HuffPo | Charlo Greene certainly knows how to make incredible live TV.
After announcing she was leaving her job at the KTVA station in Anchorage, Alaska, by telling viewers, "Fuck it, I quit," she joined HuffPost Live on Thursday and smoked a joint live on the air.
"I'll spark up right now. It is what it is. I'm in the privacy of my own home. I can spark up," she told host Alyona Minkovski as she gleefully lit up.
Greene responded to the apology from KTVA's news director,
who said she "betrayed the basic bedrock of responsible journalism" by
reporting on a business she herself owned, the Alaska Cannabis Club.
"It's
true," she said of accusations that she acted unethically. "I have a
journalism degree. I know in journalism there's a line that you're not
supposed to cross, and the minute I bought my business license on 4/20
of this year, I shouldn't have reported on any marijuana stories. But if
I had gone to my boss and said, 'Hey, I bought this company,' I would
have been fired, period. I wasn't ready for that to happen."
Greene said she felt a "responsibility to the community" to offer a dissenting voice from Alaska's "Vote No On 2" campaign,
which seeks to defeat a ballot measure to legalize marijuana, and
ensure "their fear-mongering wasn't going to be broadcast as fact." She
explained:
If everyone is upset about my 'breach of trust,' and me crossing that line, then how about you get upset about the fact that journalists in 2014 just go off and say, 'Alright, well you say whatever it is that you have to say,' [and they hear] 'Oh, the kids. The kids are going to start using if we legalize marijuana.' You put that on air without even vetting that? The state of Colorado says teenage usage rates are falling, but the No On 2 people aren't going to say that. Yet every other journalist in this market is going to put their comments on air without vetting them.
Greene also shared her side of what she called a "patently false" TMZ report
in which her neighbor Tyler Gilbrech claimed Greene smoked so much pot
in her apartment that it seeped through the walls and made his
4-year-old "violently sick." Gilbrech got a restraining order against
Greene after she allegedly threatened him to "watch his back."
