When the Job Stinks, a Woman Gets It

Another greatest generation could have come and gone between Tom Brokaw’s announcement of his retirement and his final day on the air. Now, with Brokaw gone, the country must endure the prolonged departure of Dan Rather, which is already the subject of headlines and dramatic commentary. You’d have thought justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia had abandoned their seats in tandem.

But there’s one big difference: When Rehnquist and Scalia go, the list of potential replacements will include women and African Americans. There were none on the short list of Rather replacements, nor on NBC’s, which had far longer not to consider someone from outside the male preserve. Knowing well ahead of Brokaw’s final broadcast last night that he would be leaving, NBC sent only one person -- Brian Williams -- off to its cable farm to be reared and seasoned for the job two years hence.

Network anchoring is a ceiling a female is unlikely to crack anytime soon. When I asked various network execs what makes an ideal anchor, the composite figure had the voice of Walter Cronkite, the substance of Jim Lehrer and the looks of Brad Pitt. For a woman in broadcasting to succeed, she would not only have to be like Ginger Rogers -- do everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels -- but also tug her chin and furrow her brow.

The two attempts to open the premier spot to a female were so lamebrained you can hardly believe they are cited as a reason never to try again. Barbara Walters and Connie Chung were plopped down in the second chair, next to men who loathed them for grabbing the spotlight they thought should be theirs alone. A disaster, but not mutually shared. The failure of one man does nothing to dim the reputation of the gender. But let one woman fail, and she dooms the sisterhood for all eternity.

The only CBS person willing to talk on the record was Don Hewitt. In 1960, Hewitt coined the term “anchor” (the strongest guy on a relay team, the one who runs the last leg) and chose Cronkite, who has defined the job ever since. I remember my parents watching Cronkite for four days after the Kennedy assassination as if he were a priest getting a family through a terrible death. Press Secretary George Reedy wrote in his memoirs that LBJ decided to forgo running for reelection when Cronkite returned from Vietnam and, effectively, pronounced it the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The problem with the Cronkite model for women is that it’s based primarily on gravitas, the thing women never have until they’re too old to be seen in public. The model has been modified, Hewitt says, by the additional requirement of matinee- idol good looks. Williams may be serious, but he looks like a serious Mr. America. Rather’s likely replacement, John Roberts, could double as a male model in Dockers commercials.

The best hope women have of getting the top job is that the top job isn’t what it used to be. Who could doubt, after watching Rather hounded into early retirement by bloggers, that the age of media royalty was passing. Bloggers are like basketball fans, ready to spray beer on pampered stars whenever they make a mistake. Expect them to jump on the rookie Williams the first time he misses a free throw.

Just as Rather never rose to the iconic stature of Cronkite, Rather’s replacement won’t rise to the level of Rather. Cable is nipping at the heels of broadcast news; by the time broadcast news comes on, cable has chewed over everything that’s happened that day. News is balkanized into financial, entertainment, political and red-state/blue-state sectors. Young audiences won’t sit still for stories about “Your Health” amid ads for Imodium and denture cream; they’ve already decamped to Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show.” Many viewers prefer their news predigested by similarly like-minded ideologues such as Bill O’Reilly. The network news audience can only get smaller.

When a job is sufficiently devalued, a woman can have it. Witness the rise in female doctors once HMOs sucked all the money and glamour out of the profession. Broadcast journalism is in a slump. The money’s short, the prestige low, exotic foreign assignments over, unless you count Fallouja.

Still, we’re likely to have a woman president before we have a woman anchor on the networks. It’s clearly not going to happen at CBS and probably not at ABC when Peter Jennings eventually goes. About the time the network dinosaurs finally stumble into the tar pit, that’s when a woman will finally sit first chair.