Reason for the random blackouts on WWE Smackdown
As seen during The Rock’s segment on the last night’s edition of WWE Smackdown, there were numerous moments where the screen went black for several seconds. In regards to why this happened, Mike Johnson of PWInsider.com noted the following…
“For those of you wondering about why there have been random blackouts on tonight’s Smackdown broadcast on FOX, we are told that a fan has a ‘DIE ROCKY DIE’ sign that the network is censoring.”
There were also moments were the audio was muted due to profane chants from the fans.
IM JUST TRYING TO WATCH SMACKDOWN WHY DO THEY KEEP BLACKING OUT THE SCREEN #SmackDown pic.twitter.com/Rtr2pEDsJW
— jesse (@solsrvca) March 2, 2024
On Elimination Chamber they were muting the audio on the holy sh-t chants and cut the feed when Dominic flipped off the ref. WWE is lame with the censorship
Without even getting into the censorship, it’s just bad production. Regarding the sign, maybe, I don’t know, don’t cut to the one camera that has it in the shot instead of blacking everything out? Also, it’s 2024 and sound technology is amazing when you have the budget WWE does. There really ought to be a way to mute the mics picking up the crowd noise without also cutting the commentators. I mean, I’m not a professional audio/visual engineer or TV producer, but surely they’ve been at this long enough that they can figure out workarounds that aren’t so jarring (and so obvious as to what they’re doing, which only calls attention to the thing they’re trying to cover up) to their audience.