The "phantom voices" preceding Bush's on certain CNN and other station feeds - most famously, during D-Day celebrations and the subsequent press conference with Jacques Chirac - were what convinced me to take the BushWired story seriously at the start.
Now at IsBushWired.com we have a possible UnWired explanation for those voices: "Revoicing" of the event for the sake of the automated voice-recognition system that delivers closed-captioning to the outgoing television feed. I had figured the networks used stenographers, typists or court reporters to do closed-captioning, but apparently not. Instead, they have an individual re-voice the action on-screen. The person speaks directly into a microphone that is attached to a voice-recognition system which then produces the text. You can understand why they would do this: The actual live audio feed will have the voice of interest mixed in with background noises and other confusions; putting a human in the loop dodges these obstacles and allows for a smoothing-out of the (rather choppy, for most of us) rhythms of spoken text.
Here's the kicker: Since the voice-recognition system takes a second or two to do its magic, inserting the closed-captioning requires a few-second delay of the live feed so that the captions will be in synch. This means that somewhere along the line between (1) that microphone in front of Bush and (2) your television set, someone is re-voicing the text that Bush is speaking into (3) a live microphone, one or two seconds ahead of the delayed Bush AV signal. That re-voicing is not supposed to make it to your TV, but frankly, if it didn't happen every once in a while that might be even more surprising than the alternative.
Folks, I think this story has just peaked.
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3 comments:
I should point out that there is a simple test for this hypothesis: Compare the actual closed captions in the broadcast against the (1) phantom voice; and (2) Bush's. Where they differ (and they do differ), see which one the closed captions mirror. If it's the phantom voice, I would argue, then that's it, we're done.
(1) You can ask CNN if they were re-voicing the D-day commemoration broadcast. That would answer it.
(2) This has nothing to do with Bush wearing a wire and a ear-phone, if he was, at the first debate.
Sorry -- too much slang. By "wire" I mean, to have been wired for reception.
I don't think you know if he was wearing an earpiece. There are earpieces which fit in the ear canal, and you can't see them at a glance.
I think the issue of whether or not Bush was wearing an earpiece and being fed answers to questions by someone offstage has not been disproven by his handlers.
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