I’ve always made sure that all audio is in the “middle” of stereo sound. If the reporter’s on the left channel, then I make sure that his audio is centered, etc.
From my experience at a PBS affiliate, there have been times when voice tracks haven’t been centered, and were either hard left or right. This caused the sound to be very disorienting, or even hard to hear. The audio engineer had to flip the live channel on the audio board to mono in order to correct the issue, which centered everything.
