'GMA' Alum Reflects Frankly on Being Pushed out of Morning Show
Former Good Morning America anchor Joan Lunden is still stung by the way she was pushed out of the ABC News morning show. In a new interview with Yahoo! Life, the 72-year-old journalist noted that men are not pushed out of major television roles when they hit 47. However, she also praised ABC for making it possible for her to raise her daughter Jamie Beryl Krauss while still working on the show at a time when the business world wasn't accommodating to mothers.
Lunden served as the co-anchor of GMA from 1980 to 1997. She believes sexism and ageism played a role in her being pushed out, she told Yahoo! Life, noting that she was replaced by a "30-year-old version" of herself. Lunden did not talk about it at the time though, believing it was better to leave the show with class. She called up network executives and reminded them how NBC News viewers were furious when Jane Pauley was replaced by Deborah Norville on the Today Show the previous year. Lunden told the network they could say she was "tired of the morning shift" and wanted to spend more time with her children.
The experience still hurts. "I mean, I was 47 years old. That's not old. They don't push men out because they're 47," she said. "I don't look back. I'm not the kind of person that looks back."
Lunden did have some words of praise for ABC News though. She recalled finding out she was pregnant with her first child the same day she was offered the job to co-host GMA. She told her agent she was concerned they would withdraw the offer, but her agent reminded her that Congress passed a law banning companies from denying a woman a job because she is pregnant. Her tenure at GMA started eight weeks after Jamie, now 42, was born.
"I really hand it to ABC for being a courageous enough company to have allowed me to do everything I did and to actually put it in my contract," Lunden said. "It was unheard of, and it set a precedent that rippled through companies across America for years to come. At the time, I was just putting one foot in front of the other... I didn't realize that I was, like, out on this wild frontier and that I was changing life for working women everywhere."
In recent years, Lunden has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of breast cancer. She was diagnosed with the disease in 2014. It was an aggressive form of breast cancer, requiring intensive rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and a lumpectomy. She then devoted herself to learning everything she could about breast cancer and she saw that as a way to honor her father.
"Even when I was a Good Morning America, I hogged all of the health stories – I think because I always felt that I had made this promise to myself that I would become a doctor and carry on my dad's legacy," Lunden told Yahoo!. "I finally came to peace with the fact that, as a broadcaster, you can disseminate health information and help massive numbers of people. And then I got diagnosed with breast cancer, and I didn't think it would happen to me... I just was flabbergasted when I was diagnosed. But it took me about 24 hours to say, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute: This is my opportunity to take the baton from my dad, the cancer surgeon, and run with it.'"