Breathe
By Marilú Acosta
Apuntador ( Spanish), souffleur (French and German), prompter (English), suggeritore (Italian) are words that define the same person and also express the characteristics of each language. The prompter is someone who prompts. Souffleur is someone who blows. Prompter is one who appears and suggeritore suggests. All these words describe the people who in the theater were placed under the stage covered by a kind of shell so that the audience could not see them and their voice could only be heard by the actors, this in the European theater from the sixteenth century. The word theater comes from the Greek θέατρον(theatron) which means place to see. In Greece there are architectural remains, the amphitheaters, dating back more than 3 thousand years and theatrical texts preserved from more than 2,500 years ago. Undoubtedly there were people who helped the protagonist to say his lines since then, and we are talking about a time when mankind had few writing instruments that were repositories of knowledge, so memory was a very valuable resource.
Commercial television began airing in the United States in 1947; the following year the teleprompter was born, when stage actor Fred Barton Jr. ventured into television. Although both theater and television were live, the difference between the two was the number of new lines that had to be learned daily, so Fred devised a prompter for television. Fred goes to Irving B. Kahn (USA, 1917 - 1994), vice president of 20th Century Fox Studios for help and introduces him to Hubert Schlafly (USA, 1919 - 2011), an electrical engineer, who creates the first teleprompter from Fred's idea and patents it in 1949. With half of a suitcase he covered the mechanisms that unfolded the paper where the lines Fred had to say were. The person in charge of turning the paper was a stagehand, a function also theatrical, stagehands are those who move the scenery for each scene of the theater. On December 4, 1950, the soap opera "The First Five Hundred Years" used the teleprompter for the first time during a live episode. Since it was a fairly simple mechanism, all productions began to adapt it and it was the producer of "I Love Lucy", Jess Oppenheimer (USA, 1913 - 1988), who patented the first teleprompter that used mirrors and glass to project the text directly onto the camera lens. The benefit for actors and presenters was enormous, in addition to the fact that television, as a communication channel, became intimate and powerful. Actresses, actors, and newscasters could speak directly to the audience, without having to memorize daily lines of fiction or relevant information.
Although it was created from the theater and for television, the field truly revolutionized by the teleprompter was politics. In the 1952 presidential campaign, between the Republican National Convention and the Democratic caucus, 47 of the 58 major speeches relied on the teleprompter. Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (USA, 1890 - 1969) was the first to put the word teleprompter on everyone's lips, for the campaign speech he gave in Indianapolis on September 9, 1952, being described by the New York Times as the speech that was read on a teleprompter. In 1954, President Eisenhower's (34th President of the United States of America, January 1953-January 1961) report to Congress was the first State of the Union Address to be read on a teleprompter.
More than seventy years later, the teleprompter returns to be a political scandal now in Mexico, in the 2024 presidential campaign, which is interesting for several reasons. First, because it perfectly reflects the way to simplify any situation to make it an easy criticism to repeat and impossible to deny. Second, because it is a situation that we encounter every day in the elementary school playground and it is of the type "uuuyyy se le vieron los calzones" or "uuyyy trae torta de huevo con chorizo" and so on. Third, bullies (who make point 1 and 2) are extremely immature, insecure and aggressive people because they feel incapable of resolving the situation in which they find themselves by any other means. Fourth, if this is the only thing they can criticize, then they have no capacity to respond, much less to make proposals. Fifth, they are privileging memory over the reading (and previous writing) of a text, as if repeating (the same lies) had some kind of merit. And here I open a parenthesis, I have observed (this is my personal observation), that people with good memory and who are bullies, especially for those of us who can read and write, have a learning and literacy problem, they have a dyslexia that forces them to learn things by heart without being able to read and understand them. So the sixth point may be the most obvious and simplest, but at the same time it is the most surprising and worrying. Those people who point out the use of the teleprompter as a defect, almost as a disability, are hurt children that the educational system was bad for them, since no one focused on generating reading and writing tools for them, they are adults who have had to rely on their memory (repeating the same lies), because they do not have the ability to write a speech and read it later. As the (international) results of the PISA test showed us, the world lacks reading skills. And as Eisenhower surely read on a teleprompter, during a breakfast in Denver on September 10, 1955, "some politicians of yesteryear said that bad public servants are elected by good voters who didn't go to vote." In 2024, the difference is not the teleprompter of goodMalestar, it is how many good voters we will exercise our freedom and right to elect the next president of Mexico and the recovery of a country plundered by those who have destroyed the value of life, truth and freedom.
And you, do you have your voting card in order?
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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