Former host and producer of Candid Camera Peter Funt mourned the death of “man on the street” style reporting, arguing that reporters today “really don’t have to bother with the general public.”
“When I was a rookie at ABC News decades ago, our coverage of big stories—from war to impeachment to the World Series—always included plenty of ‘man on the street,’ or MOS,” he wrote in a Sunday opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Man on the Street Has Died.” “As soon as important news broke, a pack of reporters from TV, radio and print dashed to New York’s iconic crossroads, Times Square or Grand Central Terminal, to learn what “average” folks were thinking.”
While “MOS was never scientific,” Funt said the style of reporting consisted “of quick sound bites from people given little time to think before blurting opinions” that were “almost always edited to create balance.”
“The process was quaint and sometimes misleading, but it did serve as a reminder that not all issues are black or white,” he wrote. “The man on the street as we knew him is dead. He may reappear occasionally after natural disasters or in political battleground states. Most MOS coverage, however, has been replaced by a plethora of faceless polls—and even polling averages—along with tallies of likes, tweets and Google searches.”
As an example, Funt pointed to a USA Today report following a July Democratic debate in which the publication declared Rep. Tulsi Gabbard the “clear” winner because Google searches for the 2020 candidate skyrocketed after the event. He also noted a New York Times story on who won the December Democratic debate, which consisted “almost entirely of tweets.”
“Who are these googling masses? Where do they live? How old are they? Do they look you in the eye when they speak?” he wondered. “These metrics have a scientific sheen, but they’re no replacement for MOS. Neither are the other digital facsimiles … In some ways reprinting tweets is more journalistically careless than MOS ever was.”
Funt acknowledged that “the power of Twitter shouldn’t be underestimated” but noted that “only 22% of American adults use Twitter, and it has a tendency toward groupthink.” Funt said the only place MOS “remains a staple is in local news coverage.”
“In the media lexicon, MOS has another meaning in addition to ‘man on the street’: ‘mit out sound.’ Mit is German for ‘with’ and this use of MOS refers to footage that is silent. You might say what remains of MOS in the digital age is now mostly MOS,” he concluded. “The more tools we develop to give individuals a voice, the less we care about what they have to say.”
In addition to producing and hosting Candid Camera, which his father, Allen Funt, created in 1948 and that ended in 2014, Funt, 72, also worked for Denver radio station KHOW, the ABC Radio Network, the New York Times, and various other media organizations.
