Jim Strickland, who spent nearly 20 years at WSB-TV as a consumer investigative reporter before retiring in 2019, died Monday night, according to the station.
He helped launch the station’s consumer investigative franchise in 1999. The station did not provide a cause of death, though his wife Marie was by his side when he died. Strickland was 65.
Strickland’s investigations over the years have shut down unscrupulous medical clinics, led to federal raids of illegally run businesses and facilitated sweeping regulation of the city of Atlanta’s car booting industry.
“I’ve been doing this since before Ronald Reagan got shot,” Strickland told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in early 2019 before his retirement. (Reagan was nearly assassinated by John Hinckley Jr. in March 1981. Strickland started at a Dubuque, Iowa, radio station a few weeks before that.) “This is a hard job. The hours are wacky. The hours are long.”
At the same time, he said, “it’s very rewarding, don’t get me wrong. It’s an exceptionally rewarding job. You get to a certain age, though, and it just wears a little bit.”
John Pruitt, the veteran WSB-TV anchor who retired in 2010, called Strickland “an uncompromising journalist who did an awful lot of good exposing scams that took advantage of people. He was amazingly thorough, diligent and persistent. If you were up to no good, your nightmare would be Jim Strickland walking up your driveway with a camera crew in tow. Once he was on a story, he wouldn’t let go until he had the goods. And he always got the goods.”
Richard Belcher, a fellow WSB-TV investigative reporter who retired in 2022 after 51 years on the air, said Strickland “was as good a reporter as I saw at Channel 2 in the time I was there. Organized, serious, effective. He did stellar work but he was not obsessed with work. When he left on vacation, he basically tuned out the station. You don’t always see people with that kind of self control in our line of work.”
Strickland spent the first 18 years of his broadcast career in Iowa. Getting his job with WSB-TV, he said, was a bit of a fluke. He happened to answer the phone at WHO-TV in Des Moines in 1999. On the other end of the line: then WSB-TV news director Ray Carter. The Atlanta Falcons were about to play the Minnesota Vikings in Minneapolis for the NFC Championship. Carter had been news director at WHO and was seeking to borrow a satellite truck for WSB-TV to use.
Offhandedly, Strickland mentioned negotiations weren’t going well at WHO and he was open to a new job. Carter invited him to send in a tape and Strickland ended up getting hired. Carter, who retired earlier this year as general manager of WSB-TV, was starting a consumer investigation franchise and Strickland was a key hire.
Strickland ultimately thrived in the consumer investigation world. “You get to talk to real people in every story,” he said. “You can find real characters that the audience can have a stake in and care about.”
He received a lot of notice for exposing in 2018 a Gwinnett County dermatologist known as “the dancing doctor” who posted videos of herself dancing and singing around exposed, unmoving patients and relinquished her medical license in Georgia.
“It’s the first time I think I’ve been quoted in China,” he mused. “My friend Steve Osunsami put it on ‘Good Morning America’ day after day using our video.”
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