ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 31, 1996 TAG: 9609030043
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
BILL WYATT has made a habit of raising eyebrows. And he's making sure he goes out with an unforgettable bang.
Bill Wyatt's life is a soap opera, and Henry County cable television viewers have been treated to episode after episode.
And, if the most recent installment is the finale, it hasn't disappointed.
Wyatt resigned his news anchor position at tabloid-style Cable 6 last week after the station's owner confronted him with a copy of a 6-month-old letter in which Wyatt wrote that he planned to leave the station and hoped to get back his old job at a competing station.
The 34-year-old newsman grabbed the attention of national tabloid television in 1994 when his extramarital affair with a co-worker at Channel 57 in Martinsville was exposed by Cable 6.
Wyatt raised eyebrows when Channel 57 fired him a few months later and he immediately went to work for Cable 6 in Henry County.
Some are now wondering if Wyatt took the job to try to undermine Cable 6. The station's receptionist, Sharon Kidd, said Wyatt "used Cable 6 like a rehab center."
Wyatt wrote the letter last March to Pat Painter, a stockholder in Channel 57's parent company, the Southern Broadcasting Network.
In the letter to Painter - which Cable 6 disclosed on the air this week before soliciting calls from viewers - Wyatt expressed regret about no longer working for Channel 57, a station he started. And he predicted he would leave Cable 6 before the end of this year.
"I've spent the past year and a half being mad at the world," he wrote. "I intend to do whatever it takes to make things right with the people I've wronged, risk being fired again - but this time for doing what's right and move on."
Wyatt then speculates on what he would do if given another chance to work for the Southern Broadcasting Network.
"I could take the existing equipment, propose a budget of $150,000 for the year, increase the current revenue by 25 percent over the next twelve months, retire the current debt of $100,000 within 24 months and not ask the stockholders for a dime toward debt reduction or operating capital," he wrote.
However, Bill Wilson, the president of the network's board of directors, says if he has anything to do with it, Wyatt won't be increasing or retiring anything at Channel 57.
"As long as I'm in command, that won't happen," said Wilson, owner of a used car dealership in Martinsville.
While a few of the company's stockholders support Wyatt, the seven members of the board of directors are against hiring him back, Wilson said.
Wyatt, who still owns a considerable amount of stock in Southern Broadcasting, is now working for two AM radio stations, WHEE in Martinsville and WHEO in Patrick County. He's remarried, but not to the Channel 57 co-worker he had the affair with.
He did not return phone calls for this story.
The employees at Cable 6, which has garnered its share of criticism over the years for its sensational approach to covering local news, are now feeling exposed themselves.
"We feel screwed," Cable 6 owner Charles Roark said.
Roark said he got a copy of Wyatt's letter recently when someone dropped it through a mail slot at the station's studios in Collinsville.
Kidd, the Cable 6 receptionist, said Wyatt's actions reek of corporate espionage.
Roark, though, says Wyatt is just mixed up.
"He doesn't know what he wants," Roark said. "He left his wife, then he left [the co-worker at 57], then he left SBN, and now he's left us."
Said Kidd: "He can dish it out, but he sure as hell can't take it."
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB