The Occidental Weekly

During their coverage of the Presidential election, CNN made headlines of its own by featuring a new technology - holograms. Yes, holograms. What has the news media come to?

CNN would film someone at Obama's rally in Chicago, and in the studio they appeared as a life-sized moving, speaking image. There was a blue, flickering outline surrounding the image, giving it the Princess Leia effect. They even added the titlecard underneath the person that said "LIVE VIA HOLOGRAM". It was all really cool.

Apparently, to make this work, they used 35 high-definition cameras positioned at different angles around the person being projected. To keep interference and crowd noise to a minimum, they put the whole apparatus inside a special hologram tent. I have no idea how it works on the studio side-how do you take 35 HD camera feeds and project them as a 3-D lifelike image that is able to interact with Wolf Blitzer? Even if somebody explained it to me, it would probably be too confusing and technical for me to understand.

CNN only used the hologram technology twice - once with one of their correspondents covering the Obama rally, and once with musician Will.i.am. CNN won't disclose how much the holograms cost them, but you can bet it was expensive. The holograms have led to quite a bit of criticism, especially from reporters and other people in the industry. People are wondering how CNN and other news organizations can be making cutbacks to their newsrooms and decreasing the size of their reporting staffs when they have the money to build a special hologram tent and only use it twice.

The priorities of the news media, specifically when it comes to television, seem moving toward gimmicks and "woah!" moments, not solid reporting or digging deep into a story. As newsrooms shrink, the quality and determination of the reporting decreases. Reporting can sometimes be the only thing that holds people or organizations responsible for what they do. As a society, we need large newsrooms and thorough reporting. And more holograms, because they're awesome.

Tyler Kearn is a junior Economics major. He can be reached at tkearn@oxy.edu.

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