Coming to You Live Via Satellite ... From the Same Parking Lot!

During the blanket coverage of the Cleveland kidnapping story, when TV anchors Ashleigh Banfield of CNN interviewed TV commentator Nancy Grace of Headline News, the split-screen satellite simulcast implies that the interviewer and interviewee were at a different location (after all, why would they need satellite, otherwise?), but eagle-eyed viewers pointed out that they were actually both at the same parking lot!

At first it seems like a normal TV "remote," as Banfield interviews Grace from another location. Then the channel's graphics alert viewers: both anchors are in Phoenix. That's odd. Also: They're both outdoors, sitting in what looks to be a parking lot. And is that same building behind them? [...]

It seems that Grace and Banfield are sitting in the same parking lot, facing in the same direction, and judging by the speed of the vehicles in their shots, they cannot be sitting more than 30 feet away from each other. Yet, they're behaving as if the are on opposite sides of the world.

Dashiell Bennett and Philip Bump of of The Atlantic Wire has more: Link


The perception of reality in televised news production is getting stranger every day. Maybe it always has been this weird, but I just haven't been watching it enough to notice.
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Is it possible that one is in the studio with a green screen behind her projecting a second live feed from a camera at the location of the other? That would give the appearance of them being at the same location, even though one isn't anywhere near the other.

If you look, you can see the wind blowing the hair of the one in the pink shirt, but not the other.
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A similar thing happened in Australia a couple of years ago. A TV news channel did a live cross to a helicopter "near Beerwah" when in fact the helicopter was hovering over the stations helipad, about 90km away. Naturally it was named "choppergate" and took over the news for a couple of weeks successfully distracting us from any actual news.
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As your article states, it's TWO DIFFERENT CHANNELS talking together. Each contributing to the feed, using their own equipment. They're not pretending about anything.
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