Several have pointed out that more than 700 indigenous women went missing in Wyoming from 2011 to 2020 to little media fanfare. The police resources and media coverage dedicated to Petito’s case are not typical of missing person cases involving ethnic minorities, critics have argued.
The ordeal at KTVU unfolded shortly after police found Petito’s body last week after a weekslong search, but interest in the case has remained high as her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, with whom she was on a road trip before her family reported her missing, disappeared as the investigation began to heat up.
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Somerville, 63, is the father of an adopted Black daughter. Longtime news anchor Frank Somerville will not return to KTVU after more than three decades with the TV station, the Bay Area News Group recently reported. KTVU did not immediately return HuffPost’s requests for clarity on the matter. KTVU news director Amber Eikel reportedly rejected Somerville’s plan for the 46-second tagline, and their disagreement over the matter led to his suspension. Somerville wanted to point out, as many others have throughout the Petito coverage, that American media often disproportionately covers missing white women while overlooking cases involving people of color.
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But he revealed more information regarding the incident in his Saturday post.An on-air fixture in San Francisco Bay Area news has been indefinitely suspended after raising concerns about racial disparities in media coverage of Gabby Petito’s disappearance and homicide, sources familiar with the situation told several outlets in recent days.įrank Somerville, who has anchored the news at Fox affiliate KTVU for nearly 30 years, is facing the repercussions after a reported disagreement with the station’s news director regarding how to cover Petito, a 22-year-old white woman whose body was found in Wyoming after a massive search involving multiple police departments and the FBI.Īccording to people familiar with the matter, Somerville wanted to include a tagline at the end of a report on Petito questioning “the extraordinary level of media coverage devoted to the story,” The Mercury News ― which was the first to report on Somerville’s punishment ― reported Friday. While Somerville spoke out on the arrest earlier this January and confirmed he would not be returning to KTVU, details were scant. He was arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence after a car crash the following month, according to the Oakland Police Department. That November, Somerville told the Bay Area News Group he was “never going to anchor” at KTVU again. KTVU news director Amber Eikel denied the request, calling it inappropriate, according to the source. Somerville, who has a Black daughter, had wanted to add a note at the end of any news story regarding the investigation explaining how media coverage of missing people tends to focus on white women, and the rates of domestic violence Black women in America face, an unnamed source with knowledge of the situation told SFGATE in September 2021. A KTVU spokesperson later said that he left the air to “focus on his health.” The celebrated anchor returned to his post at “The Ten O’Clock News on KTVU” that August without addressing his sudden exit, but was suspended indefinitely a month later after disagreements with the station over its coverage of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman who was killed during a long-distance van trip with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. Somerville went off the air in May 2021 after he was recorded slurring his words and abruptly left mid-broadcast with no explanation. It was the worst decision I ever made but I felt that I had no other choice,” Somerville wrote. And I really needed someone to talk to.”īut “main anchors don’t do that,” Somerville wrote. “But over time I realized that I felt like I was under a pall of sadness. “I felt it was my duty to be at all those funerals to let people know that I cared and that KTVU cared,” Somerville continued. The longtime reporter, who became an anchor in 1992 and started co-anchoring the evening shows in 2008, said that he had gone to the funerals of seven “young Black men and women who were killed on the streets on Oakland” as well as two police officers for BART and the city of Fremont.
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