Not My Type

One of the most damning piece of evidence during the NFL's pay-for-hits investigation was an audio recording of a defensive meeting in which ex-defensive coordinator Gregg Williams is heard telling the Saints players to go after San Francisco running back Frank Gore's head on tackles. They got the audio as a result of a documentary film makers who was following around former Saint Steve Gleason, who is fighting Lou Gehrig's disease and some have wondered if there was a connection between his illness and his time in football. At the time the clip was released, Gleason blasted the film makers for violating his trust. However, in a recent interview for HBO's "Real Sports" Gleason appeared to come around, saying that, "The real problem was that no one seemed shocked." It was a pretty damning indictment about the kind of things Williams may have been saying for years from a man who would have had the insight as a former player, but also could speak freely without the fear of being labelled as a snitch in football circles because his NFL days are over. There was only one problem with the quote: that was only half of it. Gleason said HBO got his words wrong because he only meant the players nearest him and not necessarily the whole team. And while "I was misquoted" is the standard athlete defense when they have said something in an interview which has gotten them into any hot water, this time HBO admitted that there was a problem with the close captions and while the tone was close the quote was not entirely accurate. Seems like kind of a big mistake to make.

What's funny is that this comes just a couple days after I was watching the news in a bar with the closed captions on and was stunned by all the spelling mistakes. At one point they did a story which contended that Mitt Romney has a tax plan designed to help the "missile" class. (If you can afford missiles, how much help do you really need?) But, that was just the most amusing in a long line of examples, because there were several sentences which made a lot less sense. I'm sure some of this has to do with the system these companies use. I'm willing to bet there is some kind of auto-complete feature which only requires that people type some kind of shorthand and then the computer guesses the word based on words which have frequently appeared in previous conversations. I know people have something similar with text messages, but am I the only one who thinks companies which are trying to do this at a professional level should be working with a technology that is more advanced than what comes on even the cheapest of smart-phones? I'm all for easy technology that you can take with you, but at some point you need to upgrade if you want to be taken seriously. Think about it like this: there is a reason you never see professional photographers walking around with iPhones on tripods.

Now, I admit that I am not a particularly fast or accurate typist (you should see these posts before I go back and clean them up) but then again I'm not trying to make my living at it. As with all things in life, once you are getting paid for it I feel as though the standards get higher. Still, I could forgive the mistakes if it was a live newscasts because I'm sure trying to talk as fast as people type is impossible. However, that particular quote about the "missile class" came from a piece of pre-recorded footage, which means the person at the keyboard had the time to look ahead at the script before the telecast started. Or they could have looked at what had been entered into the teleprompter and worked off that, because if "Anchorman" is to be believed newscasters rarely venture far from it. As a man who is extremely detail-oriented about making sure things such as movies are quoted accurately, that kind of error just feels lazy. (That is why I get really mad when I watch movies with subtitles on and they don't match exactly what is being said. You have all the time in the world to get these right and you still screw it up? That is just lack of pride in your work.) It is as if they think the deaf don't appreciate precision.

There is a simple solution to this problem, of course. For pretty cheap money you can get voice-recognition software which would do the typing for you. I don't know how accurate it is, but it can't be much worse than what is currently being used. For those of you who point out that most newscasts have two or more speakers which the computer would have to pick up, I assume that software already exists (and if it doesn't you are welcome for the idea). Also, if you have ever watched a sporting event in a bar you know that most of the time the close caption for live events don't distinguished between who is speaking anyway. [Sidebar: this is actually a really fun bar game to play - figure out which person just said the incredibly dumb thing you just read. Hint: it's usually Tim McCarver.] There has to be a better solution. In this day and age, where something which is seen as even slightly offensive by a small group of people can end careers, accuracy should be at a premium. Instead we're still allowing these kinds of spelling and speaking errors which can change the entire tone of a sentence to slide through. I just worry that one day we're going to misspeak about the wrong person and it's going to create a real problem, because if the news to be believed there is an entire class of people out there with missiles at their disposal and I bet they like to be quoted accurately.