PERSONALITIES
Christine Craft
Thursday: 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Saturday - Sunday: 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM

California native, attorney and KGO fill-in host Christine Craft was a key figure in a landmark court case that put a glaring spotlight on gender discrimination in the media, and is taught in law schools worldwide to this day.
Craft started her media career in 1974 at Salinas TV station KSBW-TV. During the late '70s she handled on-air duties in news, weather and sports at KPIX in San Francisco, and in 1977-78 was a reporter/anchor for the CBS Television Network, hosting a weekly segment on the CBS Sports Spectacular.
She was co-anchoring the news at KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara when she got the call from KMBC-TV in Kansas City. In 1979, eight months after taking the position, she found herself unceremoniously demoted to reporter because, the station said, focus groups said she was "too old, too unattractive and wouldn't defer to men." Neither deferential nor a doormat, she sued in federal court sex discrimination under Title VII . The ratings came out showing that the station had gone from number three to number one in News during Craft's tenure as the co-anchor. In the first trial, (Craft vs. Metromedia); a jury awarded her $500,000. The station appealed and got the judgment overturned. At a second trial, the jury also ruled in her favor, and once again the station prevailed on appeal. When the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Judge Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that she would have heard the case. Without the other justices agreeing to hear the case, it ended - to be spotlighted later in her 1986 book Too Old, Too Ugly, Not Deferential to Men, which received the Rhodora Prize.
She was named one of the top five collegiate speakers in the U.S. in 1984 (sharing the year's honors with, among others, Maya Angelou and Vincent Price), and her story was featured in an exhibit at the Newseum museum of broadcasting in Washington, D.C.
After returning to California in 1981, she continued to work in TV news, back at KEYT, then at KRBK-TV in Sacramento. She has also hosted many television news programs for KQED in San Francisco. Then she went to law school, graduating from the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific in 1995. Craft practices law for Farrell, Fralob and Brown in Sacramento; she has lectured at hundreds of colleges, universities and law schools about TV news and Title VII litigation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964).
As a legal advocate for animals, she puts in many pro bono hours to convince judges and district attorneys to take animal abuse cases seriously. A competitive surfer in her pre-journalism days, she enjoys distance swimming and spoiling horses.
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