A teleprompter worst moment for an introducer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When she was asked about the worst moment in her career, actress Abigail Breslin replied it happened back in 2009. She was just thirteen, and was supposed to introduce her idol Jane Goodall at an event in Washington D.C. Abigail described it in an article by Nina Metz in the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2021 titled My worst moment: Abigail Breslin and the time she mistakenly impersonated Jane Goodall.

 

Abigail read the introduction from a teleprompter. But she didn’t stop until coming to a passage about going to the rainforest in 1972. Then Abby (who is dyslexic) finally realized she had read almost half of Jane’s speech. Whoever prepared the teleprompter script forgot to annotate it to show where the introduction ended and the speech began. Abby was so mortified she ran offstage and cried in the bathroom. Luckily when she went to apologize to Goodall, Jane just laughed it off.

 

At her Knockout Presentations Blog on March 9, 2022 Diane DiResta has a post titled 10 Tips to speak with a teleprompter. The sixth says:

 

“You’ll know the end is coming because it will be color coded. Usually the script will be in white and the final message will be in yellow.”

 

The cartoon of a teleprompter was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

What tools wil public speakers be using a decade from now?

I’m not sure, but they may include smartglasses like the Google Glass shown above. At the very least it could be used as an almost invisible teleprompter. Smartglasses also could give you a presenter view of the slides or video so you don’t need to turn around to face the screen and ignore the audience. Back in January 2010 I blogged about other software that provided Visual feedback for vocal variety.

On March 30th the University of Rochester had a press release about how Wearable technology can help with public speaking. It described a real-time feedback system called Rhema for both volume and speaking rate. Details are in an article by Tanveer, Lin, and Hogue. The press release began by stating that speaking in public was the top fear for many people, with the implication that new technology would help. (A six-page article about teleprompters in the Saturday Evening Post for September 14, 1957 was titled “Sure Cure for Stage Fright”).

Maybe in a decade displays like descendants of Google Glass will seem normal. I still find them a bit creepy. That’s probably because I first saw similar devices worn by the nasty Borg on the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation back in 1989. Their first communication with us was:

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

The image of Google Glass came from Wikimedia Commons.

Republicans use teleprompters too

President Obama’s use of teleprompters has long been the subject of jokes, most recently by Paul Ryan, and even humorous photos. However, Republicans also keep them around to use (and have for 60 years), as can be seen above in the image I took from yesterday’s USA Today video of the brief opening to their convention in Tampa.

The spacing between those two 45-degree mirror plates is wide enough to keep them out of view when zooming in to just show a speaker standing behind the lectern. 

Rick Santorum’s Teleprompter Tantrum

Last week he complained childishly that the rules should be changed to favor spontaneity:

“See, I’ve always believed that when you run for president of the United States, it should be illegal to read off a teleprompter, because all you’re doing is reading someone else’s words to people.”

Teleprompters are older than Mr. Santorum. Their first political use was sixty years ago - by Herbert Hoover at the 1952 Republican Convention. (If you’d like to see how they once looked, search on Google Books for an article about “How a Teleprompter Works” in the July 1960 issue of Popular Science magazine on pages 104 and 105).

In the March 14th episode of his comedy satire TV show The Colbert Report (5 minutes from the beginning) Stephen Colbert took Santorum’s complaint to an absurd conclusion:

“Now, Rick Santorum is resonating with voters because of his authenticity. He always speaks off the cuff, which is why his sweaters don’t have sleeves. And Santorum believes authenticity should be legally mandated. [plays video clip of Santorum’s statement].

Yes, it should be illegal. Voters cannot trust candidates who have somebody else’s words in their mouths. That’s why no ventriloquist’s dummy has been nominated since the dark days of Charlie McCarthyism.

But we cannot, I believe we cannot, stop at teleprompters. I reject all pre-wrtitten words.That’s why I’m against reading books. I mean, books are a lie. When I read the words it makes thought sounds in my head like I’m thinking them.”  

Mr. Santorum would like us to return to a simpler time, but how far back would that be? I looked up what the first Catholic presidential nominee, Alfred E. Smith, had to say about public speaking in the really old days. Mr Smith was a former governor of New York who ran as a Democrat in the 1928 election. In a May 24, 1930 Saturday Evening Post article on "Spellbinding" he talked about unamplified speeches lit only by kerosene torches:

“...outdoor speaking in those days required a man to be in vigorous health and to have a good voice, or else he lasted only about five minutes on the platform, when the patience of the listening mob would be completely exhausted, and they usually started crying out for somebody else and kept up until they got him.

Nevertheless, it was a great training school for young men. It may have had its faults. It may have been crude, but it certainly was not without virtue. To my own knowledge, many young men who distinguished themselves in their later years began their early campaign speaking in the open air. The one great thing about it was that the young man starting out did not feel that he had to be an orator. There is quite a difference between coming out in front of the footlights and climbing upon the back of a truck. Maybe it is the possession of the knowledge that the truck affords a quicker get-away if you are not making a hit.”   

Mr. Smith lost the 1928 presidential election by a landslide - to the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover.

The crying baby image was adapted from an 1884 Puck magazine cover.

Raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads

On Tuesday evening I watched both President Obama’s State of the Union Address, and the Republican response by Representative Paul Ryan. Both speeches were well prepared and delivered. Ryan had the difficult job of following the President with a speech from the House Budget Committee room. 

What struck me even in the first minute of Paul Ryan’s speech was an unfortunate artifact of how he was televised. He was looking straight into the camera, probably at a teleprompter in front of the lens. The close-up view of him as a “talking head” emphasized his repeatedly raised eyebrows and furrowed forehead, as shown above. After two minutes I began concentrating more on his delivery than on his message, and even started counting the number of furrows. 

It reminded me of Kevin Trudeau, who lately does infomercials that peddle books about things that “they” don’t want you to know about (because they aren’t true). I don’t know how Kevin manages to keep his eyebrows raised that much (and that often). His messages and style have been parodied by Mad TV. Does anybody actually believe that Kevin traveled 5-million miles and interviewed over 5000 "real" doctors in order to write that Natural Cures book?

 

Bill O’Reilly of Fox News also raises his eyebrows a lot. However, he doesn’t keep them up for as long, so that habit is less noticeable.

Teleprompters and public speaking

I recently had a good laugh when I read the title of an article posted earlier this month. It claimed that Obama Made the Teleprompter Popular (Replaces Speech With Reading From a Mirror in Front of a Camera). It is wrong by about half a century. Actually Herbert Hoover began to make the teleprompter popular for public speaking – when he was the first politician to use one way back in 1952. Back then it was a trade name, TelePrompTer, not the later generic teleprompter. (Autocue is another trade name that became generic).

What is a speech (or conference) teleprompter? It is a gizmo that displays the manuscript of a speech as scrolling text on viewing screens. Usually there are two screens, one on either side of the speaker. Screens are light gray glass panels set at a 45-degree angle. They reflect an image (at eye level) from upward facing displays mounted on the floor. Current displays are unobtrusive, bright, flat-screen color lcd monitors. Before that they were CRT monitors in taller boxes. Originally the display was paper with a typed script scrolling between a pair of motorized rollers, (similar to a player piano).

You can see the screens (indicated by yellow arrows) when George Bush used a speech teleprompter to deliver his 2007 State of the Union Speech. By using a teleprompter, the speaker can look at his audience rather than repeatedly glancing down at his manuscript, and bobbing his head up and down, as shown on this Monty Python video. President Ronald Reagen used a teleprompter when he spoke to the House of Commons in 1983, and the British press dubbed it the “sincerity machine”.

What does the display look like to the speaker? They see their script (box with dashed yellow lines) superimposed on their view of the audience, as shown below in this over-the-shoulder shot of Sarah Palin speaking last year at the Republican National Convention. Look carefully at 1:43 in the video.















If you must use a teleprompter, then you need to practice with it. Reading from a script can lead to a monotonous, uniform, monotone delivery, as shown here by T.J. Walker. According to Joey Asher the remedy is to vary your speed and add feeling. Just pretend that you are reading a story book to your child.

A teleprompter user also can just replace the up-and-down head bobbing with a side-to-side motion due to alternating between the screens. The audience may wonder if the speaker is watching his very own ghostly tennis game. Jeanette and Roy Henderson mention this problem on page 184 of their book, There’s no such thing as public speaking (make any presentation or speech as persuasive as a one-on-one conversation). They suggest you concentrate on turning your whole body naturally, not just your head.

If you want to practice reading a script with a teleprompter, then you can just go to the CuePrompter web site, upload your script, and watch it scroll as you read. You don’t need to buy anything.

How did Herbert Hoover make the TelePrompTer popular? He used one when he gave the keynote speech at the 1952 Republican Convention in Chicago. The operator had told him that he would stop the manuscript when he began ad-libbing, and start it again when he resumed. Hoover misunderstood, and when the text did not begin scrolling again he said to the microphone (and audience): “Go ahead, TelePrompTer, go ahead.” Lots of reporters covering the convention asked about the device. They wrote articles, and then the company got free publicity leading to a public speaking business.

Teleprompters started out as a way of prompting actors on live television. A six-page article in the Saturday Evening Post for September 14, 1957 titled “Sure Cure for Stage Fright” discussed how they also were being used both by politicians, and 375 of the nation’s top 500 businesses.