Nifong Who? Paris Has a Rival

I spent the day 90 some odd miles out of the confines of my designated home TV market covering the begining of the Mike Nifong ethics hearings in Raleigh NC.



"Nifong who?" you ask? Mike Nifong is the District Attorney (the head prosecutor for the state in a given district) in Durham, NC who was all gabby about the details of the alleged rape of a stripper at a party held at the home of some Duke Lacrosse Players.



Now that the State Attorney General has declared all the Duke Lacrosse players innocent of the allegations the state bar wants to determine if the oft labeled rouge prosecutor breeched prosecutorial ethics in his handling of the Duke Lacrosse Stripper Rape Case.



Today was the first day of the hearing and, as one old lady walking down the street said so plainly, "Paris has some competition!"



No less than 9 mobile news studios, a mix of Satellite trucks microwave trucks, from local, regional and national news outlets lined Fayetteville Street around the corner from the NC Court of Appeals building where the hearing is being held.



Short of the photos of the news trucks and crews this hearing is pretty dry and bland. It's certainly no 'Boston Legal' or 'Law and Order'.



And since Court TV is manning the cameras and providing the pool feed most of our work was done outside, chasing down Nifong and company as they made there way into court. And that was over in a matter of minutes just after 9am.



(I can be seen in the background video on several of the onlinve versions of the media scrum walkdowns.)

CBS Evening News Video HERE



The rest of the day I gathered beauty shots and watched these guys scale the Wachovia tower we were parked in front of.



Long story short....Live at Noon, 5 and 6....rinse and repeat. We may or may not be back tommorrow. Probably depends on what Dale Junior says 'cause here in NASCAR counrty Dale Jr. trumps Nifong and Paris.

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