Stop the insanity! Television news organizations constantly use stock footage when they air a story about some topics. You know what I mean. I’ll mention a topic and you tell me the footage you always see whenever there’s news about that topic. Ready? Smoking. You can see it can’t you? A closeup of someone’s mouth puffing a cigarette and exhaling smoke. Every time there’s a story about tobacco or the health problems associated with smoking, you’ll see someone’s mouth fill your TV screen. Different stories have different people, but it’s the same camera shot.
Another topic? Obesity. What do you see? Closeups of overweight people walking down the street, heads and faces omitted. The closeup can be from the back, from the side, or from the front, but that’s what you’ll see every time, a fat belly or behind walking down the street.
How about a story on prescription drugs? You guessed it. Someone pours several pills into a counting tray and uses a knife to count out a number of pills to fill a prescription bottle. You’ve probably counted them yourself. They slide their knife to collect five pills at a time and sweep them into a trough.
Television is boring enough without showing the same scenes week after week, year after year. And it has been years and years. Isn’t there any creativity left in news story editing? Surely they must get tired of producing the same footage over and over to accompany new stories about the same topics.