A retired news director who spent four decades at a Nexstar Media Group-owned station is speaking in defense of a peer who was fired from a Michigan newsroom over a controversial Pride Month memo three years ago.
Court document reviewed by The Desk this week reveal the legal team representing Amy Fox, the former assistant news director at WOOD-TV (Channel 8), in an ongoing defamation and wrongful termination lawsuit against Nexstar hired former WANE-TV (Channel 15, CBS) News Director Ted Linn to serve as an expert witness in the case.
In a document spanning more than a dozen pages, Linn wrote that Fox’s writing and distribution of a memo urging reporters to pull back on local coverage of Pride Month events in 2023 was consistent with Nexstar’s editorial policies and procedures, which offer some wiggle room for independent judgment by local managers like Fox on a case-by-case basis.
“Nexstar’s journalism standards as written are appropriately broad for all of their markets; that is, one-document-fits-all,” Linn wrote in his expert opinion, according to a copy obtained by The Desk. “They can’t be expected to cover every newsroom scenario in every diverse market. That’s why professionals are hired to manage newsrooms.”
The memo was written by Fox at the direction of her boss, WOOD-TV News Director Stanton Tang, who felt the station was committing too many of its newsroom resources to covering local Pride Month events in the Grand Rapids area.
In the memo, Fox reminded the station’s journalists that the station’s viewers were largely conservative, and said too much coverage of Pride Month events was likely to upset them.
“We need to recognize that some stories related to LGBTQ issues are going to be controversial and polarizing in our community,” Fox wrote in the newsroom-wide e-mail. “While you personally may not agree with a certain position, people are entitled to their opinions, and they are our viewers.”
Linn did not address those points in his written opinion, choosing instead to cherry-pick some of the softer phrases used in Fox’s memo, including her urging that staffers “discern the newsworthyness of the event” and encouraging staffers to “see me” and “have a conversation” if they had questions or concerns about the directive.
“General newsroom standards do not dictate the level of specific Pride events in (Southwest) Michigan during the first two weeks of June 2023,” Linn wrote. He conceded that, until the memo was sent, WOOD-TV’s coverage of Pride Month events “reflect balanced news coverage,” implying the written guidance orchestrated by Tang and sent by Fox might not have been needed at all.
Fox and Tang were fired for writing and distributing the memo, as were two employees suspected of leaking copies of the note to other news outlets. Fox and Tang filed separate but related lawsuits about a year after their terminations, claiming Nexstar executives broke Michigan law by providing reporters with too much information about their dismissals and defamed them by implication.
Nexstar has denied any wrongdoing in the case. In September 2024, federal judge rejected in part Nexstar’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, siding with the broadcaster on a handful of unproven elements while allowing claims about defamation and wrongful termination under state law to proceed. The case is being brought in federal court because Fox and Tang are Michigan residents and Nexstar is headquartered in Texas.
In a court filing earlier this month, attorneys for Nexstar asked a judge to prevent Linn from testifying in court, saying his position as a news director for four decades did not mean he was legally qualified to serve as an expert in the case.
To that end, Nexstar’s lawyers acknowledged Linn’s lengthy career working for their company and others, but said his opinions about whether Fox’s actions complied with its editorial rules were unfounded because “Linn admits that he has never been a part of Nexstar’s standards team, the only team that is responsible for determining what does and does not violate Nexstar’s journalism standards.”
Nexstar’s attorneys also pointed to admissions made by Linn that show his lack of expert testimony in prior cases and absence of any academic or journalistic writings or reports on “journalistic standards, defamation or re-employment after termination.”
On that last point, Linn noted Fox’s lengthy absence from the journalism field since her firing from Nexstar, and said the longer she remains unemployed, it becomes less likely that she will work in another newsroom again.
At the time of her firing, Nexstar was paying Fox an annual salary of more than $94,000 per year, according to a financial analyst who has been retained to serve as another potential expert witness. That analyst, Amy Clements, said Fox’s annual compensation rate didn’t include other employment-related perks and benefits like health care costs, which she is now paying for out of pocket.
Fox’s financial struggles have grown since her dismissal from Nexstar: In 2024, she earned just over $14,000 working for a company that helps executives secure board positions at non-profit organizations. The role is part-time, and Fox is paid on a per-client basis, Clements said. She currently receives $23,400 per year, or about one-quarter of her annual salary at Nexstar, Clements noted.
Her healthcare related costs have also ballooned, with Fox spending nearly $5,000 in health and dental benefits, Clements said.
Expert witnesses are allowed to charge an hourly rate for their work on a case. Clements usually charges $425 per hour, while Linn is receiving $300 per hour, court records show. As of June, Linn said he spent approximately 25 hours on Fox’s case, amounting to $7,500 worth of commensurable work. It wasn’t clear how much time Clements has spent putting together her analysis of Fox’s lost wages and benefits, but she calculated Fox’s statutory financial damages at more than $420,000 through the end of June.
Nexstar did not challenge Clements’ qualifications as a financial analyst, but said she started with an erroneous theory that Fox was “wrongfully terminated” and then worked through her analysis of the case and financial documents from that perspective. The broadcaster used transcripts of a deposition to back its assertion that Clements failed to review any evidence related to Fox’s termination from Nexstar when compiling her analysis, which spanned more than 30 pages.
Attorneys for the broadcaster also said Clemens lacks experience working on cases involving wrongful termination and defamation, and that she couldn’t reasonably weigh in on any possible financial damages involving defamation claims.
“She therefore will be entirely unable to ‘help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue’ in this defamation case, especially since she herself does not even understand what kind of case this is,” Nexstar’s lawyers said.
The motions to exclude Linn and Clements’ appearances as expert witnesses and their related testimony are part of pre-trial procedures that Nexstar, Fox and Tang’s attorneys are currently engaged with. A firm date for a jury trial has not been scheduled.
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