Why do interviewers on news outlets sometimes abrubtly cut off their subjects, even though nowadays video storage is abundant and editing is relatively easy? I mean you’d think they can just let their guests finish their sentence and edit the interview down to whatever time they want to spend on it right?
I was watching [this interview with Naomi Klein](https://youtu.be/NDWrHd-izFg?si=Yi4hTx9ikgocQLhv) about her book. It was quite long about 40 minutes but at the end she is still abruptly cut off mid-sentence with a quick “okay we have to leave it there”
I mean couldn’t the interviewer at some point just say some house-keeping stuff like “okay please make your closing remarks now”, and then edit out those house-keeping parts in post, and cut the interview down to whatever time length they want to allot to it?
You could say it was because it’s a smaller media company and they don’t have as many editors on staff. However I’ve seen it happen on numerous bigger outlets as well, MSNBC, CNN and other news outlets.
In: Technology
It all boils down to time constraints.
Scrubbing through the interview you linked, it appears to be a live news/current events show, in which case they have a time slot that they need to fill, and in this instance they used a pre-taped introduction piece along with a live interview. The show had a defined end point, and if the interview extends to that point the host will need to cut the interviewee off.
Even if a show is pre-taped they usually don’t have an unlimited amount of time because:
1. Many networks will often have multiple shows sharing studio space and crew. So even if you have all the time in the world to edit a piece, you don’t have unlimited time in a studio.
2. Most news/current events programs are filming and editing content in the span of hours, not days. In the news world you need to be fast and accurate. Sometimes polish comes at the expense of those two criteria. You can’t always sit on a story for two or three days to perfect an edit. Everyone else has already beaten you to the story.
Finally, there are often constraints on the interviewee’s time. In my younger years I worked in marketing and PR for a big film studio. When we were promoting a new film we would have a press junket, where we would invite dozens (sometime hundreds) of newspapers, websites and TV networks to the studio or a hotel to interview the film’s stars. But when you have dozens of outlets to get through in a short span everyone is limited to 5-10 minutes. There were people like me in every room that were giving the interviewers warnings to wrap things up because we had a schedule to maintain. These types of things typically are edited out in post, but sometimes they make a segment seem to end abruptly.
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