Nielsen ratings show that Sunday’s town hall-style debate at Washington University in St. Louis garnered an audience of 66.5 million people across 11 networks.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
SIU alum gives inside look at second presidential debate
Nielsen ratings show that Sunday’s town hall-style debate at Washington University in St. Louis garnered an audience of 66.5 million people across 11 networks.
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Lancaster wrote "There’s just a lot more intricacies to it than you would think," and I think that is certainly true. One thing I did not think about with the mass of "things to do" with tech for a live presidential debate is having to hook every news station into the audio and video feeds of what was coming to the mixer. That had to be insane and I'm sure quite a mess to coordinate. Especially if someone wasn't on time, didn't follow directions, or wasn't a team player. One thing I thought was a bit ironic about this is that Trump has openly chastised sound technicians during his debates and he didn't even bother to make any jokes about that considering he was running sound on stand-by. I did think it was interesting that over 100 people were involved in the setup and 50+ ran the event. That's quite a lot at $30/hour since it was union. But I guess with the scale of the event you need that many people. If they were smart, they'd hire a lot of interns and call it "educational" to get lots of hours out of them for free. Then maybe Hillary and Trump would need a few less donations that would involve us selling our souls to another big-wig private company.
I tend to think about the behind-the-scenes side of everything I watch, but I didn’t really think about it while I was watching the presidential debate. I never considered how complicated it gets when you have so many news anchors all trying to broadcast the same event at the same time. After reading this, I realize that it is actually is quite a complex event given how many different organizations are involved, and that becomes even more complex when you consider the redundancy needed since you really can’t have anything go wrong, or at least you can’t have anything go wrong that you can’t fix so fast that no one notices anything went wrong. Before reading this article, I think if someone had brought up the idea of working a presidential debate, I would think it would be interesting just because it is such a major event, but after reading this, I now see that is is interesting for a lot of technical reasons.
I do not know if I would call the debate seamless… although it probably was from a technical standpoint. I have spoken in a few of my classes about the security requirements that go into a political event like this, and I cannot even imagine how much impacts the load in and tech process overall. Normally, when a debate might be a simple setup, this would require multiple redundancies and fail-safes with all of the additional security that goes into a debate with politicians. With 40-50 people per department, miles worth of cable, and a lot of equipment, this event must be very expensive and have a lot of labor hours associated with it. On the other side, I cannot imagine how that many people in the general vicinity would increase the already high tensions in the room, and it must be pretty difficult to be the management team responsible for making sure that those tensions do not boil over (at least too early).
Because things have gone wrong while I've watched debates or candidate speeches in general over the course of this election, I do pay more attention to the technical elements of the process, but I could not have imagined that amount of extra things that can and do affect the technical side of the last presidential debate. I assumed they would have backup plans in case of failure, but I had not considered how many, but having experiences with many a staticky cable or finicky mic, I completely understand the need for some many safeties. I also had not even considered how all of the news anchors and broadcasting could affect all of this. I guess I had assumed tat each brought their own equipment and was able to handle most of the job, but actually having to feed the sound to all of those different places and people in the middle of trying to run it in the first place has got to be one of the most challenging things. The other thing I had not considered, but now that I've read this is painstakingly obvious, id the security clearance process that all of these people have to go through in order to be present/work at one of these events. I imagine it might be a little frustrating if you're trying to fix a mic problem, and instead of begin able to approach the wearer to troubleshoot, you have to do everything through a second party. There are so many details and factors that go into this, that I really applaud those who make it all happen.
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