Here's my report on clo*(*($@#$%^@#

I was on the road again today but I was able to listen to a great segment on NPR's Marketplace on the shortage of closed-captioners and the problems they encounter. I tried to find the script on the Marketplace website but there was none. Not only that but the segment wasn't mentioned in the brief description of today's program. [This post has been updated. Please see the update at the end of the post.]

If you'd like to listen to it, you can head to the Marketplace website and select the show for March 30, 2005. Head about 22 minutes and 30 seconds into the 28 and half minute show and the segment begins.

If you're deaf or hard of hearing, those instructions won't help you a bit. So considering the subject concerns you and Marketplace didn't furnish a transcript, here's a transcript of the show I transcribed from the website audio link:

Marketplace Anchor DAVID BROWN: "Starting next year virtually all television programs will have to be closed captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. That's job security for hundreds of trained stenographers who do the work. The problem is there aren't enough of them to meet demand. Cathy Duchamp reports now from Seattle."

Reporter DUCHAMP: "Cynthia Hill has a job situation most of us only dream about. She gets paid to watch tv in her pajamas from the comfort of her den."

HILL: "I'm typing my shorthand into my machine, it runs through my software on my laptop, it translates it into English and then puts that English caption up on the appropriate station's television screen."

(Audio tv news in background)

DUCHAMP: "This day she's captioning local tv news from Phoenix. The national average salary for a broadcast captioner is $60,000 a year but Hill says the fast talkers and long hours make for stressful work. On Sept. 11, 2001, for example, Hill started to caption at 4 in the morning ..."

HILL: "and I didn't stop until midnight that night. I captioned al-l-l-l day-y-y-y long-g-g-g. Not for the same station but you know everybody needed captions to tell everybody in the world what was going on and you know during times like that it's painfully obvious we don't have enough qualified people in our industry."

DUCHAMP: "It would take about 3,000 captioners to do the work required under the new federal law and right now there are only about 400 people trained for this particular type of stenography. To narrow the gap, Congress has boosted funding for broadcast caption training programs like this one at Green River Community College in Auburn, Wash."

(Audio in background, woman's voice intro and man reporting the news but his delivery is slower than normal.)

STUDENT KIM ROCHELLE: "At 160 words you can only miss 16 words in a 5 minute long test and that''s very difficult to do, it's really very difficult to do, especially when you're pushing and you just start trying (not sure if this is transcribed correctly ... "start trying"... took a WAG - wild ass guess - here) every single week."

DUCHAMP: "What Rochelle may not know is that many Closed Captioning companies don't require certification for employment. That's something you may have noticed when watching captions that are riddled with spelling errors or just plain gibberish. The National Association of the Deaf is lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to enforce quality standards. Meantime television stations are looking for ways to absorb the additional costs of closed captioning. One option, replace the stenographers with voice translation software. Student Kim Rochelle says the human brain is the best computer for now."

ROCHELLE: "Our brains can process better than 500 (again, not sure if this is transcribed correctly ... something "500"... took another WAG here) words a minute and can differentiate the meanings behind them and then get that information to your fingers. It's better than the computer trying to figure out the grammar that you are trying to say but it doesn't know, you know, the English language as well as we do. So I just think that it's going to take a long time for that technology to do what everyone thinks it's going to be able to do."

DUCHAMP: "In fact, a Michigan company that developed voice translation software for tv took it off the market because of slow sales. It hopes with the new rules to get a second shot next year. In Seattle, I'm Cathy Duchamp for Marketplace."

After transcribing that audio I knew exactly what that closed-captioner must feel. Admittedly I'm not a professional and don't have the correct equipment, but what a pain in the ass! And I have no idea if the names of the participants in the news segment are spelled correctly or not.

This is another dirty little secret of the broadcasting and movie industries. They've been pulling the wool over the eyes of the deaf and hard of hearing for quite awhile. I'm sure the broadcasters will readily admit, if confronted, that the captioning of the news is sometimes very, very wrong. But it's not something they broadcast loudly or often. One might say they don't readily air their dirty laundry.

In her report for Marketplace, Ms. Duchamp mentions captions riddled with spelling errors and gibberish. While not deaf, I watch tv and movies with the closed-captioning on all the time. It's clarifying sometimes when I miss an important word of dialogue because of a bad actor's even worse attempt at an accent. There have been times, notably on the local news programs, when the captioning has been entirely 180 degrees wrong, from a misattributed quote to the misidentification of a news source. The result is that the deaf and hard of hearing who depend on captioned news are sometimes getting the short end of the stick.

Often the fault is not in the captioner but in the final edit of the series, made-for-tv movie or video. The tv show "The Simpsons" has many such errors where the characters say one thing but the closed-captioning includes information that's altogether different. I suspect that's because it is an animated show. Changing the closed-captioning after putting in the audio track is probably very expensive.

The local station or editor may censor the audio of a character's dialogue but the caption contains the words nonetheless. Last summer's release of the DVD set of "Jonny Quest" is a classic case of this audio censorship. On several segments, the audio was edited for political correctness but the dialogue on the closed-captioning was left intact.

In the episode "Pursuit of the Po-Ho," about an Amazon Indian tribe that kidnaps "Dr. Quest," there is a scene where "Race Bannon" screams at the tribe to scare them, calling them "heathen monkeys." The scene in the cartoon remains but the voice of "Race Bannon' has been edited out. However, the closed-captioning was not edited.

In the episode entitled "Monster in the Monastery," Jonny Quest's nemesis is an Asian terrorist (disguised as a Yeti) attempting to destroy a Tibetan city. When the terrorist slips on oil and falls down the stairs in old Buddhist monastery, Jonny Quest is supposed to say "Uh-oh, here comes the Oriental Express!" This comment also was edited out of the dialogue on the DVD but not on the closed-captions.

(The silver lining here is that I found this out long ago, when the DVD was first released. The audio was not edited on the VHS of "Monsters in the Monastery" and I've been collecting copies from eBay for pennies. And one day, thanks to the puritans and the political correctness police at Hanna-Barbera, those videos will be worth much more than I paid for them. "Pursuit of the Po-Ho" never made it to VHS.)

Many DVDs don't even offer closed-captioning or subtitles, and that's even worse than having garbled words or incorrect dialogue. The deaf and hard of hearing are a market with money to spend, and why would any profit-oriented entrepreneur in their right mind eliminate a market before the DVD even hits the streets?

I think it's great that closed-captioning exists. Not only for the deaf, but also for everyone else. In fact, I'd bet it would help children learn to read sooner if they watched tv with closed captioning on and could associate the printed word with the spoken word. (Students in elementary education, speech and communication needing a graduate research project, have at it.) But it's obvious that captioning's not perfect and it's got a long way to go.

I acknowledge, though, the situation for the deaf and hard of hearing could be worse. There could be a publicly funded radio program that doesn't contain transcripts of its shows on its website, ensuring the deaf and hard of hearing have no access to timely information that concerns them. Some information, even if garbled, is better than none at all.

[Update 4/1/2005: I stand corrected, sort of. I have discovered there is a specific hyperlink on the Marketplace website to this particular story, and a transcript of the introduction by news anchor David Brown. To find this hyperlink, you have to go to the primary hyperlink for the day's show, and select the "View Show" hyperlink, which is there not to view the show, but to view a partial transcript and the order of the show. There is, however, no transcript for this particular report other than the introduction. The reporter's last name is "Duchamp," not "DuChand" as I originally posted and I have corrected my error in the original post.]

[Update 4/05/2005: Last week I e-mailed Marketplace a short missive of my thoughts on their report and the lack of a free transcript of the audio of that report. They called, asked me to record my comments. And today, they broadcast those comments nationwide. As you might expect, no transcript is available from Marketplace but there is from The 6th Estate.

A transcript of their introduction, my comments, and their reply follows:

Marketplace anchor DAVID BROWN: Last week we reported on new rules to require closed-captioning on all tv shows starting next year. Truck driver Mark McBride heard the story, pulled over, hopped on our website and sent us this e-mail.

NEWS4A2, blood-sucking journalist's alter-ego MARK MCBRIDE: This was a wonderful report, and I'm sure the deaf and hard of hearing would have loved to have the information contained in that report. But there are no transcripts on the web site anywhere. The only transcripts are available for a fee. I don't mind Marketplace making a few extra dollars, but this limits the access of its news and commentary to the hearing, imposing a penalty -- financial, timeliness and otherwise -- on the deaf and hard of hearing.

DAVID BROWN: Mr. McBride is right. There is an outside company that does Marketplace transcripts for a fee. We wish we could afford to offer a free transcription service. But on our side of the dial, we can't afford to give away much more than tote bags and occasionally a t-shirt.

Hint from NEWS4A2: This is that time of year that your local public radio station is asking for contributions. Maybe that's why Marketplace used my comment. It was timely. Who cares? Instead of donating to your local station, Marketplace could probably use the funds. As I later noted in a follow-up comment to a Marketplace production assistant and reporter:

From a business aspect, Marketplace is a great product. But as a radio broadcast, it's a product that reaches only the audience that can hear. Before the web, that was understandable. Now that we have the web available to us, it opens up so many more doors. Just as newspapers can offer video and audio through their web sites, radio news doesn't have to be just broadcast; it can be printed and published as well. That's why I sent in the comment. Open the doors to Marketplace even further. It just melds everything together into true multimedia. Anyone who doesn't manufacture a video product without adding subtitles/closed-captioning automatically starts out with a reduced customer base, as does anyone who offers an audio product which doesn't include printed transcripts available on the web.

If you need another good reason to donate to Marketplace ... instead of airing the letters section of Marketplace and my golden words, my local station -- WRKF FM 89.3 -- pitched for contributions. They'll probably use the collected funds to buy more billboard advertising, something public radio stations really need. 'Nuff said.]

[Update 4/11/2005: Reporter Cathy Duchamp checked in with The 6th Estate and passed along the following info:

I'm the reporter who did the story for Marketplace on closed captioning. My employer/local station KUOW in Seattle, provides transcripts of our local field-produced stories on our website. Below is a link I did to a longer local story on career opportunities in court reporting. The closed captioner shortage story I did for Marketplace emerged from this story. Since Marketplace edited, mixed, and, essentially, owns the story I did for them, I can't provide a transcript. But I hope this longer story gives you the info you need.

http://www.kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=8525

]

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I've updated my post "Treating animals better than humans" with PETA's response to my inquiry.

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Porn spam Easter egg of the day:

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language;
the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it

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Must be old school: John McCaslin of the Washington Times notes that some folk might question whether there's a class structure in the liberals of the diplomatic corps. You judge for yourself. Several diplomats signed a letter asking the Senate to reject President Bush's nomination of John Bolton as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among the signatories of the letter: Princeton N. Lyman, Monteagle Stearns and Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr. This makes me wonder, does the U.S. even have any diplomats named "Bob?"