-By Warner Todd Huston
Was Washington’s WJLA TV anchorman Doug McKelway fired because he dared appear too conservative to suit the station’s left-wing news director and general manager? It sure is hard to escape that conclusion after reviewing the incident, in any case.
McKelway had a run-in with general manager Bill Lord last month that resulted in his being fired for “insubordination.” At issue was a July piece on the BP oil spill disaster in which the anchor seemed to go against the station’s liberal grain.
McKelway was sent for a stand up report near where a small protest against “dirty oil money” was held at Capitol Hill, Washington D.C. The anchor rightly pointed out that the protest was small and was peopled by little else but a group of far left fringies that are, as McKelway said, “largely representing far-left environmental groups.” The anchor went on to say that this might be a “risky strategy” because the one politician that took more BP Oil money than “anyone in history” is President Barack Obama himself.
Apparently that was all left-wing station manager Bill Lord could take and it wasn’t long before McKelway was called on the carpet for his truthful portrayal of the tiny protest. The result was that McKelway officially “resigned,” but GM Bill Lord is still claiming that McKelway was fired because of “insubordination” and “misconduct.”
I guess “insubordination” and “misconduct” is when you tell the truth about the left’s pitiful, astroturf-styled protests. I guess “insubordination” and “misconduct” is when you reveal that Barack Obama is a hypocrite because he takes more BP Oil money than anyone in history. I guess “insubordination” and “misconduct” is when you report truthfully about the actual size of a protest.
On that last note, I wonder if anyone at CBS News got fired for falsely reporting the attendance numbers at the August Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial? Then CBS said the rally only brought in “an estimated 87,000”? Even the National Park Service said Beck got over 325,000.
Oh, wait. Of course “reporter” Alex Sundby didn’t get fired for that because, a) it was a conservative rally he was lying about, and b) the crowd count was slashed into a tiny fraction that really attended in an attempt to make Beck look bad! Since they tried to make a conservative look less effective than he actually was, I’d be ol’ Alex Sundby of CBS got a big fat raise.
That should teach McKelway a lesson. The liberal Old Media rule of thumb is to under report conservative rallies, but over report liberal ones. He really needs to get with the program, don’t you think?
(Originally posted at BigJournalism.com)
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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