After 20-year news career in Charlotte, Molly Grantham makes sudden departure from WBTV
When Molly Grantham walked into the WBTV Channel 3 newsroom on Tuesday, the longtime anchor had no idea it would be her last time there as a member of the staff.
She planned to tell the station she was leaving at the end of the month after a 20-year career at WBTV to pursue other passions, and she did that.
She told the station she wanted to share the news publicly, and she did that, too, on her social media in the afternoon.
At the same time, Grantham also fully expected to be on the air for her regular 5 p.m. shift on the anchor desk. But not long after posting her announcement — in which she wrote “it’s time to grow in a new direction” and “I am very grateful for 20-years at WBTV” — she was informed by a superior that she was to pack up and leave the newsroom, she told The Charlotte Observer by phone on Tuesday night.
“I wish I had a prettier exit,” said Grantham, who was the longest-serving female anchor in Charlotte, “but it doesn’t erase the 20 years.”
The mother of three also reiterated what she had written in her social-media posts earlier in the day: “I am not retiring. I am not leaving for my kids... We are a double-income family, and I will find another job. I am leaving because it’s just time... I’ll figure something out.
“At 46 years old, I’m excited to reinvent myself.”
‘It’s best for me to move on’
She said her family plans to remain in Charlotte. Among other endeavors, she’ll continue engaging with the community through public-speaking engagements and as a moderator and emcee (via mollygrantham.com); through her #MollysKids brand, which she built around her stories on children struggling with cancer and other disorders; and through events like her annual Pink Cupcake Walk, which supports local breast-cancer charities. In recent years, she’s also authored three books about her adventures as a working mom.
Grantham, whose current three-year contract is set to expire on March 31, said she “was really conflicted on the decision” to leave.
But she said she went in Tuesday to decline the station’s new contract offer because “I just think it’s best for me to move on in a different direction and grow in a different way. ... I’ve got some other things I’m excited about — speaking, writing, Molly’s Kids.”
As for the abruptness of her exit, which came as she was preparing to anchor four election night newscasts, Grantham said she wanted to focus on the positive.
“I believe in the decision I made,” she told the Observer. “I didn’t think it was going to end this quickly. But I really love this newsroom. I really love WBTV and the people in it, and I believe in them. I truly, truly do. ... So I’m gonna look at it like ‘excited about the future.’ There won’t be an end ‘last show.’ I wish there would be. I’d love to say goodbye. However, I can do that through Facebook.”
A message sent to WBTV’s news director on Tuesday night was not immediately returned.
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About Molly Grantham
A 1999 UNC-Chapel Hill alumna, Grantham joined WBTV’s news team in 2003 after a stint at WLEX in Lexington, Ky., and quickly developed a reputation as a bulldog reporter, diving head-first into stories about gang members, rapists and killers.
Since then, she said, she’d “done every single shift at WBTV” — mornings, weekends, days, nights. By 2007, she was anchoring the 5:30 and 10 p.m. newscasts, then in 2010 started doing the 5:30 and 11 p.m. shows. She took over as the solo anchor of the 11 o’clock news in 2019. And at the time of her departure had been working the anchor desk for WBTV’s 5, 5:30, 6 and 11 p.m. shows.
Over the course of her career in Charlotte, Grantham won four Emmys; and was named “TV News Reporter of the Year,” one of Mecklenburg County’s “50 Most Influential Women,” and “Charlottean of the Year” in 2020 by Charlotte Magazine.
Grantham and her husband Wes have a 12-year-old daughter, Parker, and sons Hutch (age 9) and Hobie (3).
Prominent supporters react to Molly Grantham leaving
Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden, who has known Grantham for two decades, told the Observer he was devastated to hear she was leaving Channel 3.
“Molly is like family to me, and she’s like family to a lot of other people,” he said Wednesday. “She’s not just your news anchor. She’s just not a news reporter. ... It’s a face that you trust, it’s a face that you love, it’s a face that you know (is) going to be honest.
“When you see her come on, it is never dramatized. It’s just Molly,” McFadden said. “It’s not like ‘I’m playing for the camera.’ ‘I’m just telling my hometown news. The story. The way it is. Nothing sensational. It’s just consistent. And you lose that by losing somebody like that.”
Sheri Lynch, of the “Bob & Sheri” radio show, wrote in a public post on her own Facebook page: “It’s impossible to overstate what Molly Grantham accomplished here. Her commitment to journalism and to her community has been so fierce and always driven by integrity and decency. She’s the best, and few can say they’ve worked harder.”
By Wednesday morning, Grantham’s original announcement on Facebook had garnered more than 3,000 comments from her devoted following.
Cathy Bessant, president and CEO of Foundation For The Carolinas, called the community that Grantham has created “unparalleled.”
“She never hesitates to put herself out there as a real human who connects real humans and causes that people care about,” Bessant told the Observer on Wednesday. “She didn’t wait for the station to set her up to do a charitable gig. She went after it. ... I just find her extraordinary.
“And she is a devoted mother. ... I know often she went home between the 6 or 6:30 (newscast) and the 11 (to spend time with her kids). That’s just one small example. But I think it’s really important that we don’t lose her from the journalism scene, we don’t lose her from the community scene and we don’t lose her from the impact she has on humanity.
“I know enough about her to know that that’s not what she’s going to do,” Bessant said. “But I just think we all have a stake in that.”
This story was originally published March 5, 2024 at 4:57 PM.
