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Exposed logo raises TV ethics questions

By John Ferro
Poughkeepsie Journal
Published: 12/19/2006

Excerpt:

To bring a story home to the viewer, television reporters sometimes immerse themselves in what they are reporting. That�s what "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley did in a report that aired on Dec. 10.

Pelley was reporting on the growth of mixed martial arts sports. Pelley donned a sweat suit, got on the mat with some martial arts instructors and worked up a good sweat to show viewers what the training can be like. Then he sat down to interview one of the sport�s leaders.

That's when viewers got a brief look at something Pelley and his producers didn't want them to see: a shot of Nike's distinctive logo, the famous "swoosh," smack dab under the neckline of Pelley's sweat suit. The logo is clearly visible in only one shot during the piece, the second-to-last featuring Pelley. And it appeared despite the efforts of producers to hide it.

"The producer noticed Scott Pelley had worn a shirt with the swoosh logo on it before the interview and blacked it with a pen so it wouldn't show up on camera," CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said in an e-mail interview. ...

... "You would have a different ethics issue if they had just fixed it by blacking it out in post-production," Al Tompkins of the Florida-based Poynter Institute said in an e-mail interview. "That would have been altering reality. But inking over it in the field is a great fix to a problem. The camera recorded what was actually there and it aired as the camera saw it."
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Posted by Candace Clarke 12:00 AM Dec 19, 2006

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