Former KMOV meteorologist Meghan Danahey loses first round in court

For KMOV’s news director, the forecasted bad weather didn’t materialize: A jury unanimously ruled in his favor last week in a trial stemming from a lawsuit brought by a former meteorologist. 

Meghan Danahey, who worked for KMOV from 2014 until being fired in 2020, sued both the station’s news director Scott Diener as well as KMOV’s then-parent company, Meredith Corporation of Iowa. (Danahey filed the suit under her married name, Hodge.) The suit was later split in two, and Diener was the sole defendant in court last week as Danahey accused her former boss of intentional infliction of emotional distress. A separate trial against Meredith for discrimination on the basis of gender and retaliation will take place in two months. 

The first trial was short on shocking allegations; it was not surprising when the jury ruled unanimously for Diener. But it did offer a peek behind the curtain of television news, with plenty of household names being dropped, details being picked over, and even a few plugs for KMOV’s offerings. 

Danahey forecasted the weather on weekdays at noon and 5 p.m. She says that Diener became news director a year after her hire and later announced that he intended to remove her from those weather slots and give them to two males: Steve Templeton and Kent Earhardt. Danahey complained to her union, SAG-AFTRA, which stalled the changes for awhile.

But, according to Danahey, Diener then started intentionally causing interruptions while she was on air—during ratings periods, nonetheless. He entered the studio to show tour groups around, to pass out donuts to the staff, and to tell everyone that a meteorologist at a competing station had announced his retirement.

Diener, who testified on both Wednesday and Thursday last week, said that switching Danahey’s schedule was well within the bounds of her contract and had more to do with the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing furloughs than anything else. 

He was adamant that his donuts, which he tended to get from either John’s Donuts in Soulard or Krispy Kreme, have always been a hit with staff. He also readily admitted to giving station tours during the noon and 5 p.m. newscasts. The idea, he said, was to show visitors a live broadcast, which often had to be during Danahey’s hours: School groups wouldn’t come in at 10 p.m. or in the early morning. He questioned why a news director would intentionally sabotage his own station’s broadcast during ratings.

Danahey, who is in her early 50s, is a graduate of Texas A&M University and the Mississippi State Broadcast Meteorology Program who worked in TV news in Austin, Wichita, and Fort Myers before coming to St. Louis. She now handles the weekend weather for the ABC affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina. She was composed on the stand, a detail-oriented practiced presenter in line with her profession.

Diener, who is about a decade older than Danahey, is himself an industry veteran, running news operations in Cincinnati, San Francisco and Phoenix, among other places, before taking the leadership role at KMOV. All those years in a deadline-driven, ratings-obsessed industry facing secular decline served Diener well on the stand, as he never seemed the least bit flustered, even during cross examination. At one point, he even managed with subtle alacrity to plug the KMOV app.

The trial played out in the city of St. Louis, where KMOV based its operations until decamping for Maryland Heights in 2023. 

Diener testified that one of his supposed interruptions involved him showing then-job candidate (and future right-wing radio personality) Kim St. Onge around the station. Near the end of her interview, she said that her parents were waiting outside. Diener said to bring them in. The St. Onges had photos taken with Templeton, of whom they were big fans. “Everyone’s a Templeton fan,” Diener said. That interaction, Diener testified, sealed the deal between St. Onge, who he’d been recruiting, and the station. 

Danahey said on the stand that Diener’s hostility toward her intensified in January 2020. Her schedule was changed towards less desirable slots. She filed another grievance with the SAG-AFTRA union about the alleged discrimination. Diener started giving her general assignment reporting duties, which she said were outside her training. 

One day she was reporting on road conditions in KMOV’s Storm Mode Silverado when she was abruptly reassigned to cover a Metro bus crash. On cross examination, Diener’s attorney Robert Younger went back and forth about the weather that day. It was a “mixed precip” situation, Danahey said. Younger replied by asking why, if the bus had slid off the road, she didn’t just use her meteorology know-how to report the incident as a weather story.

In another instance, Danahey said she was working on a severe weather warning day— when the station wanted to show a “big weather presence”—but she was sent to cover a senior skip day in which local students, instead of attending classes, went to Raising Cane’s.

“If I’m a meteorologist and people are used to seeing me as a meteorologist, then why am I interviewing seniors?” she testified. 

Danahey said that by the time she was fired, she couldn’t stand the sight of Diener or even his car in the station lot. Danahey’s attorney Jerome Dobson told the jury he thought she should be awarded somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000. Diener’s attorney referred to Danahey as hypersensitive and disgruntled.

The lingua franca of the business frequently made its way into testimony. Diener’s defense asserted Danahey hadn’t increased ratings. Dobson insisted that she had. On Wednesday, while testifying that weather coverage is the backbone of local TV news, Diener quipped that the current stormy conditions outside qualified as a “First Alert weather day.”

On the final day, FirstAlert 4 veteran anchor and reporter Claire Kellett testified for the defense saying that it was not unusual for the news director to enter the studio during live broadcasts in the regular course of business—including sometimes with a tour group. She noted it would be difficult to slam the studio door, as Danahey alleged he did, because the door is designed to only close slowly so as to not make noise. As for Diener’s donuts, she said they were generally appreciated in the newsroom. 

If things had gone the other way and the jury ruled for Danahey, the trial could have been another minor scandal for KMOV, which has already had a pair of them in the last year. 

People at St. Louis City Hall have long griped about what they say is tendency to work overtime to portray the city in as negative a light as possible. Tension between the station and city leadership came to a head in February when the St. Louis Development Corporation, the city’s development arm, accused KMOV of breaking “the tenets of journalism” for airing an out-of-context clip of SLDC CEO Neal Richardson (the National Association of Black Journalists—St. Louis also issued a statement asking KMOV to “join us at the table to discuss how the story came to air”). A year before that, anchor Cory Stark had to apologize after using the term “colored” to refer to minority homeowners, seemingly having read the word off a teleprompter. 

Danahey will be back in court a few months, when a judge will decide her suit against Meredith Corporation, which has since been acquired by Gray Television.  

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story referred incorrectly to changes KMOV made to Meghan Danahey’s schedule. While her SAG-AFTRA complaint stalled the changes, they were eventually implemented. We regret the error.