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HOW A MICROPHONE WORKS  
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David Dayen
September 30, 2020
The American Prospect
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_ And why the Commission on Presidential Debates doesn’t want to
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In praise of sound engineers, ANDREW HARNIK/AP PHOTO

 

Every so often, you’ll watch a congressional hearing (if you’re
me) or you’ll be on a Zoom call (if you’re everybody) and you’ll
see someone’s lips moving with no words coming out, and inevitably a
member of Congress or Jan from HR will remind them, “You’re
muted.” What’s happening there is a complex phenomenon known in
the annals of amplification as the mic being off. In the event of a
broadcast situation, whether to lobbyists in a congressional hearing
room or the gang from the office working from home, if your mic is off
nobody can hear you.

Believe it or not, the same thing works in broadcast television. I
will impart to you my wise experience of nearly 20 years in the
television industry. There’s a sound engineer in any studio
environment, and he has everyone’s mic wired into a different spot
on the soundboard. He can turn the mic up or down, so the signal
broadcast out to the world can either hear or not hear the speaker.
This is helpful when you have people on screen speaking over one
another, or out of turn, or in the case of _The Jerry Springer
Show_ or some such operation, when there’s just someone so unruly
that they won’t shut up.

In a situation where you have two speakers, and each of them is
supposed to get an uninterrupted amount of time during a portion of
the program, you could simply bring up that person’s mic, and
“cut” the other one (that’s a technical term). Anyone who has
watched Fox News or really any news program with a guest can plainly
see that, when it’s the host’s turn to speak, the mic of the guest
is turned down. Sometimes, if Bill O’Reilly is the host,
this cutting of the guest’s mic is very explicit
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Normally it’s just implied.

Sure, if the two individuals are in the same room, and one of them is
ranting with their mic cut, it may be hard for the other person
speaking to concentrate. But that’s life in the big city, and
something that public speakers have to get used to. If they know that
they’re in control of the mic, and therefore the situation, they can
just ignore the other speaker and plow forward, confident that their
message is getting across to the people at home, who matter more than
the people in the room. (Heck, even in the room only the person
amplified will be heard, as that’s how a microphone works.)

Now, why am I relating this as if I’m speaking to an eight-year-old?
Because the eight-year-olds at the Commission on Presidential Debates
are apparently unaware of the power of amplification. The Progressive
Change Campaign Committee has now made explicit
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ask of the commission, saying, “In the next debates, you must CUT
THE MIC when it’s not a candidate’s turn to speak to control the
situation and allow the debate to go forward.”

You would think, if the commission had rules that each candidate would
get two uninterrupted minutes at the beginning of each section of the
debate, that they would have mastered this concept on their own. Those
certainly didn’t have to be the rules. You could have rules with no
conditions on cross talk and interruption. But they were the rules,
agreed to by both campaigns. And the simplest tool known by every
television producer in the history of the medium is available to
enforce that rule. If the moderator won’t do it, the sound engineer
can.

Now let me tell you why the Commission on Presidential Debates will
not resort to this time-honored tactic. The commission, run by
corporate lobbyists
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both parties, more than anything wants to display their neutrality.
Though it’s entirely neutral to enforce a ground rule agreed to by
all sides that an uninterrupted segment of the debate remain
uninterrupted, this tactic would be met with howls of derision by the
most frequent interrupter, maybe lead to a boycotted debate, and would
upset the delicate control that the commission, a perfectly fictitious
corporation sponsored by other private corporations
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to project.

More to the point, television news has invited the kind of brawling
style on display last night. They act as theater critics watching a
play and give points to the more “aggressive” contributor to the
debate, judging the candidates on style far more than substance. To
allow for uninterrupted points of the debate would mean actually
having to listen to what the candidates have to say, which would be
awful. They view television through the lens of conflict and have
created the reality show in which we now find ourselves.

Though history in the Trump era begins the moment people wake up in
the morning, this is not the first debate marred by endless cross talk
from politicians with a sense of entitlement, who know that they can
just blow past the agreed-to debate rules to get their message out.
The way the media has run debates for years, the same way they run
panel discussions and interviews, has contributed mightily to this
mess. They have a way out, but they don’t want to use it. They want
to maintain “neutrality” but refuse to implement any steps to that
end. The reason the debate was a “shitshow
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as Dana Bash called it, is because of the people who have been
stirring the shit for the last few decades.

_David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His
work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more._

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