TV

The ABC Captioned ‘Media Watch’ With A Doco On Porn Stars And It Was Incredible

"You will be having sex with someone this afternoon on camera? I will."

by Osman Faruqi  14 February 2017

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For 15 minutes every Monday evening (just before we all throw our remotes at Q&A) ABC’s Media Watch strikes fear and panic into the hearts of journalists across the country.  Who’s going to be raked over the coals for not disclosing freebies? How wrong was The Daily Telegraph? What’s The Daily Mail done this time?

According to the show’s website, “Media Watch turns the spotlight onto those who literally ‘make the news’: the reporters, editors, sub-editors, producers, camera operators, sound recordists and photographers.” The producers are always looking for slip ups, factual errors and awkward moments so they can drag the media.

Which is why when Media Watch has its own monumental slip up it’s even funnier.

When arts critic Jane Howard went to watch last night’s episode of Media Watch on ABC iview she noticed something was very, very wrong with the captions.

Instead of featuring the show’s usual dialogue the captions included phrases like “You will be having sex with someone this afternoon on camera? I will” and “Erm… I feel like an asshole.”

Howard said she was too busy laughing and taking screenshots to pay attention to what was going on in the show.

So what happened? Did the host, Paul Barry, go rogue? Was the transcriber having a bit of fun? It turns out the captions are actually bits of dialogue from a Louis Theroux documentary called Twilight of the Porn Stars that aired on ABC2 last night and is currently available on iview.

It seems like most obvious answer is that the captions somehow got mixed up between the two shows.

The Media Watch episode in question has been pulled from iview and the ABC is investigating whether the issue was widespread or just a one off error. The Media Watch Twitter account posted early this morning that there were “issues with iview”.

But for some reason ABC corporate affairs took a different line and tried to dismiss the whole thing as  “fake”.

Howard told Junkee that “iview’s captions often go a bit haywire — it’s not the first time I’ve seen a show using the captions from another show, or they become completely out-of-sync with the audio. Most of the time I will try refresh or close iview down and open it again to  get it working again, but the mix-up between the Louis Theroux captions and Paul Barry’s facial expressions were too good let go.”

It’s weird for the ABC to try and claim the pictures were faked. If you watch the Theroux doco on iview the following caption appears 2 minutes and 46 seconds into the show:

louis2

 

The exact same caption appeared 2 minutes and 46 seconds into Media Watch before it was pulled from iview, according to Howard’s screen shots.

Not fake, just very funny.