Girl Jailed For YouTube Teen Beating Bailed Out By Dr. Phil Show Staff
April 13th, 2008
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
How far will the staff of some shows go to get big ratings? This far:
The TV talk show Dr. Phil McGraw confirmed on Saturday the fact that its staff bailed out of Florida jail one of the girls involved in the violent video posted on YouTube. The video depicted several teen girls beating one of their classmates while filming her.
Mercades Nichols is one of the eight teen girls who face charges in the case of the vicious beating posted on YouTube. She was bailed out by a representative of the show on Friday night, MyFOXTampaBay.com reported.
The bails for the violent girls were set on Friday and they are ranging from $30,000 to $37,000. The girls are aged from 14 to 18.
The bailing out was confirmed via E-mail by Terri Corigliano, a show spokeswoman. In his E-mail, Corigliano explained that the show has previously helped other “guests and potential guests” of the show with different needs, but in this case “certain staff members” who were in the process of booking guests for the Dr. Phil McGraw show went a bit too far and broke the rules of the show.
“These staff members have been spoken to and our policies reiterated. In addition, we have decided not to go forward with the story as our guidelines have been compromised,” Corigliano wrote in the statement.
Keep this post and bookmark this story. Will the girl eventually appear on Dr. Phil’s show? If so, the show’s explanation will prove to be….inaccurate.
In an earlier story TMZ noted that when it comes to jumping into big stories, Dr. Phil is a serial offender:
Apparently Dr. Phil didn’t learn much from his interference with Britney Spears. Paging Dr. Fame whore.
The talk show host has allegedly posted bond, which was set at $33,000, for one of the eight teens that was arrested for severely beating another teenager in Florida. The highly publicized case has been in the news for over a week now, and Dr. Phil must want some of that action.
A bail bondsman told several local media outlets that Mercades Nichols, who has been widely reported as the alleged “ringleader,” had her bond paid by the show’s producers. When Nichols left the jail, a man who claimed to be a producer for the Dr. Phil show helped escort Nichols and her mom.
Mercades’s grandmother recently told local reporters that she didn’t have the money to bail her granddaughter out.
According to reports, the producer then told reporters to leave the jail because the Dr. Phil show had exclusive rights to the delinquent’s story. He did not comment on if Dr. Phil had helped pay for her bond.
This was how another earlier story by Fox News described how it was known Dr. Phil’s people bailed the girl out:
Mercades Nichols, one of eight teens charged in the brutal attack which was captured on a YouTube video, was bailed out by a representative of the show on Friday night, according to a report from MyFOXTampaBay.com.
A judge on Friday set bails ranging from $30,000 to $37,000 for the teenagers.
The Dr. Phil representative was waiting by the jail’s exit, and when Nichols walked out, he tried to block Tampa TV station camera people from getting video of Nichols and her family leaving jail.
TV news and TV talk shows are always focused on “the get” which is getting the big news makers who are at the center of flavor-of-the-week huge news stories. The clear reason: to attract big audiences with guests that won’t and can’t appear on other competing shows.
So remember this story — and the show’s statement that it won’t do it now.
But here is the bottom line: when shows get sensational guests, they usually get the ratings, which increases ad revenues…so their behavior (even in bailing out teens accused of beating up another teen) is rewarded when people tune in.
And then the cycle continues.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 8:49 am and is filed under Dr. Phil, Checkbook Journalism, TV, TV Shows, Television, Celebrities, Entertainment. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
