Popular Arizona News Anchor Quits Due to Cancel Culture

March 3rd, 2021 6:30 PM

A popular  Arizona television news anchor at Fox10 in Phoenix, Kari Lake, has become so fed up with annoying cancel culture that she has left her job. She made the dramatic announcement in a video she released on Monday in which Lake decried the lack of balance in news.

 

Sadly, journalism has changed a lot since I first stepped into a newsroom and I'll be honest, I don't like the direction it's going. The media needs more balance in coverage and a wider range of viewpoints represented in every newsroom at every level and in each position. In the past few years I haven't felt proud to a member of the media. I'm sure there are other journalists out there who feel the same way. I found myself reading news copy that I didn't believe was fully truthful or only told part of the story and I began to feel that I was contributing to the fear and division in this country by continuing on in this profession. It's been a serious struggle for me and I no longer want to do this job any more.

A Tuesday article in the Arizona Daily Independent goes into more detail about Lake's departure from her anchor job.

Lake, 51, also shared several thoughts about her career, her accomplishments, and why she says that the profession of journalism is in many ways “unrecognizable to what journalism was” when she walked into her first newsroom in 1992.

...But for Lake, life away from the studio began to get stressful in recent years as her social media posts drew scrutiny by some viewers and others looking to fuel a controversy.

In early 2020, Lake was criticized by a small but loud group in what appeared to be a coordinated social media attack following a one-on-one interview with President Donald Trump. She also experienced negative pushback for having a social media presence on Parler and Gab, even though she also has a strong following on more liberal platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The onset of COVID-19 and how to report on it honestly presented a great challenge for Lake:

“It really got difficult for me when Covid hit,” Lake said. “I felt the stories I was reading were not fully truthful. The cancel mob’s insistence that certain Covid- related stories not be told or even whispered, while others were told over-and-over made me feel as if I was not giving a balanced view of the situation to viewers.

“I became a journalist to be helpful, not harmful, but some of the stories I was reading likely contributing to the fear and division—and I couldn’t do that anymore. I prayed a lot for guidance—asking God to lead me in the right direction,” she said.

By the end of 2020, the job Lake loved had become a source of stress and consternation. Her last on-air appearance for Fox10 was Christmas Day 2020.

It sounds like we haven't heard the last from Kari Lake on the subject of media bias.