“Filming in the lab” is the recent theme at PhD comics, and this one grabs the essence. (Or you can start at the beginning, if you’re one of the type that needs to do that.)

I’ve been filmed in the lab and interviewed on TV once, and I’ve observed my colleagues being filmed and interviewed. There’s a pattern to it. They sit you down in front of one of your impressive-looking pieces of lab apparatus and ask questions for a while. For every 15 minutes of interview, approximately 5 seconds will make it to air time in the final story (my data point, at least). Next, they will want some “action” shots of you, which for an atomic physics/optics lab usually means adjusting some mirrors or twiddling a knob on a piece of electronics and looking at an oscilloscope with a serious expression on your face. If there are two of you in the shot, one of you will need to be pointing at the oscilloscope, as if to say, “Here is where the WOW signal would be, if we had a signal. But we don’t, because we can’t run our experiment with these floodlights on.” Obviously “action shot” here does not the mean same thing as in an episode of some detective series — this is no Magnum, Principle Investigator. A third component that is sometimes used is of one of the interviewee walking down a corridor or sidewalk, so that the reporter can do a voice-over. Alternately they will just get shots of the equipment, especially if it whirs and moves about, for that segment.

Then they mash it all together and if you’re lucky they won’t have gotten the science horribly wrong.