CBS-KTVA Newscasts Nixed For Ethics Issues

In the wake of a Big Government exclusive report featuring audio of CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA-TV staffers seemingly plotting potentially damaging scenarios for Alaska Republican Joe Miller’s Senate campaign, the station has been forced to cancel two evening news broadcasts, allowing time for extended discussion on journalistic ethics. Along with the cancelled broadcasts, the CBS affiliate had already quietly announced the dismissal of two producers in response to Big Government’s reporting.

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Two newscasts from Anchorage’s CBS news affiliate, KTVA-TV Channel 11, were canceled Wednesday so staff could deal with fallout from a phone message left by a station employee on the voice mail of a staff member working on Senate candidate Joe Miller’s campaign Oct. 28, the station announced on its website.

Wednesday’s 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. broadcasts were canceled because of time constraints related to an internal discussion on journalistic ethics, according to a message the station’s general manager, Jerry Bever, posted at KTVA.com.

“Events over the last week and a half have been challenging for our station,” Bever wrote in the Wednesday statement. “As the result of a conversation within our newsroom that was accidentally recorded and released to the public, our newsroom credibility has been called into question, and the public’s trust in us has been tested.”

KTVA general manager Jerry Bever’s latest statements on the controversy stand in stark contrast to his earlier statements falsely claiming the CBS affiliate’s staff did nothing wrong.

The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.

Rather than reporting the news accurately at the time, other mainstream media outlets, including the now apparently openly left-leaning Washington Post, simply reported Bever’s previous ridiculous statements without question, using them to attack Big Journalism’s reporting, instead. As has also now been reported, the released audio was complete and unedited. Yet, in another instance of ideologically driven journalistic malfeasance, the Washington Post appears to have done nothing to correct the facts, or address its own gross negligence in misleading its own readers.


The full audio is only on the cell phone of Miller’s campaign manager. Will the campaign release it? Also: Who edited the audio that Big Journalism posted?

With readers and viewers continuing to abandon ethically challenged old mainstream media outlets like CBS’ KTVA-TV and the Washington Post, one would think they’d eventually learn their lesson and stop misleading news consumers, now able to easily access more honest and reliable outlets on Cable-TV and via the Internet.

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