Dear Relentless Lens,

One notes with a certain weary predictability that you have once again found yourself – or rather, an iteration of your ubiquitous presence – at the centre of a rather unedifying spectacle. Police, we are told, are investigating a hidden camera arrest, not on the street, mind you, nor in the murky depths of some clandestine meeting, but *at a local television station*. The very fount, one might imagine, of your incessant output. It’s a circular sort of absurdity, isn’t it? – a hidden camera, caught in the act, by what I can only assume was another, slightly less hidden, camera. Or perhaps a bemused janitor.

This latest kerfuffle – and yes, I use the term advisedly, having endured actual kerfuffles in places you wouldn’t send a pack mule – rather encapsulates the modern predicament. You, dear Lens, are everywhere. You peer from dashboards, from doorbells, from the spectacles perched precariously on the noses of — well, of *journalists*, ostensibly. There was a time, not so long ago, when a camera was a tool. A weighty, deliberate instrument deployed with purpose, often to illuminate. Now, you are simply *on*. Forever recording. Forever seeking that elusive ‘moment’ – a concept much beloved by the American networks, who appear to exist solely to capture the trivial and present it with the gravitas of a papal encyclical.

Indeed, your hunger for ‘content’ – that lamentable Americanism – seems to know no bounds. No unobserved moment, no uncurated utterance, no un-televised sigh is safe from your ever-widening aperture. And now, you’ve turned on your own. It’s a peculiarly Oedipal development, if you ask me. Has your endless diet of petty squabbles, staged dramas, and the utterly mundane finally driven you to consume the very hand that feeds you a diet of such questionable nutritional value?

I’ve covered elections where the only thing hidden was the truth, and wars where the cameras were quite openly unwelcome. I’ve seen better and I’ve certainly seen worse – though I’m struggling to recall anything quite so self-defeatingly ironic. My editor, bless his cotton socks, suggested this warranted an ‘open letter’. To whom, I asked? To the general malaise? To the utter tedium of it all? He merely grunted about ‘audience engagement’. One notes the priorities.

So, I implore you, Relentless Lens, for the sake of what little journalistic integrity might still be clinging to the tattered edges of this profession: might you not, just for a moment, *blink*? Might you not, occasionally, choose discretion over perpetual digital documentation? Might you not focus your formidable capabilities on something of actual consequence, rather than the internal bickering of a local news outfit in, well, I believe it’s Oklahoma? We'd all be the better for a moment of quiet, a brief respite from the ceaseless, unblinking gaze. Give us a break, and for God's sake, give *me* a break from having to write about it.