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Chris Pelikan comments on KEYE firing
“I just kind of wanted to put my side out there” Chris Pelikan tells me.
The former KEYE sports personality’s contract — he had been at the station since February 2008 — was terminated on Sept. 9 after the broadcast of a segment two nights earlier featuring interviews from the locker room of the Round Rock Express. Pelikan had operated the camera for and edited the segment, which showed a brief flash of nudity in its final seconds.
On Sept. 7, the day the segment was taped, KEYE Sports Director Bob Ballou suggested the pair head to the Dell Diamond to interview a few players who were being called up to the Houston Astros. Pelikan operated the camera while Ballou interviewed players. Pelikan had spent a lot of time in locker rooms throughout his career, he says, but he hadn’t operated a camera in one since college. (Pelikan says that he was asked to start shooting video about three months after he arrived at KEYE when the sports photographer was moved to news.)
Pelikan says that when he and Ballou got back to the station about 4:30 p.m. he edited the segment for broadcast on the 6 p.m. news, showing a group of interns how to use the equipment while he worked.
After the newscast, the KEYE sports department received an e-mail from a viewer pointing out that a player’s naked rear end could be seen in the background of the segment. Pelikan said he and Ballou immediately examined the piece.
“Sure enough, for probably the last second of the sound bite in the sort of deep recesses of the background, a guy sort of came from around the corner — like, after he had gotten out of the shower — and he sort of just turned around and flashed part of his butt,” Pelikan recalls, “for no more than a second, second and a half. And, honestly, not a single person who was working the control room or any part of the show noticed it.”
Pelikan says Ballou responded to the viewer’s e-mail, apologizing and promising greater vigilance. “And we thought that was kind of the end of it.”
The next morning, the station received another e-mail. Pelikan said the content was basically the same as that of the first message, with the writer noting that he or she was not offended, but that somebody might have been.
That’s when Pelikan says KEYE News Director Suzanne Black first contacted him about the matter, forwarding the message to Pelikan and Ballou, asking them for an explanation.
“I responded first, saying I shot it, I edited it, it was my fault,” Pelikan says. He explained the time crunch and apologized. “I took responsibility for it; I said I was sorry.” He says that when Black told him they would have to talk further, he began to realize how serious the matter was.
“And it wasn’t like I didn’t take it seriously, because I understand obscenity and all that sort of thing,” he says. “But it was a complete and total oversight and you really almost had to be looking for it to see it. “
When management had him anchor the 6 and 10 p.m. shows that day, he thought things would be OK.
On Sep. 9, Pelikan met with Black and KEYE President and General Manager Amy Villarreal in Villarreal’s office. He says Villarreal spent the first few minutes of the meeting praising Ballou and Pelikan’s chemistry and their work.
“But we’re going to have to terminate your contract today,” Pelikan remembers her suddenly saying.
“And I honestly lost my breath for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe it,” Pelikan says.
He says that Villarreal brought up the possibility of a fine from the Federal Communications Commission, telling him the offense was grounds for dismissal. “She gave me a letter of termination that she wanted me to sign, and I wasn’t about to sign anything at that point in time, “ he remembers, “because I couldn’t just sit there and believe that what they were doing was right, or legal even.”
But “contracts work the way contracts work,” he tells me, “and technically I did violate a station policy on obscenity. The whole thing was just very difficult for me to accept because I felt like I had done a lot to help out that station.”
He says that the last time he had been in Villarreal’s office was four or five months earlier, when the station manager had asked him to pass on his contractual raise to help the station out in these tough economic times. “And I did it in two seconds because I thought it was the right thing to do for the station.”
He says he felt blindsided by the termination.
“I’m sitting there with a 4-week-old baby thinking, ‘how the heck am I going to provide for her? How am I going to have insurance for her?’ “ he says.
He tells me that his daughter, now 12 weeks old, is the twinkle in his eye these days. “It’s been a real nice silver lining to this whole cloud — that I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with her.”
I ask Pelikan if he hates Janet Jackson, whose wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl is regularly credited with increasing standards scrutiny for broadcast television.
“Her name came up in the meeting,” he laughs.
He says he never had a performance review that came back without excellent marks. “The only time Suzanne or Amy would come and talk to us was to say ‘Stop working so hard. You guys are killing yourselves; you’re going to burn yourselves out.”
I ask him if he feels that the punishment fit the crime.
“I guess this is negligence. But I feel like I did everything that I was asked to do there and then some and for something like this to be the end, no,” he says. “I can’t believe that they thought a punishment like this was the right way to go.”
Would he be upset if one of his children saw something similar to the segment in question on the news someday?
“Obviously, I would prefer that my child not be introduced to anything on television of any sort of sexual nature before I feel they’re ready for that,” he says. “And I am sincere when I say that if someone was sitting there or their child was sitting there and that caused a difficult moment, I sincerely apologize for that. You figure if you turn on the 6 o’clock news you’re not going to see something like that.
“But it’s hard for me to look at it that way, because I feel like so few people — even those who were watching — saw it. I don’t know how many people were watching that day and how many saw it, but we got two e-mails on it. I don’t know how many you got.”
I received one.
Pelikan says he’s had an offer to return to his native St. Louis to do a radio show, but says that family issues make that unlikely. His father has spent his life in medical sales, so he’s got feelers out in that industry. He has applied for a few PR jobs, but he hasn’t heard much back.
“It’s a tough economy right now,” he says, “and here I am trying to switch careers with a resume that just has TV on it. I think patience is going to have to be an important thing for me right now.”
It took Pelikan almost two months to begin receiving unemployment compensation. “Fortunately, the Texas Workforce Commission didn’t agree with (KEYE’s) assertion that I engaged in ‘gross misconduct’ and approved my claim,” he says.
Pelikan doesn’t want to leave Austin, but if it comes to that he would consider relocating to St. Louis or to Dallas, where his wife’s family lives. Regardless of what happens, he will have fond memories of Austin.
“My time here has been wonderful,” he says. “It’s a very special breed of person who lives down here. No matter what happens professionally, I will always love Austin and I will always treasure my time here. It’s been a lot of fun.”
Villarreal declined to comment on the record about Pelikan’s dismissal.
“As always our policy is not comment on personnel issues,” wrote Jerry Wagley, KEYE’s director of creative services. “It would be unfair to our staff and their privacy to do that.”
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Comments
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By Kevin Slayten
November 8, 2009 4:54 PM | Link to this
What a crock. How does Villarreal life with herself? Good luck, Chris. No more KEYE news for me.
By MichaelM
November 3, 2009 8:57 PM | Link to this
This is a bit hard to believe.
If I were still hearing labor appeals, I would be hard-pressed to find "gross misconduct" here, especially given that he apparently wasn't hired because of his video editing skills.
By Mark
November 3, 2009 11:20 AM | Link to this
Tough break for that guy. So I guess people actually do watch KEYE news....