Veteran Boston TV news anchor claims she lost job because she's white
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A Boston TV anchor claims in a lawsuit that she was demoted from her job because she’s a white woman, alleging she was the supposed victim of a “DEI agenda” at the Tiffany Network.
Katherine Merrill Dunham, better known as Kate Merrill while serving as a longtime anchor for CBS affiliate WBZ-TV, filed a lawsuit against the station’s corporate parents CBS and Paramount Global this month, alleging she was booted from the newsroom to appease corporate diversity quotas.
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The 51-year-old is an Emmy Award-winning broadcaster and is married to former NHL goalie Mike Dunham.
She stunned viewers last year when she quit the station without giving viewers an explanation.
In her suit, filed in Boston federal court Aug. 5, Merrill alleged that she was targeted by managers who said the morning show was “too white” and by co-workers who filed “malicious” race-based complaints against her, per the New York Post.
The lawsuit cites exclusive reporting by the New York Post of then-CBS News president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, who was accused of using her position of power to promote minorities while sidelining white journalists during her tenure.
Ciprian-Matthews was named as president of CBS News in August 2023 despite being the subject of an internal probe by the company two years earlier over her alleged hiring practices, the Post reported.
“WBZ-TV exploited such policies and took career-ending action against Ms. Merrill to advance a DEI agenda,” according to the complaint.
Ciprian-Matthews stepped down last July and Paramount scrapped its DEI programs earlier this year.
According to the complaint, the difficulties started when Jason Mikell, a Black co-worker and meteorologist at WBZ, allegedly “made an inappropriate sexual innuendo about” Merrill “on air” in February 2024 when he “implied that Ms. Merrill and her co-anchor had sexual relations at a gazebo.”
The lawsuit alleges that despite complaints to supervisors by Merrill’s executive producer, Mikell “was not disciplined for his sexually charged remark about Ms. Merrill.”
In April 2024, after she privately texted him to correct a mispronunciation of “Concord,” Mikell allegedly “loudly yelled at her on the studio floor,” according to the suit.
Merrill claims she quickly complained to human resources; however, a week later, Paramount’s HR chief informed her that Mikell and Courtney Cole, a Black anchor hired by WBZ in 2022, had accused her of racial bias.
After 20 years at the station, the Emmy-winning broadcaster charges that she was branded a racist, demoted in public and forced into a “constructive discharge resignation.”
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