up to the soundbite. I couldn’t give them a picture of me at work at VA because I’m remote, i.e., I work from home, and I had never bothered to take a picture of that. But I told them I would see what I could do. After I got off the Zoom I cleaned up our dining room where I was working to make it presentable, set up my tripod with its cell-phone mount, took a photo with the self-timer3 of me and my laptop sitting at the dining room table from the side with me looking at the camera, and emailed that to them. They wrote back and asked if I could do one with me looking at the computer instead, so I did two more photos, one from the side and one from behind the laptop, and the latter is the one they ended up using in the segment.
There’s one more amusing tidbit those of you who have read this far might appreciate… When I tested the spot where I was sitting during the segment earlier in the day to confirm that the lighting was OK, everything was fine, but at the time we were scheduled to “film” the sun was blaring onto me from two of the dining-room windows, completely washing out my face. I tried several things to soften the sunlight to fix this before I finally came up with the solution that worked. I ran down to the basement and fetched my two portable chair-mounted green-screens4, balanced one of them precariously on the dining-room table leaning against the chandelier blocking one of the windows, and balanced the other precariously on the back of a chair blocking the other window. With those in place the lighting was perfect for the shoot.
1My belief in transparency is one reason why I’m putting myself at risk to tell people what the DOGE firings are doing to the government in general and specifically to USDS and VA.
2How and why I came to be working with media representatives is a story for another time.
3I had to use the tripod and self-timer because I was home alone, my wife and son having just left for a February break college visit.
4I have a chair-mounted green-screen because I often work in my unfinished basement office, I don’t want people in business meetings to see that I’m working in an unfinished basement, and when I started working in my unfinished basement Zoom for Linux couldn’t do a virtual background without a green-screen. I have two chair-mounted green-screens because the stitching on the first one started to unravel so they sent me a replacement, but I managed to staple it back together well enough to use in emergency situations like this one so I kept it.
