From Covering the News to Becoming the News
By Shannon in News on Jul 11, 2007 7:32PM
Just one day after the first shoe dropped, the other has fallen with a resounding thud. NBC 5’s Amy Jacobson was canned from her reporting job last night after video surfaced of her visiting Craig Stebic, husband of missing Plainfield woman Lisa Stebic, and wearing a bikini with her two young children in tow. Jacobson, a self-described aggressive reporter who worked for NBC for 11 years, told the Sun-Times that she’s “devastated” and that she’d hoped her station would support her during this ethical hiccup.
You read that correctly, as a hiccup is exactly what we thought it would be. If anything, we figured a suspension would be in the works, not an out-and-out firing. As much as MSM likes to swallow its own tail, we weren’t sure this was a fireable offense. Hell, not enough time has passed and not enough details have come forth for us to make up our minds with any definition. If CBS 2 hadn’t gotten video of her visiting Stebic’s pool party — whose guests, by the way, seemed to consist only of mothers and children, upping the ooky factor — we wouldn’t have heard word one about this entire thing. That the tape “fell into [CBS 2]’s lap,” according to VP Carol Fowler, is insulting to everyone involved, especially the public.
There seem to be two levels of questionable ethics on the table: one, fraternizing with a source in a high-profile disappearance case, and two, possible involvement with Stebic in a non-professional aspect. We’re still trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, as a source close to us insists Jacobson would never get involved in the Stebic mess on a “personal” level, if you catch our drift. As for the outcries of “how could she let her children near that (alleged) monster?” that our gentle readers trumpeted yesterday, Jacobson claims she’d never have her children at Stebic’s without other kids present, kids that CBS left out of their “relevant excerpts” of the video. However, what’s done is done. We suppose the new question is, does this incident increase Jacobson's value as a Chicago reporter, or is she now damaged goods?
Image via Amazon.