Station Caves to Property Management Company

Tegna’s WBIR (Knoxville) did a story about how people are getting pushed out of their apartments, due to the fact that the new landlord is raising the rents.

The story said that Rand Property Management took over the properties and more than doubled the rent of the tenants.

But, not long after the story was posted on WBIR’s website, the story was pulled and the page that held the WBIR story is now 404. A Google cache shows the headline of the now-gone story.

Management at Rand Property sent out an internal email to its employees, bragging about the fact that they were able to bully WBIR into taking the story down.

Why the Tenga station caved to Rand is not known, but Gray’s WVLT, which apparently has better journalistic ethics, still has their version of the story posted for viewers to see and read.

It’s nice to see that at least one Knoxville TV station still takes journalism seriously.

If I was WVLT I would be using the email above in promos to explain why their station doesn’t fold like a lawnchair from pressure by a company that didn’t like the story.

Just saying….