A New York TV reporter who yelled a common expletive at two knobs who were intruding on his live stand-up is now an ex-TV reporter.
An excerpt from the NYT story:
ARTHUR CHI'EN did a foolish thing one morning last week. He acted human. Where he went wrong was to do it in front of a television camera.
A reporter for WCBS-TV, Mr. Chi'en was on a Midtown street doing a live standup on MetroCard swindles. This was for the benefit of however many New Yorkers happened to be awake at 6 a.m. and tuned to Channel 2. Behind him stood two dolts who taunted him on camera, gesturing vulgarly and holding up a sign for the Opie and Anthony radio show.
Opie and Dopey, you may recall, are the geniuses who once broadcast a live account of a couple supposedly having sex inside St. Patrick's Cathedral. They're still around, heaven save us, on satellite radio. Their idea of fun now includes sending dolts to torment hard-working reporters.
Mr. Chi'en, acting human, lost his cool. After finishing his report, he turned to his harassers and yelled something on the order of, "What is your problem, man?" That last sentence is sanitized here. The reporter's outburst included a well-worn expletive, one of the seven dirty words deemed no-nos by the Federal Communications Commission. You hear it on New York streets only, oh, three dozen times a day.
That was Mr. Chi'en's foolish thing. He thought he was off the air, he says. But he knew right away that he had gone too far. When he went back live moments later, he apologized, but to no avail. Before the morning was out, WCBS had fired him.
No question, he behaved poorly, Mr. Chi'en said the other day. "I'm a professional, and I know I'm not supposed to use those words," he said. "I thought the station had switched to tape. But I'm not making any excuses. I should have known better."
Still, under the circumstances, was his sin so great that he deserved a career beheading? Mr. Chi'en, 36, does not believe so. "I definitely deserved disciplinary action," he said. "I wasn't expecting to be fired."