Saturday, November 24, 2012

Video- Maine TV Anchors Resign On The Air, Later Cite Politically 'Unbalanced News'

By Susan Duclos

Forget the resignation letters, for two Maine TV Anchors for ABC affiliate WVII and Fox affiliate WFVX in Bangor for six years, their resignation came on air, live.

[WATCH]




Via LA Times:

Anchors Cindy Michaels (who was also the station's news director) and Tony Consiglio took the last minute of the 6 p.m. broadcast to give a classy goodbye to their viewers.

"Some recent developments have come to our attention, though, and departing together is the best alternative we can take," Consiglio said.

According to an interview with the Bangor Daily News, Michaels revealed that the surprise resignation was the culmination of steadily mounting tensions between the anchors and the station's upper management. It was a situation that Michaels said impaired her ability to deliver the news in a way she was comfortable with.

"It's a culmination of ongoing occurrences that took place the last several years and basically involved upper management practices that we both strongly disagreed with,” Michaels told the paper. "It's a little complicated, but we were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general."

Kudos to them for making a decision based on integrity, although that takes two people out of the newsroom that actually believed in balanced reporting.