WTAE was wrong to fire Bell
WTAE did exactly the wrong thing when it fired Wendy Bell. The station should have kept her on the air.
Here’s the reason why:
Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania, like the rest of the country, needs a meaningful discussion about race, and having Bell anchor that discussion could have been enormously helpful.
WTAE’s decision to end Bell’s employment short-circuited a great opportunity to air festering grievances. It’s better to discuss differences than to hide or ignore them. Misunderstandings are enlarged in the darkness; shining a light on fears and misapprehensions is always better.
That’s what’s been missed.
It looks from the outside that the station’s decision to axe Bell was motivated largely by commercial, business interests: sticking with Bell would likely have subjected its news broadcasts and other programming to viewer boycotts.
Keeping Bell behind the anchor desk also invited an endless amount of negative coverage by other stations and media outlets. Indeed, both of Pitttsburgh’s two major newspapers ran stories about the episode, and more were likely to follow. News organizations hate that — they hate becoming the story.
Being the bull’s eye is never easy, especially for an outfit that’s accustomed to shining a spotlight, not being in one.
Station officials no doubt figured it would be better to endure a day or two of harassment by viewers sympathetic to Bell than weeks of agitation by those offended by her remarks.
If you’ve forgotten, this is what happened to cause the Hearst-owned, ABC affiliate to fire Bell, a station mainstay and a presence on Pittsburgh television for nearly two decades:
At the end of March, several weeks after gunmen sprayed bullets at five adults in a Wilkinsburg backyard, killing all five, including a pregnant woman, Bell posted on her Facebook page this supposition about the gunmen: they were young African-Americans known to police for “prior arrests.” They had “with multiple siblings” who were the offspring of “multiple fathers.” Their mothers worked “multiple jobs.”
The assailants, she suggested, were holed not far from the scene of the crime.
For all of this, Bell was charged with abusing journalistic ethics: how dare she speculate? Anchors are paid to read the news, thank you very much.
She compounded matters by next writing about a young black man she eyed bussing tables at a Pittsburgh restaurant — the kid “hustling like nobody’s business and with a rhythm and a step that gushed positivity. He moved like a dancer with a satisfied smile.”
She concluded, “He’s going to Make It.”
Bell’s evocation of Stepin Fetchit earned her a well-deserved slap down from a Pittsburgh blogger whose post was widely quoted in the mainstream press.
As a result of her Butterfly McQueen moment, Bell became, officially, “tone deaf.”
Channel 4 waited several days before booting Bell off their property along the Parkway, near Wilkinsburg. Hearst Television executives claimed her comments were “inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards.”
All of which is rich coming from WTAE, which spent several newscasts extolling the heroics of a police dog killed in the line of duty while contemptuously saying practically nothing about the black man shot and killed by police in the same incident.
Only one of the dead had a soul, and it wasn’t the dog, and yet the station served up tales of bereavement for the lost pooch that made the heart cry out.
It must have been a ratings bonanza, because the coverage went on for days.
We are living through a time of heightened racial sensitivity. It’s not the first time, of course. As a nation, our preoccupation with race goes back to the very beginning: slavery, our “original sin,” flummoxed the Founders; wise in so many ways, Washington, Adams, Franklin and the rest of the gang punted on that one.
A series of crises culminated, finally, in the Civil War and the end of slavery, which was followed by Jim Crow laws in the South and de facto segregation in the North. Then along came the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Consciences were raised, North and South.
The election of a black president in 2008 seemed to signal a new, better era in our racially-torn country. America had finally become what it always promised to be: a land of opportunity for all.
Then came Ferguson and a host of ugly incidents involving police and young black men, and we were back to square one.
Against this background, it seems preposterous to think Wendy Bell might have helped, even in the small confines of western Pennsylvania, to usher in a period of understanding and conciliation. But it was worth a shot. Her firing aborted any possibility of teaming her up for on-air discussions with the likes of veteran civil rights leader Tim Stevens, blogger Damon Young, and others.
It could have made for riveting TV.
In the days following her dismissal, WTAE station officials met with leaders of the black community in Pittsburgh. They seemed to promise to do something to highlight the strain of misunderstanding and animosity.
We can only hope the station follows through. For that purpose, it’s not too late to bring Bell back.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail .com.