When I was going into high school, there were two shows that had my full and undivided attention: Max Headroom and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not necessarily in that order. Trek was more escapist, and I was more than happy to lose myself in it. Max Headroom, of course, was escapism of another kind, with a day-glo facade of more gritty down-to-Earth reality. Edison Carter always got the Big Story, and always Caught The Bad Guys In The Act. For a kid who was on the journalism track that everyone expected him to be, you couldn’t ask for a better hero. Little did I know that I’d later find myself identifying much more with Blank Reg. Played by the instantly-familiar-and-yet-nobody-remembers-his-name W. Morgan Sheppard, who has had a guest starring role in everything (seriously: check IMDb to see if there’s ever been a show called “Everything.” I bet he’s been in it…), Reg voluntarily lived on the outskirts of society, a kind of hi-tech gypsy running his own pirate TV station from an impossibly spacious VW minibus, refusing to buy into society – or to sell out to it. (Seriously, that minibus was bigger on the inside than the outside – it’s only fitting that he finally got a chance to guest star in Doctor Who not so long ago.) Now that I’m closer to 40 than to 20, I realize Blank Reg was the real hero of the show.
The thing about being in your 20s and finally moving out of your parents’ house is that you’ve got an opportunity, should you wish it, to replace your family with a whole different one, only this time your family’s not related to you by blood. I found that family, if a frequently dysfunctional one, at work. Working in broadcasting in any part of Arkansas that wasn’t Little Rock in the ’90s was an adventure, because you were already budget addled. You either fell into a tight-knit group determined to overcome that, or you found yourself in backstabbing bedlam. I served tours of duty in both situations before achieving escape velocity from the gloomy gravitational pull of the Fort Smith broadcast market and going to Wisconsin.
Even once I got to Green Bay, though, I found myself calling my old cohorts with embarrassing frequency just to check up on everybody, and occasionally to share some of the cooler ideas that had croped up in Wisconsin. In case they could make use of them. They usually couldn’t, but I’ll admit there was also an element of “See, if I’d had free reign and even a minimal budget, I could’ve done this cool crap back home.”
One of those calls, however, was a jaw-dropper. One of my closest friends back home, someone who’d been at that station since it signed on the air, was no longer there.
To make a long story short, and to make it short on any kind of identifying details, he’d been rounded up in the Fort Smith Police Department’s latest “gay sweep” of one of the city parks. For those who don’t or haven’t lived here, it goes like this: undercover FSPD officers would trawl a city park and wait to see if a gay man tried to hit them up for sex. Gay man gets arrested and forcibly outed in the next day’s papers, if not the TV newscasts. (It was such a fixture of local law enforcement that I later found myself producing not just one but two promos on the topic after returning home.)
I’d never even known this friend of mine was gay. Not that it would’ve mattered. He was one of the best people I knew in the business in Fort Smith, and that, to me, overrode whatever he’d been keeping quiet in the personal department. It’s not as if he was doing anything to anyone against their will. I’m not even crazy about the whole “misuse of public places” argument, since nothing actually happened except some verbal entrapment.
What disturbed me evern more, however, was that the station had rolled over and disposed of him – again, someone who’d been working his ass off to keep the miserably underbudgeted place transmitting since day one – in record time. Good golly, a guy working for us got arrested, and he’s gay? Can’t have that. Never mind that this person had mountains of talent, especially in the area of getting decent stuff on the air with practically no resources. He had to go because he’d embarrassed them in the papers.
It wasn’t the first such incident at this former workplace of mine, either. That station’s highest-ranking female member of management had once stomped her foot and thrown a hissy fit when a young lady applied to the station, hoping to find a better career than working at the Oklahoma Ballet (in local-ese: this is a slang term for a strip joint just across the Oklahoma border). She had a daughter, and she was eager to find a way to support herself that didn’t involve dressing scantily, if dressing at all. End result of the 
aforementioned management hissy fit? This person did not get the job, and was therefore locked into the job she was trying so desperately to get away from.
What. the. hell? Surely the moral high ground would’ve been to help this person out of the job/lifestyle she found questionable, and to help her get started on a better path.
In that context, my friend’s blink-of-an-eye termination was not a surprise, but it was still disappointing. And devastating. I’m not gay, I’m not bi, but I have quite a few friends who are, and for every one of them who has ever “come out” to me, I’ve never felt like “oh good grief, please keep that to yourself.” I’m honored to have been someone they trusted enough to entrust that too. Because for all the strides that have been made toward equality, disclosing that to the wrong party, in many parts of the country, can still just about get you killed. Or it can rip the rug out from under your life.
My friend pretty much had his life destroyed on the spot.
And that was what I could not, in all good conscience, bring myself to do in my news promo gig. I don’t care how “sexy” the story is. I am not going to 
destroy someone’s life by associating, in fifteen seconds of vague promo copy, their entire life with a heinous act that has yet to be proven in a court of law.
Fun fact: most libel lawsuits don’t some from news stories. They come from promos that don’t have the time to even begin to explain the complexity of a situation, and in the process completely screws someone’s life up.
Keep in mind, that was in the early 2000s, before the TMZ-ification of journalism. I’m under no illusion that pulling the same stunt would leave me employed today.
But I would still refuse to do it.
I got into TV as a board op, and in the end, I left it as a board op, having long ago given up any function that was intimately associated with news promotions. I’d go back into promoting programming in a heartbeat, especially on a station with no news: when I look back, it’s the gigs like that which have always been the most satisfying to me. Mainly because, while you might be wasting an hour or more of someone’s life by convincing them to watch the latest teevee talent contest, you’re not leaving their lives in ruins. (Well, depends on the show, really.)
My friend left this area. Because he had to. He’s doing much better now, with a career that anyone in the biz could envy, doing exactly what he wants to do. I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. He’s a pretty sharp cookie – he was smart enough to bail out of this area. Me, I was stupid enough to come back, and had to endure a head-spinning, soul-crushing debate over what I would’ve thought was a basic tenet of journalistic integrity. I’m not claiming to be Edward R. freakin’ Murrow – I was 
just trying not to leave the community in which I worked any worse off than it was before I showed up for work that day.
The media’s job is not to try and convict. That’s the court’s job. It’s not the media’s job – and it’s not the public’s job; this stuff isn’t up for a popular vote. People forget that in this day and age, and make snap judgements on guilt or innocence, and how to carry out the execution, when it’s not their place. You don’t like how something went down in a court of law? Vote the judge out of office, or the elected official who appointed him.
End of story. Probably the end of me being employable in that field too, depending on who reads this, but hey, there you go.
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