UNC law student wins Emmy

Sporting the wedding tuxedo his mom bought him and with an $85 banquet ticket in tow, Chip Muller, a UNC law school student, sat down as one of 500 guests at the 19th Annual Midsouth Regional Emmy Awards on Jan. 22.

His expectations were mixed.

“I wanted to win — and knew I wouldn’t,” he said. “I just thought, ‘What are the odds?’”

Muller, a former producer for UNC-TV, won for best topical documentary at the Emmys for his one-hour piece, “North Carolina’s Dependence on Tobacco.”

Originally several seven-minute tobacco-related segments on UNC-TV’s nightly news magazine “North Carolina Now,” the documentary was something Muller wanted to expand.

“As I got into it, I realized that it was a really important issue for North Carolina. … In a sense, it’s a symbol of North Carolina politics and culture,” he said.

Dr. Adam Goldstein, an professor of family medicine who appeared in the documentary while treating a patient suffering from smoking-related illnesses, said Muller’s documentary captures “both the problems and the promise facing tobacco and health.”

“It extended where we were at and challenged the status quo, which is really the promise for the 21st century for tobacco and health in the state,” he said.

Morgan Potts, who grew up working in the tobacco fields and lost a grandfather to the lung disease emphysema, served as the documentary’s associate producer and editor. He said the documentary shows the good and bad effects of tobacco on the state.

“It would be really easy just to show the health aspects of tobacco,” Potts said. “I think it was important to also show the economic benefits that it had on the state. It put food on the table for a lot of people in North Carolina.”

He said the documentary reveals that tobacco issues in the state are, more than anything else, cultural and political.

“One thing that was glaring to me was how the state is concerned about losing money by encouraging more healthful practices,” he said. “I hope that the documentary brought out the fact that smoking is costing the state considerably as well.”

Steve Volstad, UNC-TV’s director of marketing and communications, described Muller as a courageous and deserving of his award.

“He was a hard-working and dedicated journalist,” he said. “In fact, it was quite an undertaking for him to tackle this issue. Tobacco has a long history in North Carolina, and there are strong feelings on many sides of this issue.”

Muller first got into television as a 15-year-old at the local television station in his native state of Connecticut. He befriended the director and started working as a part-time cameraman throughout high school.

He entered Syracuse University but transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he majored in religious studies.

“I think, indirectly, I used it all the time,” he said of his unusual major and career path combination.

“Religion is the study of the fundamental forces that drive people. As a journalist, it always helped to know some of those unseen and unspoken forces behind what people do.”

Muller moved to Carrboro in 2000 and worked as a reporter at WRAL before switching to UNC-TV in 2001.

“I wanted to do longer form pieces. I wanted to do documentaries,” he said. “That’s kind of an art form that’s gone from most commercial stations … and that was frustrating for me.”

 

Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.