To provide listeners with an exciting and listenable experience, editing the interview, particularly, its audio part, is vital. However, selecting cuts of the interview material may cause certain ethical issue. In order to ensure that the editing process is ethical, it is vital to ensure that the intent of the speaker is kept and that the main points are listed accordingly.
Retaining the key points made by the guest speaker when editing an interview is vital. Otherwise, the argument becomes distorted, which will lead to audiences developing a wrong perception of the issue. Consequently, a major breach of ethics will occur due to the misrepresentation of the speaker’s opinion and the attempt at manipulating the information to shape the listeners’ perspective in a certain way.
However, since an interview may exceed the length of the program multiple times, a large amount of the material must be cut. Therefore, there is no standard for how much of the interview can be removed safely from the program (Arsel, 2017). As a result, an editor must rely on the sense of justice and the understanding of the issue in order to retain the original intent of the speaker intact.
Although making an interview listenable and palatable to general audiences requires making numerous cuts, it is critical to remove only the parts that do not contain vital information and do not constitute the key points of the speaker’s argument. Otherwise, the threat of distorting the core statement made by the interviewee emerges. Although cutting the entire interview so that it could fit the time frame of a radio program episode is an admittedly difficult task, retaining the key arguments made by the guest speaker while keeping the conversation concise must be seen as a necessity.
Reference
Arsel, Z. (2017). Asking questions with reflexive focus: A tutorial on designing and conducting interviews.Journal of Consumer Research, 44(4), 939-948. Web.