Joan Lunden, 46 years old, announced her resignation from “Good Morning America”1997. In her farewell message she stated that she was going to be away for a while to spend time with her family. The Los Angeles Times. Lunden revealed the truth years later that she was asked to leave the show. Lunden told Oprah’s “Where Are They Now?”
that ABC executives never mentioned her age as a factor in their decision to let her go. They told her instead, “We’ve decided to make a change on the show.”“And so they found a 30-year-old version of me,”She added. Lunden said that Gibson did the same thing. “By the way, it was not just me. It was Charlie and me,”Oprah was the first to hear her speak. “They replaced both of us with kind of, you know, a 30-year-old version of each of us, and it didn’t work.”
Lunden made similar comments to Parade2013 “The executives made a decision that younger was better; they replaced me and Charlie Gibson with 30-something versions of ourselves,”She spoke. “I agreed to say I was going on to do other things, and then I did them. I think they lost about 4 million viewers in a week. It was a calculated risk and it didn’t work.”
