Christine Craft II, in 3-D: Trio of KMBC female stars sue, claiming age, gender discrim

How could this have happened?

KMBC-9, the ABC affiliate in Kansas City, was not long ago considered one of the ideal places for news talent to graze anywhere in the country. It enjoyed a remarkable run of more than a decade as the market's dominant news leader, and not to disparage its journalism, but KMBC's rise from worst to first happened on the strength of its on-air personalities.

Management treated people right, and their contentment showed on air. Year after year, viewers turned away from whatever they were watching at newstime to see Larry, Lara, Laurie, Kelly, Ketzer ... nice people reading the news, familiar faces reporting the news, Kansas City's best known TV talent carrying KMBC to first place in daypart after daypart, book after book. In recent years it wasn't quite the dominator it once was, but even now KMBC remains a winning station, not just in viewers but those all-important demographics.

So: How did it come to this?

On Thursday, three of the station's most senior female on-air talent -- including Maria Antonia, the city's most recognizable Hispanic journalist -- filed suit against KMBC alleging gender and age discrimination.

The story is a familiar one: As these women aged, they were eased out of their plum positions in favor of younger, fresher female faces ... and meanwhile, their male counterparts were, to quote the lawsuit, "allowed to age, gain weight, turn grey, and wear glasses."

And indeed, this story played out not too long ago in Kansas City, when several employees of KCTV-5 filed suit claiming age discrimination. But that was Channel 5, where 65 percent of the staff turned over in what most people agree was a necessary (if brutal) transition.

But this was Channel 9. It was supposed to be different here.

Anyone still laboring under that impression won't be by the time they get through the allegations made in the lawsui (read it here), filed in Jackson County (Mo.) Circuit Court, by these three women, all of whom are known and trusted by thousands of viewers:

Peggy Breit, a 50-something reporter who had been working the dayside shift forever, watched as reporters half her age were given plum nighttime shifts or anchor jobs at KMBC's sister station.

Kelly Eckerman, a longtime anchor who'd never finished out of first place, was demoted to a shift that took away her weekend nights (she's a single mom) and overheard management saying, according to the suit, "We can hire two much younger women for what we pay Kelly."

Maria Antonia, a fixture at the station for nearly a quarter century, who alleges that she was told by the general manager, C. Wayne Godsey, "You will never anchor at Channel 9 again." Maria Antonia, alleging that she was "yelled at (through the I.F.B.) while on air ... yelled at when she asks for the means to get to the scene of a live report ... written up for participating in a tour that the station had supported for years."

(About that "tour": There is a military/media-relations tour that is sponsored by Fort Leavenworth every year. Antonia's ties to the military are strong and no doubt factored in the invitation to herself and her husband, KMBC photographer Tim Twyman, to visit troops in Bahrain and the USS Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Iraq War, giving Channel 9 a market exclusive.)

Maria Antonia was told by management that "the station needed to look ahead to the future" and that despite holding down the morning an anchor's job for 24 years at the station -- indeed, she had launched "KMBC FirstNews" with Bryan Busby in 1988 -- that job would be handed over to a much younger female anchor who was being paired with a male anchor in his 40s.

What's odd and ironic about all this is that, of course, KMBC was defendant in the most famous TV news gender-discrim lawsuit of all time, one that damaged the station for years.

In 1981, KMBC anchor Christine Craft was demoted to reporter because -- in those immortal words of management she would later make the title of her book -- she was told that she was "too old, too unattractive and wouldn't defer to men." Craft relayed those words to my predecessor, Barry Garron, who put them in the paper. Two years later, Craft filed suit and eventually prevailed, though an appeals court later overturned the decision. By then, however, it hardly mattered that KMBC won; it had gone straight into the toilet, ratings- and reputation-wise.

How did Channel 9 emerge from that smoldering wreck to become first in news just five years later? Well, it hired good people and promoted others. People like Busby and Len Dawson, still soldiering on after all these years. People like Antonia, Eckerman and Breit, who now feel sufficiently marginalized that they are risking their futures by suing their employer.

Truly, though, the most ironic aspect of this turn of events is that one man in management remembers exactly how badly Christine Craft's highly publicized case damaged KMBC: Brian Bracco, the man who took the reins in the mid-1980s, when the station was in dead last, and guided it back to first by making all of the key personnel decisions, as I recounted in this piece 10 years ago. Bracco is still there, working for KMBC's parent company as an in-house news doctor, so even if he is not running the show, past and present employees assure me that he is calling at least some of the shots.

So closely entwined with Channel 9's fortunes is Bracco that to this day, he works out of an office just down the hall from Godsey, the general manager. And when I reported that Bracco, stepping into the void left by the departing news director, had personally engineered the "FirstNews" shuffle that left Antonia out of a job, no one argued with my account. Even rival news directors knew who was directing the news at KMBC. And even though he is about to take Fred Young's job as vice president for news operations across the Hearst-Argyle chain, Bracco will continue to work from the same office in Kansas City.

In 1998, I asked Bracco why KMBC-9 had proven so durable and so successful and dominated the local ratings for so long. "There's a love affair with this community that goes both ways, from the anchors to the community and back again," Bracco told me. "There are also a lot of people behind the scenes and a lot of reporters who project stability."

Everyone knows that TV stations must continually update their presentation if they're to avoid falling into irrelevance. I'm sure Hearst and KMBC had hoped that this transition -- which perhaps was overdue -- could be done behind the scenes while continuing to, as they say, "project stability" on air. But they have also known for months that this would not last. After all, an employee must file a Charge of Discrimination with the state of Missouri prior to filing a lawsuit. Antonia now alleges that ever since she did so earlier this year,

"... she continually has been subjected to hostile and discriminatory treatment. Antonia was permanently removed from her position as an Anchor while her contemporary and older male anchors have been allowed to continue anchoring (Larry Moore - over 60; Len Dawson - over 70; Kris Ketz; and Jim Flink), and younger females have been added to the Anchor desk (Jana Corrie and Dion Lim)."

Perhaps this is the saddest part of the lawsuit, the one that shatters any outsiders' illusions and brings the newsroom problems at KMBC, you might say, into high definition:

"The environment at KMBC-TV has transformed over time, from one of cooperation into a hostile environment, permeated with threats, intimidation and disrespect. Management has thrown around the word 'insubordination' with various employees in a very threatening way. Even unaffected newsroom employees have commented about the publicly humiliating, and degrading treatment of women over 40, including but not limited to these plaintiffs. The observable damage to plaintiffs, and others similarly situated, is both private and public."

UPDATE: What KMBC is telling viewers