Update · September 14, 2026
On August 26, the day this site published BAM’s plan to get its stores into local news through stories reporters would call their own, WECT in Wilmington, North Carolina, aired one: a rescue kitten’s first steps in a LEGO wheelchair built at Bricks & Minifigs Wilmington. Gray stations in Charlotte and Terre Haute re-ran it and national sites followed. The store’s co-owner, by WECT’s own reporting, is Scott Saxton, who by WECT’s own bio ran its newsroom from 2009 to 2019. The reporter says the assignment came from the news director who succeeded him, Brad Myers, still his close friend. None of WECT’s four stories on the store said a word about it.
CONFIRMEDScott Saxton co-owns Bricks & Minifigs Wilmington, per two WECT stories in October 2025; he was WECT’s news director from September 2009 to 2019, per WECT’s bio page; Brad Myers, promoted to replace him, is WECT’s news director today, per its team pageCONFIRMEDWECT ran four stories on the store in ten months and promoted its buying days on the station’s Facebook page; none disclosed the connection; the August 26 kitten story names no owner at all; Gray’s WBTV and WTHI re-ran it credited to WECTCORROBORATEDthe kitten assignment came from Myers, Saxton’s close friend, according to the reporter, as told to Chris Reports Things, who published it Monday; Myers had not answered himUNRESOLVEDwhether Myers reported the relationship to his management, as Gray’s code requires; whether Gray will answer; and whether BAM or its PR firm had any hand in the story. Chris found no evidence of that beyond the timing, and neither has this site
Rex is a four-month-old kitten with cerebellar hypoplasia, wobbly-cat syndrome. A rescue could not afford a wheelchair he would outgrow in six weeks, so volunteers asked the LEGO store on Floral Parkway, and an employee there built one out of bricks. WECT aired it on August 26 under the byline of reporter Jacee Caldwell. Everyone in it did a good thing, the reporter included; she was handed an assignment and did it well. WBTV in Charlotte ran it on August 31, credited to WECT, and WTHI in Terre Haute on August 27, both Gray stations, WTHI since March. Good Good Good, The Cool Down and The Mary Sue carried it nationally, with the store’s name in every version. The rescue told Chris Reports Things it had no relationship with the store; it had heard the store had done this once before.
The store held its first buying days last October and its grand opening in March. WECT covered the buying days on October 17 and again on October 18, naming the co-owner both times: Scott Saxton. The station’s Facebook page promoted the buying days too. WECT covered the grand opening in March. WECT covered the kitten in August. Four stories in ten months about one toy store, and in none of them did WECT mention what its own website still says about Saxton: that he joined WECT as news director in September 2009, after running the newsroom at WSAZ in West Virginia. He left in 2019, when Brad Myers, an executive producer at the station since 2016, was promoted into his chair. Myers is WECT’s news director today. A viewer who watched all four stories would know the store’s address, its hours, its co-owner’s name and what a kitten can do in a LEGO wheelchair, and would not know that the man who owns it used to decide what WECT put on the air, or that the man who decides now is his friend.
Chris Reports Things spoke to the reporter. She told him the kitten story was given to her by the current news director, who is still a close friend of the previous news director and store owner. Myers had not answered Chris when he published on Monday, and Chris had not yet put the question to Gray Media. Neither has this site. What the reporter described is not a tip that came in over the transom. It is the newsroom’s boss choosing a story about his predecessor’s business and giving it to his staff, in a station where the predecessor’s name was already on two earlier stories about the same business.
Gray Television’s Code of Ethics is three pages and applies to every employee. Its conflict-of-interest section: private interests “may in no way interfere with or appear to interfere with the interests of the Company,” and any employee “involved in a conflict of interest or a transaction or relationship that reasonably could be expected to give rise to a conflict must report the matter promptly to the employee’s management.” A news director’s management is the station’s general manager. Whether Myers reported the relationship up is a question Gray can answer in a sentence. The code protects the company, not the viewer; for what a newscast owes its audience, the standard American newsrooms cite is the Society of Professional Journalists’: avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived, and disclose the ones you cannot avoid. Four stories about a friend’s business, assigned from the top, with no disclosure, is the perceived conflict that sentence was written for. The cure would have cost WECT a sentence on air: the store’s co-owner is a former news director of this station.
Because it is the mechanism, caught in the act. BAM’s PR plan, published here the day the kitten aired, is a program to put the brand in local news through stories a reporter can call their own, “the most natural and powerful kind of brand placement possible,” with the brand’s hand kept out of frame. The kitten is not in the plan. It is the plan’s ideal: a store employee, a rescue, a first step, the Bricks & Minifigs sign in every frame, aired on a Gray station and relayed by Gray’s network to markets the store will never serve, two and a half weeks before the company’s first franchisee defected on a livestream. Nobody has shown BAM touched it, and a man who ran two newsrooms did not need a PR firm to know how a small-market story travels. That is the point. BAM sells its franchisees a brand that gets on the news. In Wilmington the brand got on the news because the news was run by the owner’s friend, and the station kept that to itself. That is not a marketing plan. It is a favor, and the viewers paid for it in the one currency a newsroom has, which is the presumption that the stories it chooses are chosen for them.
Sources. WECT, August 26, 2026; WTHI, August 27; WBTV, August 31. WECT, October 17, 2025, and October 18, 2025, both naming the co-owner; WECT News on Facebook, October 2025; WECT, March 27, 2026. WECT’s bio of Scott Saxton and its team page. TV News Check on the 2019 succession. Gray Television Code of Ethics, 2025, preserved with a hash. Chris Reports Things, September 14, on the reporter’s account and the rescue’s. BAM’s PR plan, reported August 26.