This is video of an astounding segment from one of those "World's Wildest Police Video Car Chase" thingies…or at least, I think it's astounding. It might just be astounding editing.
I briefly (very briefly) got hooked on TiVoing and watching these shows a few years ago until it hit me how utterly phony they were with their editing and especially their audio. This is supposed to be a "reality" show but I wonder how many viewers understood that every bit of the audio — narration, sirens, crashes, squealing tires, gunshots, etc. — was created in a studio somewhere long after the event. Even the words of the on-the-scene helicopter reporter were written and recorded later. (On the series this clip was taken from, they'd show a car chase in Miami and follow it with a car chase in Portland…and it would be the same reporter's voice. Betcha some folks never noticed.)
Once you're conscious of how the audio is unreal, it gets you naturally to wondering about the video. How honestly did they chop a much longer chase down to four minutes?
I'm not sure why anyone (myself included) watched this show. There's something compelling about following a live car chase on live TV. No one, but no one knows what's going to happen and no one's manipulating what you're seeing and you're as much a participant as anyone watching. But I think one of the reasons that certain kinds of "reality" shows like the one that aired this clip have died out is that viewers finally began to feel like they weren't getting reality. Does this clip show us something that really occurred? Probably to some extent but between the editing and the bogus audio, it might as well be fiction. And as fiction, it's too impersonal to be interesting…
