Name: Exclusive: ‘I immediately thought it must be the way I look,’ Sonya Heitshusen says of leaving WHO
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Exclusive: ‘I immediately thought it must be the way I look,’ Sonya Heitshusen says of leaving WHO

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REKHA BASUDes Moines RegisterView CommentsWHO-TV's longtime&nbsp;investigative reporter and news&nbsp;anchor &nbsp;last month&nbsp;generated tributes, at times tearful, from on-air co-workers, and questions from fans. Privately a few people wondered if there’d been a scandal, or some personal or professional blow-up.No and no. But her departure was not of her choosing."I spent 27 years of my life doing this,”&nbsp;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."&nbsp;“Business decision” was how the station’s news director, Rod Peterson, explained it to her back in April,&nbsp;giving her a mandatory 120-day notification that her contract wasn't being renewed,&nbsp; Heitshusen says. He said she was free to seek other employment at WHO, but not at the same salary, and not on camera. &nbsp;Her reaction? “I immediately thought it must be the way I look.”As a contract employee, she served at the pleasure of management, so no explanation or severance pay was required. But&nbsp;she says her last performance review, in July 2019, had been excellent. She says she has the&nbsp;third-largest Facebook following of her on-air peers. And “I don’t think anyone in the newsroom has as much experience and has won as many awards as I have.” She learned she was receiving&nbsp;a prestigious Edward R. Murrow regional award&nbsp;just a couple of weeks after she learned she was being terminated.&nbsp;But at 53, she was the oldest woman in the newsroom, and it was hard from her perspective not to see an answer to the questions of why her, and why now? A few of her male colleagues may be older, but stations tend to have different standards for men, she said.They might be described with such&nbsp;terms as “distinguished” or “authoritative,”&nbsp;or as having “institutional memory.“&nbsp;Older TV women, on the other hand, might be depicted as having an expired shelf life.&nbsp;Female newscasters often have the contradictory tasks of being experienced and authoritative but also youthful and&nbsp;the stuff of male fantasies. Heitshusen said while she got positive feedback from viewers, it often focused on how she looked.“The more I thought about it —&nbsp;especially because the news director had said there might be a job opening but nothing on air, nothing on camera —&nbsp;the more I thought, this is really the result of systemic and implicit gender and age bias,” she said in the&nbsp;interview over Zoom&nbsp;with her lawyers present. “The fact of the matter is, there just are not a lot of women in their 50s and 60s and 70s who are on the air, especially on local television.”►More: So after nearly three decades of sniffing out, reporting, and later co-anchoring the news on WHO-TV in Des Moines,&nbsp;Heitshusen doubts she’ll ever work&nbsp;on camera again. "I'm done with broadcasting," she declared.That means she won’t again put a face on caring for someone with a chronic, degenerative disease. She won’t again reveal the results of a painstaking investigation she undertook into questionable spending by government officials. She won’t again chronicle the mistreatment of intellectually disabled people living in a local group home.Nor will she continue to be part of the first female duo to anchor an afternoon newscast on local television, as she did with her colleague and dear friend, Erin Kiernan,&nbsp;or share some of her most intimate experiences, like&nbsp;She'd picked up on little signs that her age was seen as an issue. She says Peterson had made a few public quips about her appearance focusing on her "advanced age."&nbsp;But she says it was common for women newscasters to&nbsp;get comments from bosses on their appearance, attire or weight&nbsp;that she didn't hear made of men. And when men won awards,&nbsp;promotional ads would be aired about them; not so for women, she said.Peterson didn't respond to requests for comment Monday. WHO&nbsp;was bought last year by Nexstar Media. Heitshusen's attorney, Thomas Newkirk, did some research and turned up&nbsp;almost no women over 50 or with gray hair in its&nbsp;stations' newscasts. He said he also found&nbsp;one woman on its nine-member board of directors, and seven women among the 29&nbsp;corporate officers.Because everyone's contract is negotiated separately, there is no way to know whether&nbsp;men and women are paid equally at WHO. But in an analysis&nbsp;of age and gender bias nationally,&nbsp;Newkirk found that women make up less than a third of&nbsp;news directors. &nbsp;At&nbsp;WHO,&nbsp;both the general manager and news director&nbsp;have always been male, with the exception of a woman serving as news director only briefly, he said. Today, only one woman is in charge of a department&nbsp;(sales) at the station.Newkirk said they had reached out to the company seeking responses&nbsp;to questions about gender and age and&nbsp;possible implicit bias&nbsp;but got no response.&nbsp;Heitshusen said&nbsp;she feels a need to expose the&nbsp;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 nightly news.It’s not that she wants to be done with television journalism. Her boss once called her "a journalist's journalist." But&nbsp;she doubts&nbsp;another station would hire her at 53.&nbsp;View Comments

REKHA BASUDes Moines RegisterView CommentsWHO-TV's longtime&nbsp;investigative reporter and news&nbsp;anchor &nbsp;last month&nbsp;generated tributes, at times tearful, from on-air co-workers, and questions from fans. Privately a few people wondered if there’d been a scandal, or some personal or professional blow-up.No and no. But her departure was not of her choosing."I spent 27 years of my life doing this,”&nbsp;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."&nbsp;“Business decision” was how the station’s news director,...

Exclusive: ‘I immediately thought it must be the way I look,’ Sonya Heitshusen says of leaving WHO

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