Kansas City News Blog

A news director for KCTV Channel 5 allegedly wore a T-shirt reading, "Fuck Women, Fuck Hispanics, Fuck Gays, Fuck Blacks," to one of the station's meetings in 2004.

That's one of the allegations contained in a lawsuit filed in Jackson County Court on May 29 by Francelle R. Watson, a former news operations manager at KCTV 5, which is owned by Iowa-based Meredith Corporation. Watson, a 49-year-old African American woman, was a 21-year veteran of the station until she was fired on June 10, 2008.

Watson's lawsuit calls the atmosphere at KCTV 5 "hostile and permeated with threats, intimidation and disrespect," and notes that in Watson's two decades there, only 14 of the approximately 150 employees at the station were African American. It also notes that Kevin O'Brien, KCTV's head of broadcasting from 2002 until 2005, was eventually terminated for repeated comments criticizing blacks.

Jayson Ford, Watson's lead attorney, says, "One of the disturbing things about this is apparently we have here ... a very pervasive environment of, You're too old, you're not of the correct racial profile that we're looking for, and we're going to shuffle you out the door."

According to the lawsuit, "Firings or non-renewal of minority reporter and anchor contracts during the last several  years include on-air personalities Sharita Hutton, Robert Lyles, Michael Scott, Ty Chandler and Ty Wilson." Hutton, the lawsuit states, also filed a claim of discrimination against the station.

Watson alleges that after she complained about Regent Ducas' offensive T-shirt, Ducas "suddenly and without explanation" demoted Watson to a 2:30 to 10:30 p.m. shift, blocking her from attending the morning meetings. Ducas left KCTV 5 in March 2007 to become vice president of news for KTVT in Dallas-Fort Worth. He's now with a company called Talent Dynamics as director of business development/sports. We left a message for Ducas and will update with his comments if he calls back.

Watson also complains that she was not allowed to count the days she attended the 2007 National Association of Black Journalists Convention as paid work days. In April 2008, she was told in a routine employee evaluation that she should "think about doing something else" and work on training a successor. At the meeting in which she was officially terminated, Watson asked Kirk Black, vice president and general manager of KCTV, whether she could be considered for another position at the station, and was told that she could not.

Black is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along with human resources director Laurel Berenguer, KCTV and the Meredith Corporation. Watson claims she's suffered loss of past and future income and benefits, humiliation, embarrassment, mental distress, harm to reputation and severe career disruption, and seeks a jury trial to recover an unspecified amount of damages.

"It's a very disturbing situation when you see the background information," says Ford, Watson's attorney, citing the positive evaluations Watson received from her bosses during her time at the station. "Things start happening behind the scenes where people like Fran are being separated,  being treated differently, being marginalized. When that doesn't lead them to quit on their own and they've tried everything possible to marginalize the person and to scare into quitting, then they just go ahead and let the hammer fall."

We left a message for Black at KCTV -- we'll update this post if he returns the call.