Boston TV: Kate Merrill Succeeded By Another Blonde Anchor at WBZ

Kate Merrill

Kate Merrill, a former longtime anchor and reporter at WBZ-TV in Boston, co-anchored WBZ This Morning and WBZ News at Noon from 2017 until her departure in 2024. She joined the station in 2004 as a reporter and rose through the ranks over her 20-year tenure, earning an Emmy for her work. 

Merrill, who is white, filed a $4 million federal lawsuit this month against WBZ-TV, its parent companies CBS and Paramount, former general manager Justin Draper, Paramount’s VP of employee relations Michael Roderick, and two Black former colleagues, meteorologist Jason Mikell and anchor Courtney Cole, alleging racial and gender discrimination.

Merrill claims she was wrongfully demoted from her weekday morning anchor role to weekend nights in May 2024, following what she describes as a flawed investigation into allegations of microaggressions and unconscious bias against Mikell and Cole. 

She alleges this demotion was "career-ending" and was orchestrated to advance a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda imposed by CBS and Paramount. The lawsuit states that in the early 2020s, WBZ adopted DEI policies, and in 2020, CBS’s head of East Coast stations, Adrienne Roark, declared WBZ the “whitest” of their stations, enforcing minority-only hiring practices, which Merrill claims led to her being targeted.

Merrill’s morning anchor slot was taken by Paula Ebben, a longtime WBZ colleague who is also a white woman with blonde hair. This has led to skepticism about her discrimination claims, as noted in a Boston Globe column by Shirley Leung, which questions how replacing a white blonde anchor with another constitutes racial discrimination. Critics suggest Merrill’s lawsuit may be an attempt to capitalize on anti-DEI sentiment, especially given its timing after Paramount’s $16 million settlement with President Trump over a 60 Minutes story.