Mistick hits WQED execs hard
July 14, 2009
Duquesne University associate law professor Joseph Sabino Mistick is fighting mad at WQED-TV.
In an op-ed for Sunday’s Tribune-Review, Mistick, a former executive assistant to Mayor Sophie Masloff, blasted the public station for laying off employees while upper managers make “six-figure salaries … (with) Duquesne Club memberships included for some.”
“The top executives continue to live in the lap of luxury while those employees who are least able to take the hit are the ones who were targeted,” Mistick says.
“Ask yourself what it says about a public charity when it acts like Bernie Madoff or AIG or any of the robber-baron corporations that have coddled the rich and cast adrift the poor.”
He’s particularly hard on the station’s production of the French and Indian War miniseries “The War That Made America,” which he calls one of WQED’s “colossal mistakes” and one that broke faith with Pittsburgh’s major philanthropists.
“Other folks around the station point to the day that Fred Rogers died as the day that WQED lost its soul,” Mistick says.
Until recently, Mistick has been one-half of an occasional Monday night panel show with Allegheny County Executive Jim Roddey, but says he’s now “effectively ended my public-television career.” We’d have to agree.
