Watchdog is overridern in cron function

When I add watchdog calls in a cron function, these are being over-riden by elysia's own watchdog message:

Unexpected termination of cron job excentriq_node_digest_daily manually started, aborted.

Is there a way around this or did I miss something? It also sets the cron job as having terminated unexpectedly which is not the desired behavior, I just want to pull out of cron function gracefully as there is nothing to process.

// Example snippet below

// No nodes to process, return and log to watchdog
if (!$result) {
watchdog("digest", "No digest.");
print_r("DONE!");
exit;
}

THe above code does not get through watchdog function, elysia reports Unexpected termination. print_r is not rendered but it is if placed before watchdog.