Bean on Fire Chief

Betty Bean, writing in this week's Hall's News, takes 6 News to task for our reporting of the controversy surrounding Fire Chief Carlos Perez. She was particularly unhappy with our story last week of Jamie Faucon - a firefighter who'd filed a grievance claiming she was being discriminated against because of her sex change. Here's part of Betty's column:

WATE hit rock bottom last week with a 6 p.m. interview with a transgendered firefighter who claimed that she was being punished for her sex change by having her city car and access to overtime taken away, and that co-workers (who had known her for a decade as a guy named Jim) were still calling her “him.”

I wrote about our reasons for running the story last week and nothing mentioned in Bean's column changes my opinion. Certainly the story generated alot of interest. It was picked up by the Drudge Report and linked back to us. The day after we posted the story on our website, the site got more than 200,000 hits.