TV anchors quit on-air

Two local ABC news anchors, Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio, "shocked viewers and colleagues" by quitting on-air Tuesday. No reasons were given for their sudden departure beyond Consiglio saying "some recent developments have come to our attention, though, and departing together is the best alternative we can take."

Their boss, however, was less mysterious: "Sometimes people leave before they're officially told to leave."

• [Oliver Crosby]

  Would have been so much better if they made out at the end instead of hugging. 

  • [Dan Hibiki]

     Or flipped over the table before storming out.

    • [sqyntz]

      …or just done it on the table

      • [tré]

         After flipping it over

        • [Lemoutan]

          And then doing it again.

  • [Nathan Bruckert]

    Such an awkward hug to. “Should we hug?” “Yea…yea we should” “Yea…this is nice I guess” “OK stop”

  • [David Carroll]

    I would have preferred this:
    Cindy: This will be Tony and I’s last broadcast here on ABC 7.
    Tony: Sorry to hear you’re leaving Cindy, we will all miss you here!
    Cindy: But… We agreed to quit together?
    Tony: I don’t know what you’re talking about Cindy.  Good luck with your “novel”.
    Cindy: You bastard!

  • [Marc Mielke]

    I did get sort of the ‘they’re totally doing it’ vibe that I used to get from Regis and Kathie Lee. 

  • [pjcamp]

     Or screamed “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!”

• [Deidzoeb]

  FFS. Douchey boss still manages to imply the cliche “You can’t quit when I’m about to fire you!” Or maybe he would have asked for their resignations, which is supposed to be different from firing in an unimportant way.

• [tlwest]

  It is nice to see people take the opportunity to leave with grace and dignity, despite what they may be feeling.  A pity that their boss couldn’t exhibit the same sort of class.

  • [blueelm]

    This. Given my experience, this speaks volumes. 

• [cjhowareya]

  No inflatable emergency slide?  Kinda Fail-y.

• [Mr. Winka]

  You stay classy Bangor.

  • [bo1n6bo1n6]

    Classy in the 1800′s… Less and less classy since they killed Al Brady in the street.

• [knappa]

  From http://bangordailynews.com/2012/11/20/news/bangor/anchors-away-at-wvii-cindy-michaels-tony-consiglio-resign-on-air/

  “It’s a culmination of ongoing occurrences that took place the last several years and basically involved upper management practices that we both strongly disagreed with,” she explained. “It’s a little complicated, but we were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general.”

  Neither Michaels nor Consiglio would say what specific political leaning they were expected to adopt.

  Good for them.

  • [exile]

    Integrity!
    Respeck!

  • [jmv]

    And here I was, immediately thinking they were stealing muffins from the lunchroom. Turns out it’s about journalistic integrity. Thanks for the quote knappa.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      They were probably redistributing muffins from the lunch room.

• [Jonathan Badger]

  It’s Bangor, for crying out loud! Haven’t any of you read the exposes by resident S. King? There’s all sorts of weird stuff going on in that part of Maine — monsters, vampires, evil clowns. Perhaps they are the only two humans left in the newsroom and the rest are aliens in human form or something.

  • [Halloween_Jack]

     The real problem with management is that several other veteran staff members died under mysterious circumstances, then came back to work after being buried in the pet cemetery outside of town. Those two decided to quit after one of them made the mistake of checking out what their co-workers were bringing for lunch.

  • [bo1n6bo1n6]

    So true. I moved away just in time. I think.

• [cstatman]

  she is 46????

• [Diogenes]

  Their boss is Mike Palmer.  He has the broadcast competence of WKRP’s Mr. Carlson and the humanity and intelligence of salesman Herb Tarlek.  He’s infamous in central Maine.

• [winkybb]

  “Over the last 15 to 18 months, we’ve been a raging locomotive of change,” he said. 

  Could anybody work for this guy? Seriously?

  “The capital improvements to the building, the technological changes. We have added 10 full-time jobs with benefits here to payroll. We had to expand the parking lot because of adding so many people.”

  I take this to mean they’ve been firing their more experienced and higher paid employees and replacing them with additional minions working for minimum wage. Wait. Perhaps not. “jobs with benefits-here-to-payroll” or “jobs-with-benefits here to payroll”. Hmmm.

• [miasm]

  “Sometimes people leave before they’re officially told to leave.”
  and sometimes people make shit up after they’re exposed as biased managers.

• [social_maladroit]

  It’s interesting how the BoingBoing version of this event differs from the Crooks and Liars version of this event.

  • [millie fink]

    Interesting? How so?

    I do see that the other, overtly political site does offer this informative bit – 

    “The WFVX 10 p.m. newscast is simulcasted on talk radio station WNZS-AM 1340, which also airs shows hosted by conservative personalities Laura Ingraham, Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher and Michael Medved.”

    And, presumably, no liberal personalities.

    • [ericmonse]

      “While neither of the former anchors would go on record to detail how they were being pressured to slant the news, some bloggers have speculated that Fox affiliate WFVX had been moving to emulate conservative bias at Fox News.”

    • [social_maladroit]

      While the story apparently fit within Crooks and Liars’ liberal agenda (or perhaps because it did), they provided a lot more context as to why this happened.

      This post, on the other hand, just sort of snarkily quoted their boss as saying, ”Sometimes people leave before they’re officially told to leave”, without providing any other context. People who left comments filled in the details.

      The difference in the two blogs’ approaches was interesting to me.