Photo via KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco/YouTube
September 28, 2021, 1:02 pm
According to local sources, a San Francisco-based news anchor was suspended after pushing back on his bosses when his suggestion that they mention the thousands of unsolved missing person cases during their coverage of the Gabby Petito story was rejected as “inappropriate.”
Featured Video
Hide
The Mercury News reports that Frank Somerville of Fox station KTVU has been “suspended indefinitely” after an argument with news director Amber Eikel sparked by Somerville pointing out that these missing people, disproportionately Black and Native American women, go largely ignored by the news media.
Advertisement
Hide
Somerville, who has a Black adopted daughter, would certainly not be the first person to point out the discrepancies in the way U.S. news media treats single cases of thin, attractive white women from rich families who go missing compared to the over 17,000 other missing people in the country.
Leaders in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement have been trying to call attention to this problem since long before Petito disappeared, saying that this racial discrepancy is another function of the nation’s white supremacy problem.
All that Somerville was requesting was a “brief tagline” near the end of the report, something that multiple other news stations have already done. Some have done more extensive reporting on the failure of news media to cover missing women of color, even creating new regular segments on the topic in order to address this reporting gap.
On social media, the term “missing white woman syndrome” trended, coined by late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill in 2004.
Other supporters of women of color have come out in droves to demand that Somerville be reinstated, with many lauding him for his past actions pushing back on what some say is a pattern at KTVU of treating people and communities of color with disrespect and disregard.
The owner of Queen Hippie Gypsy, which bills itself as Oakland’s first Black-owned artisan botanica, wrote on Instagram that she was contacted on behalf of Somerville to get her story as part of a report he wanted to do on domestic violence faced by Black women. This was meant to highlight the high number of Black women who go missing or are murdered by intimate partners in relation to the Petito case, and Somerville himself wanted to interview the owner, Lilly Ayers, but KTVU decided to fight against the story.
Advertisement
Hide
Ayers seemed to blame her own part in this report for Somerville’s suspension, showing how this action by the station affects far more than just the one anchor, and is calling for a boycott until he’s reinstated.
“I am utterly heartbroken and shocked to learn the news that Frank Somerville was fired from the news station over a disagreement regarding the small portion at the end of the story which included my part,” she wrote.
“Frank is the loving father of an adopted beautiful black daughter. I have followed and loved to watch his style of parenting over the years,” she added. “I am praying that Frank and I can still tell the story that the KTVU Executives didn’t want you to hear.”
This is not the first time the Somerville has been taken off their air, though it appears to be the first time it’s happened because he tried to stand up for BIPOC. He was conspicuously absent for nine weeks after a late May broadcast in which he slurred and stumbled over words multiple times and seemed to be having a hard time reading his teleprompter. The station has refused to provide any details as to why this happened, saying only that he was taking time off to “focus on his health.”
*First Published: September 28, 2021, 1:02 pm
0 Comments