Dwight Drummond is a Canadian news broadcaster who has basically been working in broadcast TV his entire professional career.
Dwight is originally from Jamacia and says that when he first came to Canada that he really did not want to be in the country. “I was living in St. Elizabeth with rolling green hills near the Appleton estate… And then they drop me in this concrete jungle and I’m thinking why am I here.”
This caused Dwight to act out and get in trouble a lot. One day his principal said to him “Dwight, you’re here in the office every day anyway, why don’t you help me do the announcements.” This was enough to spark Dwight’s interest in broadcasting.
At first, Dwight wanted to become a famous basketball player, instead of getting into broadcasting, however eventually when he was in grade 11 he realized that he had a good shot at getting into university so he decided to focus on studying from then on.
Dwight then got into university and while at university he was able to get a job at CTV, however, it wasn’t as a broadcasting position, it was as a part of the security staff. Eventually, Dwight became a cameraman and that’s how he met his now-wife, as he was holding the camera for a show she appeared on.
A big part of why Dwight went from behind the camera to in front of it is because of the shift work because he is really not a morning person. This led to Dwight working in pretty much every job in broadcasting you could think of, from videographer to floor manager until eventually, he got in front of the camera after 6 years.
Dwight then talks about the importance of being black on the screen and how if he is on screen, people are more likely to watch because he looks like them. He also talked about covering the crime beat in news and how once he covered a story where the person accused of murder actually lived in the exact same apartment unit that he grew up in.
Working on a crime beat actually put Dwight against the police for a while. He states one experience where they drove by a police station and seemingly out of nowhere the cops pulled them over, pointed their guns at them and handcuffed them on the ground. The reason Dwight was let go was actually because of the press pass for crime scenes that he had in his wallet.
Dwight went on to press charges, which caused him to receive harassment from the police on many occasions. The officers eventually got off without charges because they said a witness gave them bad information. They could not identify the witness at all for the case.
