A STORY ABOUT NOTHING
Sorry Shea Allen, You’re No Glenn Greenwald
By Elizabeth Coady
SHEA ALLEN’S A WEE BIT UPSET — AND BEFUDDLED — AFTER GETTING TOSSED from her reporting job at ABC’s Huntsville, Ala. affiliate WAAY-TV.
Duck and cover. Wow. For God's sake I just want to tell the news.
— Shea Allen (@SheaMallen27) July 30, 2013
The “passionate individualist & a full-time smarty pants” feels she was unfairly canned for exercising her “free speech” about going braless on the air, fearing old people, and stealing people’s mail.
Those revelations came on a post entitled, “Confessions of a Red Headed Reporter” that she ran on her personal blog, Shea Allen Says. Among her admissions:
- My best sources are the ones who secretly have a crush on me.
- I’ve mastered the ability to contort my body into a position that makes me appear much skinner in front of the camera than I actually am.
- I hate the right side of my face.
- I’m frightened of old people and I refuse to do stories involving them or the places they reside.
- Happy, fluffy, rainbow stories about good things make me depressed.
- I’ve stolen mail and then put it back. (maybe)
Allen was called into her boss’s office. The axe fell. She was shocked. “Terminated without cause,” she claims.
“They handed me a copy of the blog post. The very first thing out of my mouth was, ‘This is my personal blog — this is my personal space,” she told TheBlaze.
She temporarily took down the blog post, only to republish it with an impassioned speech about her right to “free expression.”
Here’s the thing, I’ve vowed to always fight for the right of free expression. It’s allowed, no matter what the profession. I pride myself in having earned the respect of many because I make no apologies for the truth and hold nothing back. I don’t fight for things because they serve me, I fight for them because they are right. Sources trust me because I am an unadulterated version of the truth. I won’t ever bend just because its [sic] popular to do so and I’m not bending now.
“I had no earthly idea,” she laments in an interview. It was just me being my usual, snarky & cynical self.”
The worst part of the story: Allen’s a single mother with a 6-year-old son who doesn’t want to relocate from Huntsville. But she broke one of the cardinal rules of mainstream journalism — which is never make yourself a part of the story.
Also, here’s a lesson from Journalism 101: The First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing speech, not employers. Allen fell on her sword for her right to shoot from the hip.
Or as one commenter on Twitter wrote: “Not sure what you’re standing up for, other than your ‘right’ to be shallow and insipid. Yes, you have ‘free speech,’ but the TV station also has the right to decide who is or is not a good representative of their station.”
Still, the girl’s got a knack for stealing attention, which is the name of the TV game. So here’s a quarter bet she lands a job — just not one as “investigative journalist.”
