Anchor in trouble for FB posts

But she didn't lump all black people. She made an assumption about a pair of guys who gunned down five people (including a baby) in a poor, mostly black neighborhood. Now maybe the perpetrators were a white old fogey and a drunk mexican immigrant, but probably not.

 

She should have resisted demonstrating her amazing Kreskin skills. It was dumb, racist and she deserved to be fired.

 

Her assumption that the attackers had to be black children of single mothers was just one part of a long post. She juxtaposed it with her experience being served by one of the good blacks at a restaurant. She complimented him to the manager, and you should have seen that boy grin! He looked like he might start dancing. Just imagine the change we white people could make if we smiled for the good ones now and then...

Seriously, it was one of the most jaw-droppingly racist, condescending things I've ever read. It was an absolute gots-to-go situation. They couldn't fire her fast enough.

 

If Facebook was around in the '30s and '40s, that would have been an enlightened post.

 

"And he did all this with a rhythm and a step that gushed positivity"

 

I tend to fall on the "read generously" and "forgive social media sins" side of the spectrum, and even then, I think that post was super racist. Not just the criminal profiling part; the kid in the restaurant might have been worse. Like, not just a little racist. Really very racist.

 

I think the restaurant stuff was super patronizing. She should be fired for stupidity.

 

PCLL-

Per usual, as two of the only TV types on here, we don't always agree but do here.

WTAE couldn't drop her fast enough.

Reading that post started out as another "sad outrage about violence involving young people" that many of us in TV do post on social media. Yet the post became worse and more stereotypical. Then the condescending story about this non-white busboy. It was all wince-worthy.

I looked through her previous posts and they are all of a "look at me" variety that permeates too many of the social media posts I see from the other anchors in my business. Here's me in my large yard with my privileged kids. Here's me in Aruba. Here's me giving a speech at a gala where I can do good for others without having to get my hands dirty. Here's me in a car at a parade waving to the great unwashed...

Our TV news industry is full of rich kids - young people with degrees from Northwestern, Bosron U, USC, Syracuse, Mizzou where they paid out of state tuition. Far too many of us (and it was this way 20 years ago when I started out) never had to struggle financially. Us making 17k a year on our first job was different than people who weren't from affluent families making the same 17k. Most in TV news have a safety net.

Not only that but anchors, especially females, tend to marry up, financially. Male anchors get married, mess around, get divorced and have to anchor until they're 79 because of all the alimony. But I digress.

If you've been a street reporter for a long time, I'll give a lot more latitude to your credibility on a post about violence in your city. You interview people who are victims. You talk with people on their worst day. Yet too many anchors who just read the promoter and emcee the galas to raise money for foster kids are usually disconnected from it. Like Wendy Bell appeared to be.

What's interesting to me is any future legal action. Let's say in a year that police arrest and charge people of the very demographics Bell wrote about. While her post brought negative attention to WTAE and I think the station couldn't keep her, she may also have a legal foothold for major damages for wrongful termination.

Almost all tv stations now require on-air people to post on social media. And post often. Management claims to want their people to engage with the audience and create compelling content.

Bell did exactly this. It wasn't what a lot of people wanted to read but it's also clear that a good segment of the readers didn't find it offensive.

WTAE couldn't keep her because she would always be known as "that anchor who posted about black people" but if she found a sympathetic jury, she could walk away with a lot of money.

This incident serves as a wonderful flashpoint for all of us. How much to reveal. How much to truly engage.

We have a debate on this where I work over Facebook Live. Seen these? Where the anchors will have a live running feed of them anchoring for an entire newscast? My co-anchor and I have been getting subtle hints that we should do this from the bosses but we are both hesitant because live anchoring is messy. You work closely with producers, update scripts on the fly over a three hour newscast, move crews around. I wouldn't want to call out a co-worker on a fact error on a live feed for the whole world to see when normally I'd just casually mention it privately.

We are concerned that we would be so self-conscious about it that the inside jokes during the breaks between the three of us would cease and that would hamper the chemistry we DO have when we are on camera.

Does an NFL team want a camera and mic in the huddle for every play? It is kind of the same with us. Transparency is good but can we just do our jobs and do them well in this era where everyone is so quick to pounce on any mistake?

In the short term, expect more "look at me" pictures of anchors showing of the latest shade of their toenails. It's not controversial and, if the anchor is pretty, people eat that crap up.

 

Yeah, exmediahack, I agree with just about all of that.

I completely understand why management wants anchors to engage on social media. It makes sense. The problem is, some are just terrible at it. Wendy Bell is a pretty good example of that -- I'm bet she was completely blindsided by the suggestion that her post was racist. Thankfully the anchors in my shop are very good at it and are more interesting and likable than they come across on TV, so it's a good fit. There's an anchor in the market who has two moves on social media: she retweets everyone who tells her she's pretty (with a "You're so sweet!" attached), and she whines about how emotional and difficult it is as a parent to report these terrible crime stories. (She hasn't been in the field in 15 years.)

And Facebook Live... holy shit, do I hate this. I believe my newscast is the only one at my station that is not on Facebook Live. My anchor -- who is extremely savvy and very engaged on social media -- finds it to be really dangerous and doesn't want to do it until the station has some kind of clear cut policies on it. I filled in on a different show last week and each time I tried to talk with my anchors it felt like I was interrupting something. (Earlier this week an anchor got angry over something she was told in her IFB during a break, then leaned over to the phone shooting the Facebook Live feed, said "we're going bye bye now," and got into a pissing match with the booth that lasted the rest of the morning.)

My great hope is that Facebook Live goes the way of Periscope. There was a span of about two or three weeks when every single move made by a reporter was broadcast live on Periscope. Then.... nothing.

 

The Facebook Live trend will get some anchors in the business fired. Our weekend crews do this and I don't think it'll end well - between fact errors, hitting on each other and a tendency to off-color jokes, they'll get burned.

I anchor a total of four hours a day. The commercial breaks are spent either updating scripts, pre-reading anything new but, also, talking back and forth with my co-anchor and our met. We all have kids and this is the time that builds chemistry and familiarity that we will occasionally bring over when on the air for cross talk.

Yet I also protect my privacy sharply as they do over their children. We don't post names and I never put pictures of them on social media. Bringing in Facebook Live would mean that I will not say anything remotely interesting during any of the breaks -- even though I am one of the more active anchors in the market on social. Strictly self-preservation.

Glad that your anchors seem to get it. We all have anchors on social media who constantly seek validation over their looks or try to stoke sympathy from the difficulty of our jobs.

I've had those posts as well but those were from reporting - direct contact with victims or crime scenes where I was directly touched by a moment or a conversation.

Definitely a balance. Just please let Facebook Live die an early death.

 

It's funny -- I almost never see those kinds of posts from reporters, who really do deal with some gut wrenching stuff on the job and have every reason to be emotionally beat down by it. About 90% of the time the "my job is so emotional" posts come from anchors who are just reading a scripted toss to that reporter.

 

In the past year I moved from both anchoring and reporting to back to anchoring every day. It is different -- I'm not as connected on a daily basis as I'm keeping watch on 14 different local stories instead of a deep focus on one.

When I do report, it's easier to get calls returned for the visibility but, deep down, I do notice that layer of separation now between the news and the reporting of it.

My highest reach always came from the gut wrenching reporting where I would be in the midst of something awful. Irony is that connection with people helped me get the anchor gig but the connection now isn't quite the same.