Charles Perez Alleges Station Told Him Not To Have Kids, Report On WMDs, Or Exist

Charles Perez - former news anchor and talk show host, current gay - was demoted and eventually fired from his position at WPLG in Miami because, he says, his producers weren’t down with his issues of the gender identity variety (which, we’re assuming, must be distinct from the fact that he is gay). He’s since added that the station did not want him procreating. Also, they were totally jealous of him.

In a three -page post Perez wrote up for The Daily Beast, the former reporter sheds additional light into his recent firing - by making us aware that, depending on how you analyze his piece, he may very well be self-centered, arrogant and difficult to work with. 

Perez recalls being told that a less-visible position as a weekend anchor would be beneficial to his plans of eventually becoming a father. This later segued into being told not to “push it” by having kids:

It was a suggestion that never would have been made to one of my straight colleagues, male or female. The only thing I could take from it was that my profile as a gay man, especially if I were to have kids and, God forbid, get married, would render me less promotable and less advertiser-friendly.

In fact, over the previous five months, I’d been told, “Don’t get married, Charles. We don’t need that.” I’d also been told not to have children. In essence: “You’re the main anchor and you’re gay, but let’s not push it.”

Perez paints a portrait of himself as a man fighting his way through a workplace that presented him with countless and omnipresent obstacles, the consummate martyr for attractive, successful gay men the world over. He likens his struggle to that of the black civil rights movement:

I understand there are those who believe that my actions will actually make it harder for gay men and women to rise up, for fear they’ll start trouble. But that is no reason not to do the right thing. In the words of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

Perez adds that his cutting-edge nose for news went ignored and unappreciated at his work for the sake of appeasing advertisers:

The news business has become a place of fear, where principle and the news have become the casualties and ratings and dollars the prizes. A perfect example: In the runup to the war in Iraq, Mohamed El-Baradei, the top man looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stood in front of a dozen microphones in Paris and announced that there weren’t any. It was a front-page story in Paris, London, Moscow, and Tokyo. It was buried in The New York Times. I, however, read it.

I went to one of my bosses at Miami’s Fox affiliate, WSVN, and said, “We have to run this. This is big!” He said, “Charles, that’s not what our advertisers want to see.” We never ran it.

In fact, Perez’s complaint targets his station’s relationship to advertisers - despite the fact that it seems far-fetched that an email circulated around an office would potentially offend national and Miami-based advertisers to the point that they would cease to work with the station. 

And this is the bulk of the problem with Perez’s discrimination complaint thus far: Without any other witness backing him up or proof of his allegations, his story seems slightly to wildly implausible. It has also been noted that Perez’s station manager, Bill Pohovey, whom he names in his formal complaint, is an openly gay man who has been working at WPLG for years and has publicly referred to Perez’s ever-expanding list of complaints as “ridiculous and offensive.”

The question also remains what, exactly, Perez hopes to gain from giving his complaint a national platform. And why did he not come forward with these complaints as they began to unfold months ago? One might suggest, given, say, his appearance on The Real World and his stint as a bread-and-circus-style talk show host, that Perez, for all his talk of journalistic integrity, is more concerned with fame. Which is fine, of course. But is it what the founding fathers would have wanted?:

Democracy demands a free and independent press as a check on those who govern us. The Founding Fathers must never have imagined, however, that we would abdicate that responsibility for a quick buck.

Please. You know how much hush money those rich old white men passed around to keep their gender identity issues on the downlow? 

We may very well, of course, be overly cynical about Perez’s decision to be so public with his struggle. If his allegations are true - and hey, you know, it would be incredibly naïve of us to say we live in a world where people aren’t still flagrantly oppressed and silenced at work for their race or beliefs or sexuality - we’re glad he’s being open about it and inspiring people not to sit back and take abuse. Jaded bloggers be damned. 

Why I Committed Career Suicide [The Daily Beast]