Good Tape, Bad Tape

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This week I’m trying to explain a strange chapter of history to students at NYU’s Podcasting and Audio Reportage program — so I figured I would try to explain it here as well. If you are an audio producer, prepare to have your mind blown. If you are not, this should still be interesting. Because many of us have used the words “true,” “real” or “genuine” to describe media we like — and “fake,” “artificial,” or “contrived” to describe stuff we don’t.

Good tape is … good, right?

In the audio journalism school that I attended (i.e., the Faculty of Hanging-Around-Grimy-Public-Radio-Newsrooms), nothing was more important than “good tape.” Good tape means any kind of recorded moment that evokes a strong emotional response: maybe empathy, laughter, tears, or astonishment. Often, as we listen to a narrative podcast, those good-tape moments are what pull us in — and they are what make us linger in the car or laugh out loud on the subway. A 30-second news spot can become instantly better with a blip of “good tape.” A longer feature or series is usually built around it. A lack of good tape has killed many a story, despite all the work that went into reporting it.

Good tape happens when the people we interview (or generally hang around) stop performing for the microphone and start being themselves. It often arrives spontaneously, in messy and human moments — and sometimes reporters don’t even know they have it until later.

This quicksilver, elusive type of “authentic” audio is a subject of obsession when producers talk about craft. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve our chances of getting good tape, about how to ferret it out from hours of field or archival recordings, and about how deploy it skillfully. You can find dozens of posts about “tape” on the audio storytelling site Transom. There’s even an indie podcast publication (printed on paper!) called Good Tape. 

So when I found out, early on in my research into audio history, that tape itself was not considered “good” at all for much of radio history in the USA? That was freaky enough. Then I learned about the era of radio when journalists hired actors to play the parts of real people they’d interviewed, or to illustrate reported pieces from print media.

Enter “News Acting”

It was, as I’ve noted many times here, the policy of the big US radio networks NBC and CBS to ban recorded material of any kind from their airwaves. Network programming was by definition live until the late 1940s. But this policy made the artful depiction of news events and newsmakers a challenge.

A. Brad Schwarz’s book Broadcast Hysteria starts off by setting up the radio landscape from which Orson Welles’ production War of the Worlds emerged in 1938. When Welles and his co-author decided to center their play around a fake news report of an alien invasion, they weren’t actually straying that far from the kind of re-enactments Welles had already been performing as a voice actor, on a popular show called The March of Time.

In its earliest iteration, the show was called “News Acting” — a bald and accurate description of what it was: people re-enacting recent events, more infotainment than documentary. Later, The March of Time sprouted a newsreel version which Welles later parodied as News on the March in his movie Citizen Kane. Both Marches of Time were built around scripted re-enactments of recent events — the newsreel version used re-enactments because film cameras at the time were bulky and huge, and rarely in position to act as eye-witness. The radio version used actors because the value system of radio was centered around liveness.

The March of Time used talented voice actors such as Orson Welles week in and week out. One week Welles might play the part of Sigmund Freud, and the next, Horace Greeley (or — face-palm — Emperor Haile Selassie). But things got awkward for the program after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1934. It was no problem to find voice actors (not Welles, alas) who could imitate the new president’s accent and cadence. The problem was that FDR also went on the radio as his own self to address the nation in what became known as Fireside Chats. The White House soon got letters showing that radio listeners could not always tell the fake “re-enacted” versions of FDR apart from his real broadcasts.

So FDR’s press secretary asked CBS to stop dramatizing the President on The March of Time. FDR’s words were not re-enacted on the country’s most popular news show for several years. Of course, the White House recorded most of FDR’s speeches on disk. Couldn’t CBS just use those in lieu of a voice actor? No way! That would not be live radio, and thus it would be a “hoax” on listeners. (🤯)

On the cold tape

During World War II, many non-network reporters started using magnetic wire recorders in the field and incorporating that tape into their reports. Wire recorders were heavy and fussy to use, but they gave the reporters a huge advantage while reporting from dangerous places like war zones. 

After the war, some network stars got special dispensation to use wire-recorded field tape in documentaries. First among those was the dramatist Norman Corwin, who traveled the world in 1946 with a CBS producer and a wire recorder to make the documentary series One World Flight.

While Corwin was out on his four-month trip, CBS was also creating its Documentary Unit, under the direction of star correspondent Edward R. Murrow. Unlike Norman Corwin, reporters in Murrow’s unit made journalistic documentaries the way the network wanted them: to be delivered completely live, not using any tape. 

How did the Documentary Unit pull that off? Here I urge you to go get Matthew Ehrlich’s book Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. That book, and the radio work it cites, really opened my ears to how arbitrary our notions of “authenticity” in audio journalism really are. 

Take, for instance, a CBS documentary from 1947 that Erlich focuses on: The Eagle’s Brood. That doc was an investigation into “juvenile delinquency” and the justice system in the US. Reporter Robert Lewis Shayon traveled the nation for months, interviewing young convicts, prison wardens, victims and community organizers. He then synthesized his reporting into an hour-long script, which CBS cast with actors. Shayon didn’t even voice his own narration — the actor Joseph Cotten played the part of the reporter. The whole production was of course delivered live in March of 1947, with live orchestration. Because of all its scenery-chewing drama, The Eagle’s Brood doesn’t really sound like social-issue “journalism” to our modern ears. But it was journalism — and more importantly, that’s how people perceived it at the time. 

“By week's end, thousands of enthusiastic letters had flooded in. CBS had demonstrated that when radio has something to say about an important problem — and says it intelligently — people will listen,” TIME wrote in its review of the work.

By contrast, just a month earlier, reviewer Lou Frankel had slammed Norman Corwin’s use of tape in his CBS series One World Flight. “With tape recording there can be no rehearsals or rewrites, no ‘breathing life and feeling’ into a scene. What you have on the cold tape is all you can get.” 

Ouch.

When you listen to documentary work from this era, you can hear a new thing — the aesthetic of “good tape” — just barely emerging. Producers are self-conscious about using actualities, and even talented writers like Corwin don’t quite know what to do with them. This was worsened by the fact that many of his interviewees sounded awkward on mic. People were not used to being recorded — and also, almost all voices they had heard on the radio were scripted, so it was hard to know how to talk, I’m guessing. The microphone itself introduced an element of vocal self-consciousness that was hard to overcome.

Plus, tape itself introduced a whole new set of structural problems. How much recorded speech was enough, and how much was too much? Could the producers trust that listeners would understand that these were voices of “real” people, but pre-recorded?

Even more interesting is to notice our own reactions as we listen to the scripted docudramas from the past. What is it about them that bothers our sensibilities now? And what survives of their approach nonetheless? After all, when we producers talk about good tape, we really are talking about the exact same “life and feeling” that reviewer Lou Frankel complained was missing from tape back in 1947. Something has obviously changed in American ears, but it makes you realize that perhaps what we consider eternal about “good tape” is, in fact, completely circumstantial.

If it has occurred to you that we are going through a similar conceptual nervous breakdown now because of AI-generated synthetic media, you are correct. But I find it too exhausting to think about how this very piece, like everything else original, is being digested by the enzymes of billionaires. (Hi guys! You can quadruple-subscribe to CW with a rounding error in your kid’s third-home’s pool-house maintenance budget by clicking here.)

Anyway, let us instead consider the Blattnerphone.

Broadcasters in other countries, it’s worth remembering, didn’t have America’s live vs. tape hang-up. The BBC had been trying to find ways to use “tape” since the 1920s. They saw recorded audio as a great way to get out of the studio, to save some money by repeating certain programs, and generally to try new technology. Their main issue was that transcription disks, the recording technology of the 1920s and 1930s, were awkward to use in the field and also didn’t hold enough audio. So at one point the BBC engineers beta-tested a terrifying machine called the Blattnerphone.

So now, via this lost technology, I finally have a workable definition of “good tape”: good tape is any recording that doesn’t smash through walls or try to impale you. Try it soon in a philosophical debate near you!

❤️‍🔥 📻 ❤️‍🔥

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