It says something about the ruined state of local TV news that the lawsuits now are much more informative and entertaining than the actual newscasts themselves.
And just think how much more amusing this legal wrangling would be if we were even slightly familiar with any of the “talent” that’s pointing the finger at one another.
I vaguely recall the plaintiff, Kate Merrill. She came along at the tail end of TV news, around 20 years ago. As for the rest of that pampered crew from assorted protected classes, most people couldn’t pick any of them out of a lineup.
Liz and Jack ain’t walking through that door.
Channel 4 used to be proud of its “I Team.” Now they have a “R team.”
All racism, all the time. With an occasional “micro aggression” thrown in for good measure.
Kate Merrill’s career has been destroyed, she contends, because she is white. That seems quite evident on its face. It’s interesting that she didn’t file her lawsuit until after the fast-fading See BS network was formally acquired last month by the Ellisons as part of a larger $8 billion deal.
I predict a rapid settlement of the Merrill case. Not that it will resurrect her career. When you file this kind of suit, it’s an acknowledgement that you’re all done. Remember Gretchen Carlson at Fox News? She got $20 million and vanished.
CBS must know they’ve got problems with Merrill. Their GM, Justin “Don’t Call me Don!” Draper resigned last September, just days before Merrill filed her initial complaint with the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD).
Draper said at the time he “didn’t intend” for his uber-woke reign at WBZ “to end so soon.” No kidding.
In her lawsuit, Merrill doesn’t hold back. She makes obvious points that just a few years ago would have gotten her not only fired from regime-controlled media, but also banned from polite society, a la Alan Dershowitz.
For instance, here’s how she describes the news director at Ch. 4, Gerardo Lopez – “a younger Hispanic gay man with far less experience in news and no experience in the Boston market.”
Sounds like an editor, any editor, at the Boston Globe. Or almost anybody who works for either Maura Healey or Michelle Wu.
During the Biden error, your career could suffer “catastrophic damage,” as Merrill’s describes her situation, for daring to mention such disastrous DEI hires, although what little remains of the viewership has surely noticed.
Paragraph 35: “(WBZ) promoted Tiffany Chan (who is Asian) to the role of weekend Anchor over several other White candidates with more experience.”
Paragraph 37: “(Weatherman) Zach Green, who is White, was let go… although he had never been warned about any performance deficiencies.”
His only deficiency was the color of his skin. It was all about getting a more diverse workforce. Melanin over merit.
Think Vice President Kamala Harris.
Or Harvard University President Claudine Gay.
Or Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
What could possibly go wrong?
To fill the morning weather job, WBZ undertook a nationwide search, for somebody who wasn’t white. They picked some guy named Jason Mikell “who is a less experienced television meteorologist.”
So what? At least he’s not white.
Charles Austin and Sarah-Ann Shaw could not be reached for comment.
In the old days, stations made blooper reels of funny on-air screw-ups that would be played at the annual Christmas party. Such a howler occurred on Feb. 22 of last year, when Mikell made what Merrill describes as “an inappropriate sexual innuendo.”
What did he say?
“Specifically, he implied that Ms. Merrill and her co-anchor had sexual relations at a gazebo.”
A gazebo! Who knew? I can remember hearing about third-rate romances and low-rent rendezvous, but usually they were consummated in live vans rather than gazebos.
I think that Mikell clip about gazebos belongs in a blooper reel rather than a lawsuit. But maybe they don’t have Christmas parties at Channel 4 anymore. Too white, too Christian.
And by the way, who is, or was Merrill’s co-anchor with whom she was supposedly enjoying love in all the wrong places? I have no clue.
But this is a recurring theme in the 59-page lawsuit. Names and jobs are mentioned like everybody knows who they are, as in the old days when people still watched TV news.
Paragraph 79, subsection C: “A Reporter (who is a Black male) was not disciplined notwithstanding that, as a video recording evidences, he physically threw Carlos Patricio against a wall at WBZ.”
First question: Who is the black, er Black reporter?
Second question: Who the hell is Carlos Patricio?
I used to follow the weather forecasts on Ch. 4, but not since Melissa Mack left town. She was eminently qualified to deliver the forecast, if you know what I mean. Hubba hubba! On those rare occasions I now watch TV in the morning, I’m all in with Shira Spear on Ch. 25.
Shira’s good, but she’s no Melissa Mack, if you get my drift. As for everybody else in Boston, forget about it. Like everybody else, I have an app on my cellphone.
Back at the beginning of the Karen Read saga, Ch. 4 put out a fake story that the cops had surveillance video of Read running over John O’Keefe. A lot of people heard that, or more likely saw it on the website, and just assumed she was guilty, case closed.
That was in early 2022. WBZ didn’t get around to “correcting” their 100% fake news about Karen Read until the summer of 2024.
I always knew Ch. 4 hadn’t been a real “news” operation for decades. But even by See BS standards, it seemed remarkably shoddy to just put out fake news like that and then not bother to correct it.
Now I know why. They were all too busy cavorting in gazebos and mispronouncing “Concord” and going to “unconscious bias training” to, you know, report the news.
Make them spend it all, Kate Merrill.
