By now everyone has heard (or at least heard of) the ‘Dean Scream’ — Dean’s post-Iowa speech to his assembled fans which culminated in a soundbite played over and over (more than 700 times on television, apparently), not to mention being heavily sampled across the ‘net.
What wasn’t as heavily reported, though, was the atmosphere of the room itself — packed to the gills with rowdy Dean fans that were yelling and cheering as Dean promised them that he wasn’t finished, and that he’d continue to campaign and attempt to gain the Democratic nomination.
In an unusual media “mea culpa,” however, Diane Sawyer followed up on her interview with Howard and Judy Dean (which is excellent by the way, and worth watching — unfortunately, it’s gone to a pay-to-play link now) by taking a look at not just the footage that was broadcast all over the world with a direct-from-the-microphone audio feed, but at footage taken from within the crowd itself. Because this vantage point captures the energy and noise level of the room, all of a sudden Dean’s yell doesn’t seem nearly as ridiculous.
After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again — in fact played it to them — I noticed that on that tape he’s holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise. It isolates your voice, just like it does to Charlie Gibson and me when we have big crowds in the morning. The crowds are deafening to us standing there. But the viewer at home hears only our voice.
So, we collected some other tapes from Dean’s speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage.
[…]
Dean’s boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd.
And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn’t really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd.
The article includes a link to a video clip of Diane’s segment looking back at the scream, which has both the originally aired clip and a clip from within the audience. It’s quite a difference.
I’m afraid it may be too little too late — Dean’s already taken a tumble in the polls, though I’m not about to write him off yet (politics has seen far stranger things than a possible Dean resurrection) — but still, kudos to Diane for coming back to this instead of just letting it lie as-is.
(via Mark Sundeen)
iTunes: “I See You (Extended)” by X Marks the Pedwalk from the album New Dark Noise: The Darkwave Dance Floor Killer No Filler (2002, 5:11).