Thanks, ABC! — network broadcast fake audience reaction shots during 'live' Oscar telecast

ABC didn't tell its viewers that realistic-looking
audience reaction shots to Seth MacFarlane's
We Saw Your Boobs Oscar number were
prerecorded and inserted into the broadcast.

Oscars-related: Argo pushback

Evidently ABC's standards and practices don't prohibit taking viewer deception into brave new worlds.
     By now, audiences are used to CGI images of yardage markers and superimposed sideline billboards in football games as well as altered news footage in late night comedy sketches. Fine.
     But are audiences really ready for ABC's new practice of transmitting phony prerecorded audience reactions inserted into a "live" broadcast, as it did last Sunday night during its Oscar telecast from Los Angeles' Dolby Theater?
     In order to juice up the sexual harassment offensiveness of the Seth McFarlane / L.A. Gay Men's Chorus number, We Saw Your Boobs, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences inserted prerecorded footage of two supposedly appalled actresses, Charlize Theron and Naomi Watts, as reaction shots. ABC then sent the fakery around the world to a billion people.

Naomi Watts (l) and Charlize Theron
as they actually looked at Sunday's
Oscar awards show.

     When, earlier this month, Maureen Dowd focused her New York Times column, The Oscar for Best Fabrication, on deliberately-doctored Hollywood history in Argo, Zero Dark 30, and Lincoln, we wonder if even she guessed how far out on that limb the film community — and the ABC television network, owned by Disney — is willing to go.