The Media Are Lying to You
-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on March 25, 2026
When I was running the KOMU-TV newsroom, one of my goals was to be sure the experience students had was as close as possible to what they would get in their first full-time jobs. We aired newscasts 365 days a year, using all the tools found in bigger markets to give students the same experiences they would have working in their future jobs. Our six newscasts a day had gorgeous graphics, sophisticated software and lots of live shots. The one thing we didn’t have in our newscasts—so-called “look lives.”
If you’re not in the TV news game and don’t know what a “look live” is, I can guarantee you’ve seen them—probably multiple times in the last day or so. The term refers to the practice in which a reporter records a clip in the field in the style of a live shot, relaying information as she would if she were live. These recorded clips are then played in the newscast with the anchors usually pitching to the reporter in the same way they would if she were actually live. In some cases, the reporter even records acknowledgment of getting an anchor pitch, saying something like “Thanks, Jim.”
The philosophy behind the look live is, I suppose, to extend the value—questionable as it is—attached to going live, using the technique for stories that are no longer viable as live reports. For instance, if you have five backpacks for going live, you can make it appear that there are six live shots in a newscast if one of them is a look live. Or it could be considered an easy way for a reporter to leave a capsule summary of her report without assembling an entirely new story. She can literally make it one of her last tasks of the day before wrapping things up. While those could be seen as good reasons to use look lives, they ignore the fatal issue with them. Look lives are lies we tell the audience every time we air them. In fact, I’m just going to call them “look lies.”
A look lie is a lie because it is constructed to appear to the audience that it is live.
The vast majority of stations use the practice mentioned above, having anchors “pitch” to the reporter in the look lie and having the reporter “acknowledge” the anchor(s) who just pitched to her. Many look lies end with the reporter pitching back to the anchors and the anchors thanking her for the report. Using this language to introduce and close look lies means we are lying to audience members about what they are watching. We are implying that the report is live when it is not.
Now, many of you reading this could be saying, “Yes, but it’s a little white lie. Who are we hurting with it?” We’re hurting ourselves, that’s who. Public trust in media is at an all-time low. Gallup (admittedly an organization with its own trust issues) has been measuring this number for 54 years. Our trust peaked with 72 percent of Americans having a “great deal or fair amount of trust” in 1976 (we can thank journalists bringing down a crooked president two years earlier for that number) and it has plummeted ever since. We’re now at 28 percent giving us a great deal or fair amount of trust, leaving us under water with 36 percent giving us no trust at all. Admittedly, it’s the perception of dishonesty rather than the reality of it that’s driving most of that decline. But why give our supporters a reason to doubt the rest of what we report—or hand our critics another bullet to fire at us? I can’t support journalists lying for any reason—but what a stupid reason for which to be caught lying when the way to avoid it and still get all the benefits is so simple.
I said at the top of this piece that we didn’t do look lies under my watch at KOMU-TV.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t have reporters file recorded reports from the field to air as a complete segment. We just didn’t try to make them look live. Our anchors would clearly say the report was filed or recorded earlier and did not pitch to the reporter as if she could hear them. The reporter did not acknowledge the anchors at the top of the piece as if they could hear her either. And she would use a standard package close at the end, something along the lines of “Jane Reporter, KOMU 8 News, Columbia.” Using this type of report gave us all the benefits of a look lie, but without the lying.
The value of broadcasting news live, whether it be in a report from the field or the entire newscast itself, has become a point of contention lately—one that I’ll write about soon. But I don’t think there’s ever been a doubt that pretending to be live when we are not is a despicable practice. And it’s so easy to correct. Anyone reading this who’s running a newsroom now can end the practice today. Be honest with the audience when a segment is pre-recorded. I guarantee you the audience will not care. It wants the information your reporter is presenting from the field. Thinking she is live when she is not doesn’t add a thing to the that information. It only subtracts from our reputation when the audience realizes it’s a lie.