Anchors Away: Take This Job & Shove It

UPDATE 11/23/12: The Bangor Daily News is reporting the general manager at Bangor TV stations WVII and WFVX says he thinks the main reason for Tuesday’s joint on-air resignation of news anchors Tony Consiglio and Cindy Michaels had more to do with job security than journalistic concerns.

Mike Palmer, vice president and GM for Bangor’s ABC (Channel 7) and Fox (Channel 22) station affiliates, said he offered Consiglio’s job to another person on Monday.

“Tony’s job was offered to someone else Monday. Cindy knew this and decided she couldn’t continue working without him,” said Palmer.

When asked if their departure had anything to do with salary issues, Palmer said no.

“Actually, Cindy was offered a contract extension within the last few days. We wanted her to stay,” he said.

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Original Posting...

Citing a longstanding battle with upper management over journalistic practices at their Bangor TV stations, news co-anchors Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio announced their resignations at the end of Tuesday’s 6 p.m. newscast.

The Bangor, ME. Daily News reports Michaels and Consiglio, who have a combined 12½ years’ service at WVII (Channel 7) and sister station WFVX (Channel 22), shocked staff members and viewers with their joint resignations Tuesday evening.

Not everyone was shocked by the on-air resignations.

“No, that was unfortunate, but not unexpected,” said Mike Palmer, WVII/WFVX vice president and general manager. “We’ll hire experienced people to fill these positions sooner rather than later.”

Neither had told anyone of their decisions before Tuesday’s newscast.

“We figured if we had tendered our resignations off the air, we would not have been allowed to say goodbye to the community on the air and that was really important for us to do that,” said Michaels, the station’s news director, who has spent six of her 15 years in Bangor’s radio and TV market at WVII.

Both Michaels, 46, and Consiglio, 28, said frustration over the way they were allowed or told to do their jobs — something that has been steadily mounting for the last four years — became too much for them.

Michaels said there were numerous things that contributed to their decisions.

“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.”

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