"It's Hard to be Essentially Forced Out"
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WHO-TV longtime Investigative Reporter and Anchor Sonya Heitshusen says that she was dumped by the Nexstar station and she says she thinks it was the station saw her as too old to be a woman on TV.
"I spent 27 years of my life doing this,” she said in an interview Monday. "I loved my job. I think I was good at it. It's hard to be essentially forced out."
“Business decision” was how the station’s news director, Rod Peterson, explained it to her back in April, giving her a mandatory 120-day notification that her contract wasn't being renewed, Heitshusen says. He said she was free to seek other employment at WHO, but not at the same salary, and not on camera.
Her reaction? “I immediately thought it must be the way I look,” she told the Des Moines Register.
A former anchor in the market said this about Heitshusen, “Sonya got the shaft. She was a true journalist in television news. The real deal. The best storyteller and go-getter in the Des Moines market.”
Heitshusen has hired an attorney and says she feels a need to expose the unfair double standard. She says every woman on television has to worry about this happening to her. But she won’t be the one delivering that report on the nightly news.
It’s not that she wants to be done with television journalism. Her boss once called her "a journalist's journalist."
But she doubts another station would hire her at 53.
It is hard to believe that in 2020 we are still dealing with stories like this.
But here we are….
