TV Q&A: Is KDKA-TV only firing women?

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen answers reader questions every Wednesday at TribLive.com in a column that also appears in the Sunday Tribune-Review.

Q: Anyone else notice that CBS is only firing women at KDKA-TV?

— Lindsay, via Facebook

Rob: After the first round of corporate-mandated layoffs in August that resulted in the dismissals of news anchors Kym Gable and Lindsay Ward, it was suggested that KDKA was only firing women, which I wasn’t sure was fair given that we didn’t know the genders of anyone behind the scenes who might have been let go and CBS earlier this year hired a woman as KDKA’s general manager who in turn hired a veteran KDKA assistant news director to be news director, who is also a woman.

But with the late October layoffs – three more women who worked on air; we don’t know the genders of the nine who were let go behind the scenes – the optics are indeed quite bad for KDKA and/or its corporate parent, CBS/Paramount/Skydance. (We also do not know if the decisions on who to let go were made locally or at the corporate level.)

CBS corporate publicists did not respond to a request for a gender breakdown of the behind-the-scenes employees who were laid off.

Looking at the station’s on-air roster at cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/kdka-tv, there were 18 men working as on-air talent at KDKA and there were 19 women working as on-air staff prior to the October cuts.

At the national level, the poor optics continue: The on-air correspondents let go were women; half were people of color. CBS News staffers pink-slipped include “CBS Saturday Morning” anchors Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson, senior foreign correspondent Debora Patta, correspondents Nikki Battiste, Nancy Chen, Elise Preston and Janet Shamlian and contributor Lisa Ling.

Q: Channel 11 has a subchannel MeTV that my cable company, Verizon FiOS TV, carries. There is a second MeTV Toons channel that is only available over the air on some low-energy channel and on some inferior streamer. How do cable companies decide which of these types of channels to add?

-@salparadise49.bsky.social, via bluesky

Rob: Only the primary channel of a broadcast outlet is a must-carry, so the FCC says cable companies must carry Channel 12.1 but not Channel 12.2. Beyond that, TV stations negotiate individually with cable systems when it comes to whether cable systems will carry local digital subchannels.

MeTV Toons is carried locally on over-the-air low-power station WOSC-TV, Channel 61.1. (Low-power stations are not mandated must-carry stations.) MeTV Toons is also on DISH (Channel 376), DirecTV (295) as well as Philo, Frndly TV and Fubo TV.

Q: Don’t you find it annoying/insulting that TV news people can come to a person in that person’s worst moments and shove a microphone in their face and ask for a comment, yet when you question any of the local stations about what’s happening there (firings, dismissals, anchors disappearing, etc.), they never have any comment? It seems they cover up all the time when you question them about their “dirty laundry.”

— Tim, Natrona Heights

Rob: I wouldn’t characterize viewers’ questions about the goings on at local stations as “dirty laundry,” but I do agree some TV stations can be hypocritical when they don’t respond to viewers’ questions, given that their news reporters are expected to get news subjects to answer questions on camera on a daily basis.

My rule of thumb is if it’s a question about what viewers see on TV— and as long as it is not simply mean — then it is a question worth asking (Think: Mister Rogers’ “Anything mentionable is manageable” quote). Odds are, if one viewer has the question, others might, too.

To be fair, not all Pittsburgh TV stations dodge questions all the time. KDKA-TV, WQED-TV and WTAE are more responsive than not.

Sometimes the response I get is “on background,” meaning I am free to use the answer as long as I do so without attribution. This is when I refer to “my understanding” of a situation.