Why I Committed Career Suicide (by Charles Perez)

[FLAprogressive]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-09/why-i-committed-career-suicide/

Charles Perez, the gay news anchor fired by his Miami ABC affiliate after filing a discrimination claim over a bump to weekends, says he couldn’t forgo marriage and children just to stay in the news business.

I was fired four days after filing a sexual-orientation discrimination claim with Miami-Dade County’s Equal Opportunity Board against my employer, Miami ABC affiliate WPLG, owned by Post-Newsweek Stations.

Bottom line, I believe they sold me out as soon as my being gay became too widely known. It made them uncomfortable and made me, in their eyes, less advertiser-friendly. They’d demoted me two weeks earlier from main weekday anchor to weekend anchor. It was a move I quickly recognized was leading to the door, and I wasn’t prepared to watch my career circle down the drain.

read more @ link above

[Berry Cool]

1. Bully for him. But buried in his story is something that goes beyond even the discrimination issue.

He says:

The news business has become a place of fear, where principle and the news have become the casualties and ratings and dollars the prizes. A perfect example: In the runup to the war in Iraq, Mohamed El-Baradei, the top man looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stood in front of a dozen microphones in Paris and announced that there weren’t any. It was a front-page story in Paris, London, Moscow, and Tokyo. It was buried in The New York Times. I, however, read it.

I went to one of my bosses at Miami’s Fox affiliate, WSVN, and said, “We have to run this. This is big!” He said, “Charles, that’s not what our advertisers want to see.” We never ran it.

So, in the middle of this story about how his employer expected him to stifle himself and his dreams to remain noncontroversial, he drops a story about how an employer also avoided telling the truth about the Iraq WMD--for the sake of advertisers.

[mitchtv]

2. We had an out Gay anchor here in Palm Springs

On KPSP CBS he moved on to North West Cable, however but didn;t destroy his career He is Erik Sandoval ;and he ans partner adopted two kids and never hid them , and attended all the events for the station, Perez should consider Calif.