KTVU news anchor Frank Somerville again has been removed from the air, but this time a newsroom spat — not an on-air meltdown —appears to be the reason.
According to station sources, Somerville, 63, has been “suspended indefinitely” by Channel 2 management after a disagreement with news director Amber Eikel over coverage of the Gabby Petito homicide case.
The disagreement, said sources, occurred earlier in the week after the body of Petito was discovered in Wyoming. Petito, 22, had been reported missing earlier this month while on a cross-country camping trip. The FBI has issued an arrest warrant for Brian Laundrie, Petito’s 23-year-old fiancé.
KTVU was prepared to air a news report detailing the latest developments in the case. Somerville wanted to add a brief tagline at the end of the report that questioned the extraordinary level of media coverage devoted to the story. Sources said he wanted to point out that the U.S. media often disproportionately covers tragedies involving young White women, while largely ignoring similar cases involving women of color and Indigenous people.
Somerville is the adoptive father of a Black teen daughter.
The veteran anchor was told that the tagline was inappropriate and he apparently pushed back on it. There was no word on how heated the discussion got.
Sources said that Somerville was informed by station management the next day that he was being suspended. A station spokesperson could not be reached as of Friday evening, and Eikel declined to comment.
It’s another strange twist in a turbulent year for Somerville. During a now-infamous May 30 newscast, he repeatedly slurred and stumbled over his words and appeared to have trouble reading off the teleprompter. Days later, a spokesperson for Fox — the network that owns and operates KTVU — announced that Somerville would take an indefinite leave of absence to “focus on his health.”
Somerville was off the air for more than nine weeks before returning in August to Channel 2’s “The Ten O’Clock News” without addressing his unusual absence. Since then, Fox and station management have refused to publicly speak to the issue.
This latest incident, coming just six weeks after Somerville’s return to the anchor desk, will undoubtedly trigger speculation about his future with the station. He’s one of the highest paid anchors in the Bay Area, but his contract is up in March. Somerville has said in the past that he wants to work “two or three more years” and would like to finish his career at KTVU.
Meanwhile, the media coverage issue Somerville had hoped to raise has garnered plenty of attention in recent days as debate rages over how much is too much. MSNBC host Joy Reid criticized her own industry on her prime-time program, calling the Petito coverage an example of “missing White woman syndrome,” a term coined by the late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill to describe the media’s often lopsided focus on white women and girls when they go missing.
An ABC News report, citing statistics from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center stated that at the end of 2020, the FBI had more than 89,000 active missing person cases, and 45 percent of those were people of color.
The ABC News report also said that only about one-fifth of missing person cases involving minorities are covered by the news, according to a 2016 analysis published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.
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