Global Toronto scoops up former CITY-TV veteran anchor Anne Mroczkowski

Anne Mroczkowski starts anchoring the flagship 6 p.m. newscast with Leslie Roberts starting June 1, after she was fired along with 35 other CITY-TV (Toronto) employees and 25 others in Rogers’ newsrooms in January.  Mroczkowski is no stranger to Global TV; it’s where she began working in TV newsrooms, in 1976, and where, she recalled in an interview this year, she was sexually harassed. She left in 1978 to build a 32-year-career at CITY.

Global TV was an ambitious new station when Mroczkowski first worked there, and one who has adopted a very different news culture now. In an interview with The Current’s Anna Maria Tremonti in February, Mroczkowski described Global in 1976 as “like the wild west” run by hard-drinking, hard-smoking, tough males, mostly with backgrounds in newspapers.

She recalls that before workplaces had to “accommodate the sensibilities of women” and before human rights commissions, the newsroom was a minefield for females. She described one incident in which an unnamed,  “very powerful man in authority” lunged at her for a kiss – “a very inappropriate approach”. She punched and swore at him, and figured that was all she had to put it behind them. But, she says, his anger at the rejection led to him denigrating her character and soon she was bounced from the evening newscasts to the morning show. However, her punishment was ultimately her salvation; she learned to write with the host, Bill Cameron, who then recommended her to CITY TV when he moved there to host, in 1978.