Reply #148: The TV audience and the people in the room got the amplified feed

[karynnj]

Dean was speaking into a microphone. The difference was that in the crowd, they heard the others standing next to them better than the TV audience did. This is because the audience was not amphlified at all -

It seems that the TV got a directfeed from Dean's mike. (This would have been set up by the Dean people and it makes sense as they would want what Dean said to be sent to any remote speakers in the room.) But, there was some crowd noise when he was speaking - as it too was picked up by Dean's mike. So, that was an accurate account of what was heard if you were standing where the mike was - ie where Dean was. Now, I did read long ago accounts like this - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/26/politics/main596021.shtml - that made the point that if you were in the crowd, you heard the people around you far more than Dean did.

But, I assume what the media did is what they always do - because the point is to catch what the speaker says (or for that matter consider that when Paul McCartney gets everyone to sing - you still, thank God, hear mainly him. In fact, compare the relative speaker/crowd noise in the dean scream (one of many links - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5FzCeV0ZFc ) to the speaker to crowd noise on this tape of from Kerry in 2008 - I was there and I could tell you the crowd was incredibly excited as it became clear that Obama had won. But, the audio here has a similar speaker to crowd ratio - http://www.johnkerry.com/multimedia/entry/entire_election_night_remarks/ I can tell you, standing there, I heard far more crowd noise and it was harder to hear Kerry (though he was still audible)

What I think was a problem was that it was played thousands of times. You might want to think of who this constant playing of Dean's line took news time away from. Remember 2008? The discussion was all the surprise of Obama winning. Kerry's win was actually more of a surprise to most of those following the media as he had largely been ignored.