I first came to grips with the weird effects of a zoom lens on pack mentality back in the early nineties, when I wandered into the Emerald Isle Beach Music Festival with a camera on my shoulder and trouble on my mind. Not big trouble, mind you - just a young man’s desire to witness the legendary gathering firsthand. Boy, did I. Between the drunken Marines, shirtless rednecks, and bikini-clad beach bunnies; I got more than my fill of images - most not suitable for the Six o Clock news. After skirting the crowd for a bit (and turning down countless offers of alcohol and other enticements), I foolishly strolled up to the lip of the stage, where North Carolina’s most popular beach music band was laying down the finest in watered-down Motown, all to the enjoyment of a sold-out, sunburned thoroughly sloshed crowd.A bit intoxicated myself from all the attention my lens brought, I climbed onstage and recorded close-ups of the band. When the station logo on my camera flashed in the sun, the throng of badly dancing revelers cheered at the arrival of their local news dude. Hunkering down by the stage’s edge, I panned from the performers in matching pantsuits to the crowd in assorted cut-offs and halter-tops. Everywhere I pointed the camera, cheers rang out, causing me to swell with pride at the power of my chosen weapon. With thousands of raucous partygoers clamoring for my lens’ attention, I almost felt like a rock star myself, though on stage with the Kings of Southernized White Boy Doo-Wop. Either way, I tried to look casual behind the viewfinder as my senses overloaded with swirling vistas of the adoring masses.
That’s when the beer bombs started. One at first, then a second and a third - plastic cups half-full of keg rot landed all around me at first, before a fourth sudsy projectile found its target - my head. The audience squealed with delight upon the first solid splashdown, and to a man, each rhythm-deprived imbiber launched his own salvo of Budweiser and backwash. I’d like to be able to say I dodged each and every cup, then grabbed the microphone and led the band through a scorching rendition of ’Peace Frog’, but it wasn’t meant to be. No, I merely shielded my camera as best I could while incoming alcohol reigned down from above. With every soaking, the crowd responded with glee, bringing to mind visions of Christian Cameramen bring ripped to shreds by lions as a coliseum of the Great Unwashed roared their approval. Eventually, I managed to escape stage left, but not before my station golf shirt, overgrown mullet and personal dignity were soaked in hops, barley and embarrassment. Slinking past a giggling gaggle of Budweiser Girls, I retreated to my news unit with a new appreciation safe for safe distances from alcohol-engorged audiences.
It’s a rule I would strictly adhere to until a few years later, when a new camera and too much testosterone placed me on top of an ice machine during a drunken Halloween brawl, where the crowd soon decided to turn on me once again.
But that’s a story for another time...
It all started when some thug in East Greensboro stole a Mitsubishi from a convenience store parking lot. The owner of the car had left it idling while she went inside to pay for gas. When she realized it was gone, all she could think about was her two year old son in the backseat. As she began to rightfully freak out, the Spot News Circus began. City police turned out in droves, their scanners percolated and overflowed with tantalizing details and assignment editors started to hyperventilate. Before long, I was behind the wheel of a wheezed-out Live truck, passing traffic and cursing under my breath as my reporter for the day scribbled details of the carjack turned kidnapping.
It was all over by the time we arrived. Cops had spotted the stolen car and chased it through less than stellar neighborhoods. After a respectable pursuit, the car thief crashed his purloined vehicle into a passing SUV, causing quite the dust-up off Market street. In the immediate moments following impact, the bad guy somehow managed to escape on foot, leaving the unharmed toddler safe in his car seat. Classy! But though the action was over, my job had just begun. Parking my logo’d stagecoach near the crunched up Mitsubishi, I raised the mast and began processing tape my fellow staffers had shot on scene. My photog brethren had done their jobs well. Shots of the wrecked car, search dogs, and an interview with a much-relieved mother told me I’d have plenty of images to tell the story. Good thing, since every newscast producer I knew was now clamoring for a piece of the action. As each individual show-stacker rang my cell phone, I leaned in to the editor and mused about the news.
When I was new to the business, there was nothing I enjoyed more than breaking news. But after years of covering murders, drive-bys and armed robberies, I found myself monumentally bored with televising the daily carnage. So I began to specialize in features. You know - those inconsequential stories that wrap up the newscast, the ones that give the anchor team something to chortle about as the houselights fade. Call them frivolous, but were it not for the warm and fuzzy feature piece, I would have found another way to make a living a long time ago. It’s not something I think about a lot, until I’m stuck on the roadside, getting dizzy off Live Truck fumes and wondering how normal people spend their workday.
But there wasn’t alot of time for critical thinking. I had far too much tape to cut. Between our many Live(!) shots, I sliced and diced the footage into every form and shape possible. Full blown reports, quickly-paced summaries and a bevy of teases poured forth from my fingertips. Before I knew it, I’d helped process this fleeting crisis into a daylong newsroom commodity. In the big picture, a twenty minute kidnap joyride doesn’t really amount to much, but for a TV station in the thralls of a Ratings period, it is televised gold. Given just a nugget of on-air emotion from the relieved mother holding her son, we stretched it across a full day of news programming, spicing up our many newscast with the tersely worded tale of “A Mother’s Worst Nightmare“! Okay, maybe we didn’t dust off that old cliché (we’re saving it for the next school bus wreck), but we did showcase the drama in a way that only TV can - in full living color with sound, immediacy and a few bromides to boot.
I'm STILL trying to figure out how I feel exactly about the 
Okay, THAT'S funny. Look, I'm all for stinging social satire and I'll give this group props for highlighting the electronic media's fascination with the fast and easy bleed, but I'd feel a whole lot better about these clowns if I better understood their agenda. Surely they don't think interrupting live shots with silly masks is going to change anything? If they're a bunch of drunken frat pukes, I say more power to them, If they're serious media critics, I gotta question their tactics (and their wardrobe choices.)
Of course that's the midnight analyst in me talking. The weathered photog in me says 'screw their motive, get 'em out of my shot!" I know more than a 
I suffer the weirdest sensations sometimes; episodes that make me wonder what this job is doing to my brain. I'll be out and about somewhere, not thinking about TV News at all, when a strangely familiar face appears in the crowd. I'm never sure of their name or profession, But I'm suddenly certain I've framed their countenance in a talking head shot sometime in the past...
Meet 