"Get Out Of My Face!"

It is a story that is done in so many markets….

The health department gives a local restaurant a bad grade and then a TV station shows up a few days later with the camera running.

Often times, the TV station tags the story and an “investigation” but it is really just TV news porn.

WGCL (Atlanta) Reporter Adam Murphy and Photographer Dmitri Lotovski, showed up unannounced at a Denny’s restaurant that recently got a bad grade by the health department.

Here is a portion of the raw video of the news crew walking into the Denny’s.

The station led their newscast with this story.

First off, this is not an investigative story. If anyone did any investigating it was the health department.

Second, the station knew that this was not going to go well, otherwise, why walk into the business with the camera rolling?

We would argue that this was exactly the reaction that WGCL wanted. Does putting the camera in the faces of low payed employees really prove anything?

If you really wanted to address the problem, you would have talked to Denny’s corporate. The station did that, but only after they went into this business with the camera rolling.

It is likely that these employees that acted badly on camera will be fired.

So, in other words, the station got a number of people that are working low paying jobs unemployed, by going in with the camera rolling and asking them questions that they were not qualified to answer.

And that’s your lead story?

This was a straight up ambush of some minimum wage employees that work at Denny’s. It might have been “good TV” but what did it really do for the viewers? You can say, it informed them of a local restaurant that might have been unsafe to eat.

True, but you could have just reported that fact without all the drama and without walking into the business with the camera rolling to try and stir up a reaction.

This was TV news porn and nothing more. The people that worked in the Denny’s behaved badly, but I would argue that the station did not come out looking too good either.

This confrontation might be good for ratings and clicks, but what else did it really show the viewers?

#BeBetter

H/T WGCL

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