News
Tim Chavez, the love-him-or-hate-him Tennessean columnist known for his advocacy of the poor, afflicted and otherwise marginalized, has survived a two-year-long battle with leukemia that nearly killed him. But while he ultimately managed to keep his life, he couldn’t hang on to his job.
When his doctor finally gave him the green light recently to return to his old gig, Chavez called the paper to share the good news. What he got back was an email from the human resources department saying his job had been eliminated but that he could apply for other openings should they come up. Then readers learned Sunday that talk radio mouthpiece Phil Valentine would be given precious Sunday real estate to peddle conservative fare. Beside his mug on the opinion page, the paper announced that Valentine would have a new weekly column. This is the same guy who, at a rally against illegal immigration two years ago, said that when people cross the border illegally, we should “shoot ’em.” (Valentine has since told The Nation that, yes, he said that—but that he was only joking and he’s “not a racist.” His talk show, however, regularly features mean-spirited anti-immigrant rhetoric.)
So, to recap: The Tennessean effectively fired without notice a Hispanic cancer-survivor columnist, telling him that the paper had “downsized the newsroom” and that the job he formerly held “does not exist anymore” and instead the paper is running the work of a radio talk show host who makes jokes about killing Hispanics.
Chavez, who asks that it be noted the Scene called him and not the other way around—which, after seeing Valentine’s inaugural column, is exactly what happened—says he bears no ill will toward the paper and blames himself for not doing enough research when he went on disability leave. (His wife, Kathrin Chavez, works for the Tennessean-owned Williamson A.M.)
“When you go on long-term disability, you lose all rights to your job,” says Chavez, who wrote 16 columns in 2006, the last from his Vanderbilt hospital bed. “And I didn’t know that, and so I was under the mistaken impression that I could come back. It’s my fault, it’s my fault, you know. I didn’t ask enough questions. But you know, when I went on permanent disability was about the same time I almost died, and I wasn’t even thinking of working. I was just trying to live.”
Tennessean editor Mark Silverman, whose publisher offered a buyout package to more than a dozen employees recently as part of ongoing cost cutting, says the matter “is a personnel thing, and I can’t get into that.” He adds, “We’re buying one freelance column to give us a local conservative voice on the [opinion] page on Sundays.”
An emotional Chavez, who in print was a regular antagonist of Gov. Phil Bredesen’s, laments that his illness reared its head amid the drastic cuts in TennCare, the state’s health insurance plan for indigents and working poor. “I just feel like I let a lot of people down. There are a lot of people hurting that I wish I could have helped.”
Chavez says he regrets more than anything not having a farewell column to thank his readers for their good wishes. “I’m grateful to my friends and readers who have told me they would pray for me,” he says. “And now I’m sort of powerless to tell them how much.”
Change that station
WKRN-Channel 2’s new general manager, Gwen Kinsey, has been on the job now for almost six months, during which time she has made headway in unraveling—or refining, depending on the eyes of the beholder—the new media approach her predecessor Mike Sechrist had earlier developed.
While the ABC affiliate continues to use the video journalism model Sechrist implemented with much fanfare a couple of years ago (see “Hand Me a Camera,” Aug. 18, 2005), Kinsey says the newsroom is putting back into more frequent rotation the traditional camera crew configuration—that is to say, letting reporters be reporters and camera operators be camera operators instead of having one person perform both functions—when content would benefit. Anchors have also been reassigned to different time slots and are being used in newscasts to offer “explainers” to viewers.
The station has also made relatively sweeping changes in the way it uses blogs, eliminating a substantial number of them, creating a new one for reporters’ outtakes and reining in others to avoid opinion or personal references that stray from content. In particular, the blogosphere has been prolific in its protestations that political aggregator A.C. Kleinheider, the man behind WKRN’s Volunteer Voters, has been “neutered” from peddling his political conservative ideology, relegated instead to pointing to content and posing questions for readers.
“My idea about blogging is less about people’s individual home lives and more about trying to give transparency to content…and to give people an opportunity to get involved with content in a way they can’t on the air,” Kinsey tells the Scene. “From a news organization’s standpoint, an appropriate use of new media as far as I’m concerned for blogging is to provide an extension and a forum for back-and-forth with viewers. I know that part of the blogosphere locally has been trying to assess whether there’s room for personal blogging with respect to some of what we did before…and, again, I just think that we can do something that has value and that’s additive to our mission as a broadcaster without necessarily getting into the personal and the opinion.”
Kinsey also has yet to renew political analyst Steve Gill’s contract, which has expired. He is now appearing on Bob Mueller’s Sunday talk show (where this columnist is an occasional guest) without compensation. Both Kinsey and Gill say the station has been busy with other changes and will deal with the question of a renewed contract later.
“They want to sit down and talk, but they’re moving anchors around and doing 15 million other things right now,” Gill says.
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