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Please take a moment to watch this "exclusive" report (above) from WGCL-TV in Atlanta. It shows that the employees of a Denny in DeKalb County become very hostile and even a little violent towards a reporter and a videographer who enter the restaurant to record videos and audio recordings. The comments I read on social media mostly provoked or mocked the workers. I think this video says a lot more about the reporter and TV news than about Denny's staff.
Let me clarify that I do not apologize for the bad behavior of employees. It is quite possible that these workers paid the price for their actions and learned an important lesson on how to act to represent a company or even themselves. It would be nice if this TV channel also learned some lessons.
What you saw in the story of journalist Adam Murphy is not journalism. It was theater. Walking into a restaurant room with a camera running and confronting the hostess and staff waiting for a failed health inspection is a huge waste of time. My impression of watching this story and the raw video (displayed at the bottom of the story of WGCL-TV) is that this ambush was the journalist's first resort to attempt to get an interview, whereas it was not the only way to get an interview. it should have been the last (or not at all, considering that this story is inconsequential). What you saw is a person on the street walking in the middle of one of Murphy's actual shots because she wanted to talk to her at the last minute about her business relationship with the director of information or the director General of WGCL-TV.
If you attended one of my presentations, you probably heard me talking about ambush interviews led by TV reporters. And I wrote about them a few times on STATter911. I think it's a tool that should only be used when it's the only way to get an interview on a meaningful story.
The job of good journalism is to inform. To light up. To help the public understand the world around them. To provide viewers, listeners and readers with knowledge that can help them make important decisions in their daily lives. None of this has happened here. WGCL-TV did not tell us anything we did not know already. The journalist did not reveal facts that were not already in the Ministry of Health documents. It was barely worthy of the "exclusive" label.
All this report has shown is that people do not like to have a camera in their face. During my television career, many people – including politicians, firefighters, police and EMS – reacted the same way when we were shooting a video outside on a public street. without reaching out to someone. I'm sure you could easily organize such confrontations every day by chasing people with a camera at a busy intersection and calling these "exclusive" works. In fact, there are already people doing something similar. You may have heard the term "first amendment audit". These are citizen videos that incite law enforcement (and sometimes, firefighters, EMS and other state agents) to confront each other. They do this by pointing the cameras at them and walking in public areas of government buildings. That's basically what you've seen here, except that you can not wrap this obnoxious display in a kind of much larger one like defending the First Amendment.
These Denny employees, or perhaps now former employees, should have been better trained to deal with this situation, especially given the number of times Denny's made one of these headlines. The people who work at WGCL-TV, the tenth TV market in the country, do not even have that excuse. They should know better. They should report news and not create a confrontation that turns their newspapers into a less entertaining version of The Jerry Springer Show.
NOTE: In the report of WGCL-TV, so that he can not be identified, they have blurred the face of the child who was with a woman who gives the impression of being a Denny worker outside the hours of job. When the station broadcast the raw video, no such effort has been made and you clearly see the child.
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