Leave ’em be
As remnants of Hurricane Ida make their way back out to sea—and don’t let the door hit ya—reporters from around the country are doing what they do best, telling stories about the news. The news this past week was a hurricane.
The rivalry between newspaper reporters and television reporters goes back decades. Each medium comes with its own challenges, but we’ve never envied television reporters who have to do live shots. Lordy. At least we get to edit and re-edit and have another editor re-reedit. Imagine having to write this without being able to delete a word, sentence or whole column. On second thought, don’t imagine that.
Live can be funny. It can be surprising. It can be dangerous. We remember when
Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel was attacked on live TV back in 2014, and the broadcaster made the attacker virtually famous with a knee. (Jimmy Kimmel called Mr. Cantore “the Chuck Norris of meteorologists”.)
And you may have caught the video that went viral earlier this week as a man disrupted an NBC News reporter’s live shot and harassed him. The reporter’s name is Shaquille Brewster, and viewers saw the danger coming before he did.
A white pickup roared up into the shot behind the reporter, and a man got out and charged at Mr. Brewster. The reporter pivoted his shot away, professionally, to avoid giving the miscreant any airtime. But the man kept screaming and eventually got in the reporter’s face. So they threw video back to the anchor, and you could hear the attacker screaming in the background. Something about “report accurately.”
Our reporter was in Gulfport, Miss., covering a hurricane as it blew in. Did he misquote the hurricane?
“The man repeatedly yelled at Brewster and his TV crew—seemingly concerned about accuracy in the media— before Brewster’s segment with [Craig] Melvin was cut short,” NPR reports.
The man, whoever he is, might be charged with criminal counts. And authorities think they have an idea about who he may be, and if they’re right, he might face parole violations of some sort in Ohio.
If he wasn’t having a good day then, he might have a worse one when the police find him.
For those of you who haven’t been behind the scenes in television news, live reporting is a difficult task. Reporters have to keep a number of facts straight in their heads, ready to answer questions from a news anchor in a studio several miles away. And they might only have less than 60 seconds to tell their story, getting the most pertinent information out for viewers at home. There are certainly easier jobs.
Moral of the story: If you see a news reporter doing a live shot, standing with a microphone in front of a camera, leave ‘em be. They’re attacked more than you might think.
Many will recall the murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, a reporter and photographer for WDBJ in Roanoke, Va., who were shot and killed on Aug. 26, 2015, while doing a live television interview in Moneta, Va. They’re not the only reporters who have been attacked while trying to do their jobs. In the last year, during the protests that shook this nation, even this newspaper had a reporter who suffered serious injuries while covering the news.
Fortunately, Mr. Brewster and his colleagues are fine. After the interruption, he tweeted, “Appreciate the concern guys. The team and I are all good!”
One thing that might not have occurred to the attacker: His actions were caught on camera. Maybe don’t attack people with recording devices who can document everything. It’ll look crisp and clear in a courtroom—in high definition on a television screen.