Republican Lawmakers Say They Didn’t Push For Chattanooga Reporter To Be Fired

Republican state lawmakers are denying they pressured the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga into firing a public radio reporter.

Reporter Jacqui Helbert has been accused of recording meetings between a group of high school students and their state lawmakers without identifying herself.

The meetings were organized to discuss LGBT issues, in particular transgender bathroom use. They included state Sen. Mike Bell, R-Riceville, who was recorded making dismissive comments about transgender students.

He called research into gender identity “hogwash” and compared changes in gender to “feel(ing) like a dog.”

Bell does not deny those remarks. But he says he was unaware a reporter was in the room when he made them.

“The issue was that it’s not right for someone to secretly record you. Period,” he says.

Helbert worked for WUTC, which UTC oversees. She says her credential and recording equipment should’ve made it clear she was a reporter.

Bell says he mistook Helbert for a student and thought her equipment may have been a tablet computer and headphones. He says he never threatened the funding for WUTC or UTC, and he never asked another lawmaker to do so.

But he did discuss the matter with state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga. Gardenhire was not among the legislators who were recorded, but he did take part in a meeting with UTC officials at which it was discussed.

Yet Gardenhire rejects the idea that he could’ve strong-armed the school into letting her go.

“If I had that much influence, all my bills wouldn’t be going down in defeat these last three weeks,” he says. “You need to take all that up with UTC, and they can answer those questions.”

A spokesman for the school says in a prepared statement that Helbert was fired for violating journalistic ethics. It’s rejected claims of outside influence.

Monday night, NPR
released a statement, saying the decision on how to handle the incident should have been left to journalists.

“Taking the decisions about enforcing ethics out of their hands did more to undermine the station’s credibility than the original infraction,” NPR senior vice president of news Michael Oreskes said. “This chain of events underscores why it is critical that newsrooms such as that at WUTC not be subject to pressure from the institutions that hold their licenses, the sponsors who give them financial support or the politicians who sometimes don’t like the stories they hear or read.”