“We can confirm Frank is taking time away from the desk to focus on his health and we welcome his return when he is ready,” the spokesperson said in a brief statement. On Thursday, a spokesperson for Fox confirmed Somerville would be taking an extended leave of absence, and noted that the anchor still has a job with the station whenever he is ready to return to his duties there. KTVU is operated by Fox Television Stations, LLC., a subsidiary of Fox Corporation. On Monday, the blogger erroneously reported that Somerville would be returning to anchor that evening’s newscast, information that he claimed was learned from the anchor himself through text message. Somerville, who is well known to journalists throughout the Bay Area, has not responded to requests for comments from other reporters who have covered the incident, and news outlets have been unable to independently verify Lieberman’s reporting on the issue. Bay Area anchor Frank Somerville is facing indefinite suspension from KTVU after a disagreement with the networks news director over their coverage of the. Lieberman claimed to have a direct line with Somerville, who purportedly told him that the incident was caused by the news anchor mistakenly mixing up certain medications. Until today, details about what exactly happened and how the station handled it were largely unknown.Ī series of reports published by local news blogger Rich Lieberman fueled speculation about Somerville’s condition and his status at the station. Viewers were initially aggrieved that Somerville disappeared without the station addressing the incident. Still, enough people were tuned in to generate a large amount of social media attention and concern to what played out during the broadcast. The incident in question happened over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, when local news viewership is traditionally lower compared to other days of the year. In 2008, Somerville was promoted to the lead anchor on KTVU’s flagship news program “The Ten O’Clock News,” which has held the position as the most-watched local news broadcast in the San Francisco market for decades. He started his career as an intern at KTVU in the early 1980s before the station ultimately hired him to lead their afternoon news broadcasts in 1991. Somerville is one of the most-recognizable television news anchors in the San Francisco Bay Area, the sixth-largest television market in the country. Somerville presented several news stories until he was removed from the news desk about 15 minutes into the broadcast, according to a copy of Sunday’s broadcast reviewed by The Desk. Viewers noticed the veteran news anchor slurring his speech and struggling to read a prepared news script as it came across the teleprompter. The news anchor has been off the air since he appeared to be suffering from an unknown medical episode during an evening news broadcast aired on Oakland FOX station KTVU (Channel 2).įrom the start of the broadcast, Somerville appeared to be struggling to comport himself. The FBI has since issued an arrest warrant for Brian Laundrie, Petito’s fiancé, who has been missing for two weeks.Television news anchor Frank Somerville is taking an extended leave of absence to focus on his health, his employer confirmed in a statement this week. 11. Authorities recovered her remains last week and deemed her death a homicide. Petito’s case has sparked nationwide interest in recent weeks after she was reported missing on Sept. The three-time Emmy winner was previously suspended from the network following an incident in which he was allegedly slurring his speech on the air during a May 30 newscast. Former KTVU news anchor Frank Somerville was charged earlier this week with driving under the influence following an arrest in late December in Oakland, Alameda County prosecutors and police said. The following day, Somerville was informed of his indefinite suspension. Somerville’s request to add the less than 30-second sidebar was reportedly denied by KTVU’s news director, Amber Eikel, who dubbed the tagline inappropriate. The Mercury News noted that the term used to describe the media phenomenon, “missing white woman syndrome,” was coined by the late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill.īy the end of 2020, 45 percent of the FBI’s 89,000 active missing person cases were people of color, according to a report from ABC News. Somerville, the father of a Black adopted daughter, reportedly requested to add a brief tagline drawing attention to the disproportionate media coverage that missing white women tend to receive compared with women of color. KTVU news anchor Frank Somerville was removed from air over a newsroom dispute involving coverage of the Petito case. A Bay Area news anchor has been “suspended indefinitely” for requesting to cover “missing white woman syndrome” in relation to the Gabby Petito case, The Mercury News reported.
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