Ratings Dispute : KDOC-TV Settles With Ex-Worker

Orange County’s only commercial television station agreed on Monday to pay a former account executive an undisclosed sum to settle her allegations that she was forced to leave the station for fighting its doctoring of TV ratings.

Representatives of both Anaheim-based KDOC-TV/56 and Linda Ford, the former account executive, refused to disclose terms of the settlement, citing a Superior Court judge’s order of confidentiality.

The settlement is the latest of several that the station has been forced to make in recent years to resolve employee claims of kickbacks, doctored ratings and sexual harassment by management.

Claimed Sexual Advances

Ford herself was at center stage last year in one of those actions. In a suit filed by a fellow employee, advertising salesman Steve Conobre, Ford testified that station talk-show host Wally George had made persistent sexual advances toward her. Ford is married.

George denied Ford’s allegations, saying that Ford was the aggressor.

(Conobre, who alleged he had been fired for opposing the alleged sexual harassment and for refusing to use phony TV ratings to sell ads, won a $256,000 jury award, which KDOC is appealing.)

In filing her own suit more than 2 years ago, Ford had sought $2.7 million in damages from the station and its parent firm, Golden Orange Broadcasting Co., headed by Pat Boone.

Ford, in charge of commercial sales at the station from 1982 to 1986, claimed that the station castigated her for trying to expose phony ratings that she alleged were designed to boost advertising rates.

After pressuring Ford unsuccessfully to perjure herself about the ratings, station officials withheld Ford’s sales commissions “for the purpose of punishing her for telling the truth about KDOC,” and they eventually forced her out of work altogether, Ford claimed in her suit.

Although Ford would not reveal how much the station had agreed to pay her Monday, she said in an interview: “I’m satisfied. (Company officials) didn’t want this to get out to the public, so they knew they had to settle it. . . . I won.”

But Calvin Brack, attorney and board member of Golden Orange and general manager of KDOC, said the company acknowledges no wrongdoing through its settlement.

Brack asserted that the station has not been hurt by the recent barrage of lawsuits, saying, “I don’t know that it’s cost us one viewer.” He refused any further comment on the Ford settlement.

Before Monday, Ford and the station had failed in several attempts to settle the case out of court. Stalled by their financial differences, the two parties had agreed go to trial, which was to have started Monday.

But Superior Court Judge Thomas N. Thrasher ordered the two sides to try one last time to reach agreement, which resulted in the settlement late Monday.

Thrasher ordered the case file sealed.