Last week, NBC News named Brian Williams, the cable anchor, as the heir to Tom Brokaw’s throne on its network news.
That was no surprise, so speculation inside the television industry quickly moved to the issue of who would ultimately succeed the two other aging network anchors, Peter Jennings at ABC and Dan Rather at CBS.
Several names were thrown about. Agents and CBS staff members mentioned the correspondents Scott Pelley and John Roberts as Rather’s likeliest successors. Charles Gibson seemed to have the inside track on Jennings’ job, the thinking at ABC appeared to go.
Nowhere did a woman’s name pop up. This did not go unnoticed in some quarters.
“Let’s face it,” Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News Channel anchor, fumed in an interview. “There are 280 million people in this country–surely they can find one smart woman to deliver the news.”
Williams’ appointment, and the dearth of women’s names, served as a reminder of a curiosity in the industry: Women have made huge gains in television news, but the evening news anchor remains a male bastion.
“Those three anchor chairs are the last all-male preserve in all of television–except for the people who call `Monday Night Football,”‘ said Bonnie J. Dow, associate professor of communication at the University of Georgia and author of “Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture and the Women’s Movement Since 1970” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). “It’s amazing, it’s 2002, and yet we all think it’s a logical call to name Brian Williams.”
In fact, by the standards of a few years ago, the business is beginning to look something like a sorority meeting. Women now head two of the four cable news networks (Teya Ryan at CNN and Pamela Thomas-Graham at CNBC) and hold many of the top broadcast news management jobs as well as crucial correspondents’ positions. They are the most important faces on the prime-time magazine programs and in the increasingly vital, and profitable, morning shows.
But the evening anchor’s job still carries a special weight. And the occupant has traditionally been a patriarchal figure who is white. He–except for a few moments, the anchor has always been a “he”–is the face of a network and at crucial moments is a kind of single combat warrior who carries his company’s reputation in the steadiness of his hands and eyes, conveys strength and order and helps calm a nation.
Which may be why the absence of female correspondents on deck implies to some that network executives believe that viewers would not tolerate a woman as anchor.
Many network executives said last week that such an attitude did once exist and that today’s lead anchors were products of those times. But they see change coming. Americans’ attitudes have evolved, they say, and the evening news anchor will eventually reflect that.
But others acknowledged that for all the gains made since Barbara Walters arrived at “Today” in 1961, many viewers still want the news at 5:30 p.m. delivered by a patriarchal figure.
“There are major pockets of our society and our culture in America not yet ready to accept a woman in that role because of a perceived lack of gravitas,” said Erik Sorenson, the president of MSNBC, who was a producer of the failed CBS newscast with Connie Chung and Dan Rather that ran from 1993 to 1995.
Chung’s anchoring with Rather was one of two failed attempts at a breakthrough, executed by pairing a well-known female journalist with an even better-established male anchor. It came to an abrupt close when ratings fell and personalities clashed. The marriage of Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner at ABC followed a similar course 19 years earlier.
Executives said those experiments failed for many reasons that had nothing to do with gender. At the time, though, the episodes served to bolster the conventional wisdom that the country was not ready for women as anchors of the evening news.
As of two decades ago, audience researchers found that viewers felt women lacked adequate authority and reliability for the job.
Both male and female viewers held this view, one executive said, a finding that does not surprise some feminists.
“The women’s movement really helped in this regard, but I think that a lot of women accepted male authority, and female authority seemed strange to them,” said Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation. “Thirty-five years ago, if you asked a woman if she would rather go to a male or female doctor, I think many, many, many would say a male doctor, of course.”
That the network news still reflects those times, she said, only proves that “in every regard television lags behind the culture.”
Still, Dow, the author, said that many people felt that “the grandfatherly” quality the anchors projected was exactly what the nation needed after Sept. 11.
“It was so wonderful to turn on ABC and see Peter Jennings — `Peter’s on the air, it’s OK,”‘ Dow said. “When American lives and ideals are threatened, we think of men as the proper people to handle those kind of situations. People don’t perceive a woman can pull it off.”
Chung said in an interview that because of this notion, network executives clearly believe that “it has to be a man.”
Network news executives, however, say focus groups are beginning to tell them otherwise.
“If it’s the right person, they’re fine with it, whether it’s a man or woman,” said David Westin, the president of ABC News.
In particular, Westin praised the ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas, who sits in for Jennings on occasion. Asked if she could someday be an evening anchor, Westin said, “We would never put anyone on as a substitute of the evening news anchor who we didn’t think was capable of doing the job.”
Alan Wurtzel, head of research for NBC, said that a change in attitude began to show up as early as 10 years ago. But there is a hitch.
Most important to audiences, researchers say, is that the lead anchors have deep experience. As in many other industries, because of past prejudice, there are simply more men who qualify in that regard than women.
With the lead anchor jobs closed to them, the most established female figures — Diane Sawyer of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Katie Couric of NBC’s “Today” and Walters — moved to morning and prime-time positions, jobs that, though important, probably subtract from the “hard-news” image. But shifting industry economics and viewing habits have made the morning, in particular, the place to be.
The morning programs of Couric and Sawyer bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year, far more than the evening newscasts. That has made them probably the most important people in their divisions and has made executives loath to move them.
Couric is the highest-paid news figure in all of television, with a new contract that pays her $15 million a year; Sawyer is said to have unrivaled influence over network decisions (an assertion she laughed at in an interview last week).
The soft segments on the morning programs — on cooking, parenting and celebrities — earn little respect from hard-news producers, correspondents and anchors. And though each female morning anchor has a male co-anchor, some say the evening-morning split reflects a dated division of labor.
“The qualities the newscasters are supposed to have are stereotypically thought to be male qualities — they are qualities of intelligence, knowledge, calm objectivity,” Pollitt said. “For women, the stereotypical qualities are the opposite — they are charm, frivolity, subjectivity, beauty, being a fluff bunny.”
Sawyer does not see herself as fitting that description.
“I love what I’m doing today,” she said. “I get the combination of news in the morning that can bounce through the day and on some occasions, we like to think humbly, even drive the news and ideas of the evening newscast.”
Sawyer said she never believed she had been unjustly barred from the anchor’s chair. “I’ve never thought it was about gender,” she said. “I really thought it was about who was the logical and the clear person to head up that flagship broadcast.” Jennings, Rather and Brokaw, she said, “are there because of the careers they had that led rightly and inexorably to those jobs.”
If she ever did want the job, “I think I could certainly earn consideration,” Sawyer said, adding that she would not necessarily want the job if Jennings left.
Some news executives say the focus on these women leaves out other established women journalists who do toil on the harder side of news–like Lesley Stahl, the “60 Minutes” correspondent; Judy Woodruff, the CNN political anchor; and Christiane Amanpour, the CNN war correspondent.
Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president for CBS News, says a new generation of female correspondents has emerged, thanks in part to female executives like her.
The younger female correspondents do not seem to believe gender issues will inhibit their careers.
“To me it’s a non-issue,” said Campbell Brown, 33, who covers the White House for NBC News.
“Clearly because of the groundwork of the people who came before me, who are ahead of me and have broken down so many of the barriers,” she said, “I don’t feel that there are any.”
