What To Know
- Joan Lunden recalled learning she was pregnant just minutes after landing her Good Morning hosting gig.
- Lunden welcomed her first child the same year she started on the ABC morning show in 1980.
- Lunden opened up about her early career struggles as a woman in broadcast journalism.
Joan Lunden looked back at the beginning of her motherhood journey and of her time on Good Morning America.
Lunden recently spoke with fans at a California signing event for her latest book, Joan: Life Beyond the Script, which was released in August. While speaking to People at the event, Lunden recalled learning she was pregnant with her first child only minutes after she was offered her GMA hosting job.
“I just said to myself, ‘This is way too big a job. You’ve just got to figure out how you’re gonna do this,’” she told the outlet in an interview published on Tuesday, June 23. “And I asked if I could bring my baby to work with me because I was breastfeeding. Now, that was 1979. In 1979, one of the words that the FCC did not allow you to say on TV was ‘breastfeeding.’ Can you believe it? You couldn’t say ‘breast’ or ‘breastfeeding.’ Today, everybody says whatever they want.”
Lunden joined GMA in 1980 and hosted the show while pregnant until she gave birth to her eldest child, daughter Jamie, later that year. Lunden is a mother of seven, sharing her eldest three kids — Jamie, Lindsay, and Sarah — with her ex-husband, Michael Krauss, and two sets of twins — Kate and Max, and Kimberly and Jack — with her husband, Jeff Konigsberg.
Lunden served as a co-anchor on GMA for nearly two decades before departing the show in 1997. In the years since, she has continued making TV appearances, released several books, and beat breast cancer in 2015.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
Before making waves on GMA, Lunden faced challenges as a woman as she rose in the world of broadcast news. “I get why that was not a popular move,” she told the outlet of her first on-air job at the Hearst Television station KCRA.
In her book, Lunden recalled when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required major news corporations to hire more women as a result of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1972.
“It really historically lays out what the world was like for women from the early 1970s, really, almost from the 1960s, until present day,” she shared. “I don’t think a lot of young women in their 20s and 30s really truly understand how different life was for women. Not that long ago.”
Despite progress over the years, Lunden said she hopes her book sends an important message to readers. “I hope that this book gets into the hands of a lot of young women because they need to know, they need to understand,” she explained. “I mean, our rights and privileges are being challenged a little bit these days. And so it’s important that young women understand how a lot of us have stuck our foot in the door.”
As for the advice she would give to women hoping to go into broadcast journalism? “My husband always says, if you took a page out of the Joan Lunden playbook, it’s this: whenever anyone asks you if you can do something, just say yes, for god’s sakes,” she shared. “Just say yes, and go figure out how to do it. That motto, which I pretty much learned to embrace very early on, that has been what has catapulted me.”
Good Morning America, Weekdays, 7 am, ABC