KSDK Meteorologist Anthony Slaughter Fired
KSDK meteorologist Anthony Slaughter has been fired by the St. Louis NBC affiliate. Slaughter has worked at the station off and on since 2009.
"I'm pretty much as dumbfounded as you are," Slaughter told Saint Louis Magazine. "I just got called into an office one day, and they just said we're parting ways…It was a three-minute conversation."
Slaughter admitted that his attitude may have played a part in the firing.
SLM said KSDK is a perennial number three in the morning ratings.
"So the idea of being a number three meteorologist was always thrown around in my face, you know? And it was like, 'No, no. This is a station problem. Yeah, this is not a me problem,'" Slaughter said.
In a social media post, Slaughter said the evolution of local news since he started in 20005, has led him to want to get out of the business 'for a long time.'
'No more clothing allowance. Do your own makeup!? Like how as a man…be on social media,' he wrote. 'Post often. Engage, often. More and more work for less pay. Less about you as a person and more about a brand or content. Welp, finally, it's done, it's over. Back to being me. Not having to answer to anyone about what I post or how I feel. Not having everything I do be rated or critiqued by a company. I can finally be a person again. I can finally be free!'
Multiple sources say that Slaughter clashed with KSDK director of content Morgan Schaab over the station's morning program, Today in St. Louis. Schaab came to KSDK last February.
Slaughter didn't mention Schaab by name, but indicated that station leaders were pushing the pace.
"There's only a certain amount of hours in the day, and there's only a certain amount of things you can do in a shift, and we were doing so many things on our morning shift, you know, doubling up, recording things, just so we could do something else-I mean, it was getting to be a little absurd," he says.
He says he loves weather and meteorology, but his job was getting bogged down in semantics. "I don't know if you've heard, but they've got a new brand called 'Weather Impact,' and they want you to say it a thousand times every weather hit," he says.
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