ABC News Boss Kim Godwin ‘Badmouthing’ New Boss Was ‘Last Straw’: Sources

Embattled ABC News president Kim Godwin stepped down after she was caught “badmouthing” her new boss — the “last straw” in a “confluence” of bad decisions that included the bungled firing of weatherman Rob Marciano last week, The Post has learned.

Godwin — the first black person to lead a major network news division — resigned Sunday to end a chaotic three-year tenure marked by a slew of public missteps that led corporate overlord Disney to bring in veteran executive Debra OConnell in February.

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The source cited Puck’s report, which included interviews with black journalists at the network who were worried that Godwin would “use the race issue to insulate herself from criticism or frame the narrative around her seemingly inevitable departure.”

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“Disney fell into the trap of the soft bigotry of low expectations and appointed someone everyone knows is unqualified to do the job… Now [they] are worried that firing the first black woman would be an act of racism, when she is simply bad at her job.”

The National Association of Black Journalists came out with a full-throated defense of Godwin on Saturday. The organization claimed Godwin’s supporters inside the network had been silenced.

“Those supporters have told NABJ that they see the attacks, perpetrated through media reports, as ‘racially motivated’ or in reaction to her not being in what some in the industry call the ‘good old boy network’ of players,” the organization wrote in its press release.

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Godwin also allegedly said in several staff meetings that “black people don’t watch the news,” and complained that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of cops, news networks had “overcompensated for a lack of diversity in the leadership ranks.”

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