Crime & Justice reporter, Jonathan Choe was fired by KOMO 4 today for posting videos on Twitter promoting a Proud Boys march in Olympia, unapproved coverage of the weekend rally and not meeting KOMO’s editorial standards.
If you followed Choe’s Twitter feed, his video reports shed a spotlight on street crime, the homeless disaster that is Seattle. Reports of numerous encampments and the loitering, drug usage, filth and destruction happening on the downtown Seattle area.
KOMO Fires Reporter Jonathan Choe
It’s all about ratings and offending sponsors or the few remaining viewers.
Load up your Econoline and head for the greener pastures of Boise, Baraboo, Waterloo or Waxahachie. Follow those elusive dreams . . . ya gotta.
I don’t hang with antifa, so I don’t know. The Proud Boys thing, though, hits close to home. My wife knocked doors for a literal grandmother (a moderate Dem in Snohomish County) who ran for city council in our suburb. One of her fellow volunteers turned out to be a member of a lefty gun club. Because of that, a local Proud Boy guy published my wife’s name and our home address on a “warning” website that also doxxed other local volunteers. We have young kids, we’ve never been to an antifa protest, and we’re pretty average suburbanites. Until federal law enforcement visited the website operator, our home address stayed on that site for more than half a year. Others listed on that site got harassing visits and threatening phone calls. So, yeah, I’m not sympathetic for a reporter who decides to softly endorse the Proud Boys.
I worked in my previous communications job with KOMO TV alums who left once Sinclair took over. If you think Sinclair or the local management are leftists, then you won’t be convinced by anything I say, but people who worked there wouldn’t agree. That said, most of them left because Sinclair’s pay is lousy (to be fair, most TV news pay is now lousy), and Sinclair’s contracts with employees are famously punitive if they quit before the contract’s end date.
A Tacoma News-Tribune reporter noted on Twitter yesterday that Choe started a shouting match with a rival reporter at a recent Seattle press conference, he apparently couldn’t get camera people to work with him at times, and he kept ignoring managers’ memos about social media practices, etc. Any of that would have gotten me fired when I worked for newspapers across the PNW. I take anything I read in The Stranger with a huge handful of salt, but if half the stuff is true, then they were on solid ground in firing him for cause: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/03/21/68783953/komo-journalist-blasts-out-proud-boy-propaganda.
I didn’t hear the morning hosts on KVI or KTTH rallying to Choe’s defense this morning; correct me if I missed something they did. Dori will (he already was yesterday), but I get the sense that even his usual allies think Choe went too far by “assigning” himself to cover the Proud Boys rally and then posting a slide show about it accompanied with the far-right nationalist anthem, “We’ll Have a Home,” playing in the background.
Does Antifa have an anthem or just the shouting of obscenities while they hit people with batons and baseball bats?
This is BS and everyone knows it. He wasn’t promoting anything, just covering an event in the community. KOMO has become a joke, just like much of Seattle.
So many posts appear on this site by people hating on Sinclair and KOMO as part of the right wing media. I guess not so much. 😉
Sinclair, right? I thought they were the ones that leaned “too far to the right.” No longer the case?
The local management– far Left.
Choe tells me tonight: “Bottom line, I’m a journalist. If there was a Klan rally and cross burning at Seattle Center or a Black Panther party march, I would cover it. My job is to present all sides, not just the one that aligns with my values or worldview. ”
One could say KOMO caved to the outcry from the Progressive Left over coverage of the Proud Boys events. Sounds like there is an agenda being followed by the news management at KOMO 4. The station isn’t what it used to be, at all.
No Seattle station is what they used to be. No local ownership has led to an agenda rather than news based media.
(Hope KING isn’t still referring to themselves as the “Home” team. That train left Union Station many years ago)
Left-leaning KOMO 4 local management fires a reporter that Tweeted about a group KOMO considers n–is, while Antifa are considered harmless, happy folk that participate in Seattle’s “mostly peaceful” downtown street parades. I have said it before, Seattle is a s__thole. Some of the management in Seattle tv news have their heads buried somewhere and don’t want both sides of the stories told. Seattle is filled with what are labeled Progressives — and that city, its government, and a large part of the population are pushing Seattle bass-ackwards into the crapper.