Is there a name for this?

[Paul Cascio]

I'm watching the news and the anchor appears to be asking questions of someone in a remote location who appears on the monitor behind the anchor. It seems that the responses may have been pre-recorded and the anchor had a script with the questions.

Seems like this could be a great PR tool and I'm considering producing a few of these. But, are these types of interview packages common place in television? Is it an acceptable technique in TV news?
Does it have a name?

[Chris Hurd]

Apparently it's acceptable enough that it's used on major national market shows such as the NBC Today Show and others. I don't know what the industry calls it, but I refer to it as a Dinterview, as in, didn't really interview.

[Calvin Bellows]

When I worked at our local TV station we called it a Fake Live.

[Bill Ward]

There are a couple flavors of that: the prerecorded "live to tape" segment where they use the same set and anchor (but at an earlier time), do the segment as if it were live, record it in its entirety, and then play it back later as a single segment.

then there is the "wire and fire" on set interview, done in a pseudo-live manner, but cut down to make a separate segment. "...We talked earlier with..." kind of thing.

Neither one of these, in a news environment, however should ever be referred to as "live" on the air.

Because it isn't.

From a news room standpoint, I'd be a bit concerned about buying preproduced "PR" kinds of video packages masquerading as actual news. but then, I've been out of news for a long time, and who knows to what pandering depths they've sunk?

[Battle Vaughan]

In journalism school I learned the name, it's "unethical."

[Trevor Dennis]

Living in New Zealand we have a lot of situations where the person at the other end is on the other side of the world and the delays can be pretty irritating. Our guy in America - Jack Tame at the moment - was reporting from the Oscars last week, and at the end of his report, the local anchor-man said "Thank you Jack" while Jack nodded as if he could actually here him LOL. Unfortunately there was a slightly confused look on Jack's face, so he should probably avoid getting into serious games of poker.

People are so media savvy nowadays, and are fully aware of things like satellite time delays, so it would be much better to make that segment plainly off-line and announce it accordingly. Same thing with cutaways to inane 'noddies'. I'd just love to see such a cutaway to the location guy with an obvious continuity blunder.

[Shaun Roemich]

+1 for Fake Live

We used to handle these with a "Double Ender Kit" whereby we would use a mobile cellular (like an old school CAR phone) in an armour case so the talent in studio WOULD be talking to the interviewee, albeit the piece would not AIR live, but "Live to Tape" and aired later.

Battle: It's only unethical if it is PORTRAYED as Live To Air. As far as I know, we never did that at the National Public Broadcaster while I was there...

[Calvin Bellows]

You can tell if its a fake live if they don't say we are going live to or there is a live bug. The anchor will just say we are going now to johnny at the scene or something like that.