Weather Channel star: I was fired for my military service

mdjonline.com ^ | June 5, 2012 | Geoff Folsom

[Free ThinkerNY]

MARIETTA — A former Weather Channel star is suing the Cobb-based channel and its new owners, claiming she was fired because of her military service.

Meteorologist Nicole Mitchell said Monday that her contract was not renewed in 2010 because the Weather Channel’s management didn’t want to deal with the time she took off to serve in the Air Force Reserves, where she is a captain and “Hurricane Hunter.” While the channel’s former management, Norfolk, Va.-based Landmark Communications, embraced her role in the military, featuring her weather-related duties on the air, she said that started to change when the Weather Channel was sold in 2008 to NBC Universal and two private equity firms, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group.

“I don’t think it was so much they were anti-military,” Mitchell said after a news conference Monday at her attorney’s office, a couple of miles from the Weather Channel’s headquarters. “But we were taken over by outside companies that weren’t internally managing, if that makes sense. And so they never got to know some of us. Our managers weren’t meteorologists anymore, so I think it was just easier for them to feel inconvenienced than to look at the benefits.”

The lawsuit states that in March 2009, NBC News Vice President Elena Nachmanoff called Mitchell in for a Sunday meeting with a “hair consultant,” even though Mitchell had a military service weekend scheduled for months. It claims that Nachmanoff was “perceptibly angry” that Mitchell didn’t come in. After Mitchell missed a second weekend assignment for “makeup consultation” in June 2009, she was removed from “Your Weather Today,” which she had been on for four years.

[thefactor]

Bain Capital was one of the first things to jump out at me when I read this. Was wondering if anyone else saw it.