Longtime WRAL reporter will leave the station in January, but says this is not retirement
Gilbert Baez, a fixture on WRAL-TV for 17 years, will leave the station in January.
Baez worked for WRAL as their Fayetteville reporter from 1989 to 1996, then for 17 years at ABC11 WTVD before coming back to WRAL in 2014. He has also covered the weather for both stations.
In a Nov. 8 email to WRAL staff shared with The News & Observer, news director Mike Friedrich said Baez would be leaving WRAL “in early January,” noting that Baez said “this is not a retirement, but instead a new chapter in his career.”
“I’m not sure exactly what it is I will do after January, but my wife and I, Doris, will take a deep breath and we’ll see what the next challenge is,” Baez, who turns 70 next year, told The News & Observer in a phone call.
He plans to stay in the Triangle area and added that if he does not find another job in television, he will “probably run for county commissioner.”
“How can I help the community, and how can I be the voice for the voiceless?” Baez said.
Friedrich called Baez “one of our region’s most respected reporters for decades” and called attention to his work covering the first Iraq war in 1991.
Of that time in the Middle East, Baez said on his WRAL bio page: “I was supposed to be on the assignment in the Middle East for about a week. I ended up staying overseas for nearly two months and was able to develop wonderful stories about the men and women who volunteer in the Armed Forces to keep America safe.”
“I would hope that people know that I’m a damn good reporter, and there have been stories that I’ve broken and information I’ve gotten just because of my relationship in this community,” Baez told The N&O.
Baez’s journalism career
Baez grew up in Philadelphia but has spent at least the past 35 years in Fayetteville. He is a former U.S. Army Ranger qualified combat communications officer who worked at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg).
He has spent about 50 years in radio, as an announcer, news director and program director. He still works as a disc jockey.
In addition to his job in broadcast news, Baez was on staff at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, for 15 years, from 1990 to 2005. He spent around seven of those years as an adjunct professor, teaching on topics including speaking for radio and television, radio editing, and television and radio production.
Baez won an Edward R. Murrow Award in 1995 for his reporting on Fort Bragg soldiers killed when an F-16 fighter jet collided with a cargo plane at Pope Air Force Base, according to his bio. “Unsafe: North Carolina kids dying from gun violence,” a documentary for which Baez reported, was recently nominated for a Nashville/Midsouth Emmy award.
Baez was hospitalized for more than a week in August 2021 with COVID-19 and shared video updates from his hospital bed at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville.
“In my time at WRAL, it is apparent why so many in our communities have come to trust and respect Gilbert’s work,” Friedrich wrote. “Gilbert opened doors and told stories that no one else could tell. He has also helped provide a voice to the voiceless and has broken hundreds of stories to make sure Fayetteville was an important piece to our news coverage.”
Baez has five daughters, two sons and 10 grandchildren.
