The Pregnant Pause : Television: The fact that networks are allowing more of their top newswomen maternity leave is a testament to the increasing power of women in the medium.

Of all the pop culture images of the quintessential career woman, none fits the ideal more neatly than the network TV newswoman. She globe-trots, power lunches, circulates among the influential, and along the way she gets fame, glamour and big-money contracts. The one thing the profile doesn’t include is kids.

It was no accident that when the fictional archetype of the female broadcast journalist was dreamed up, sitcom heroine Murphy Brown was unmarried and childless.

But if Murphy were real, right now she might be thinking about shopping for strollers and arranging for maternity leave at mid-season. So many network newswomen are passing through maternity wards it’s as if pregnancy is a requisite for the job.

This development has led to some high-profile personal choices as well as a few interesting corporate decisions that would have once been unthinkable in a business where the only lasting marriages were to the job, and the only “quality time” that mattered was air time.

As part of her negotiations about joining “60 Minutes” last season, CBS’ Meredith Vieira asked for and got permission to carry a lighter work load than the other correspondents so she could spend more time with her infant son. In April, Maria Shriver asked to be relieved of her regular weekend anchor duties on “NBC Nightly News” and “Sunday Today” so that she could be home with her husband and new baby. Her replacement on “Sunday Today” was Mary Alice Williams, who herself had just returned from giving birth to her first child--a year after joining the network.

For Faith Daniels, her maternity leave from CBS this spring became an opportunity for career enhancement. While she was out from “CBS This Morning” having her second child, NBC was negotiating her post-partum leap to that network as a featured anchor on the “Today” show.

And now, there is Connie Chung. Until last week, Chung--with, perhaps, Diane Sawyer--was the personification of the “wedded-to-my-job” TV careerist. Then she turned the image on its head. Chung, 43, announced that she needed to cut back, not for a mere maternity leave, but for something unprecedented in network newsrooms--a sort of conception leave.

In an uncommon airing of a deeply personal matter, Chung announced that she and CBS had agreed that “Face to Face With Connie Chung” would not become a weekly series in the fall as planned, because she and her husband needed to take a “very aggressive approach” to conceiving a baby. The show would have to appear periodically instead, as specials.

What made Chung’s announcement remarkable was not only its unusual candor, but its practical consequence: Chung, who a year earlier had jumped networks to help CBS in its decade-long quest for another prime-time news hit, was seemingly pulling back at the brink of success. In a sort of trial run this summer, Chung’s show had performed well for CBS, the last-place network in prime-time ratings.

At a time when family concerns dominate the public arena, and issues such as parental leave have come to the fore, what do all these childbearing TV journalists mean? That the networks are in the avant-garde of social change, broadening benefits and opportunities for all female news employees? Hardly.

For the moment, it means that enough women have gotten far enough in television to make demands, and the demand they are increasingly making in the age of family is motherhood.

CBS executives bravely expressed their support for Chung’s decision in their prepared statements accompanying Chung’s announcement, but beyond that the network refuses to discuss the broader policy implications of the move. Chung, too, declined to comment beyond her statement of last week.

It is clear that Chung is being accommodated because she is a million-dollar news star who could always take her ratings elsewhere. The question arises whether a third-year newswriter could expect the same concessions.

Last week in her syndicated newspaper column, Linda Ellerbee, the former network correspondent and author of a best-selling memoir about TV news, publicly applauded Chung, for her gutsy public declaration, and CBS, for its sympathetic response. In an interview, Ellerbee recalled a time when the issue would never have presented itself. She started in television in 1973 at one of Houston’s local stations, part of the first prominent wave of newswomen--which included Chung--to quickly work their way up to the networks, in part by demonstrating devotion to the job.

“The atmosphere was such that if you wanted to succeed, you did what men did. What men were doing was (they were) willing to put their families second,” said Ellerbee, a single mother of two preschoolers when her career began. “If I had it to do again, I would have the courage to ask for more time to be with my kids.”

Beyond demonstrating Chung’s clout, Ellerbee said, the newswoman’s decision represents a momentous step in the slow evolution of workplace policy regarding women’s issues, at least at CBS. “What’s happened here, and people forget about it, is the precedence it sets,” she said. “It would be very hard for them (CBS) to say no to a line correspondent who asked for the same thing. They might have a suit on their hands.”

Gloria Allred, the prominent feminist and attorney, said she would not hesitate to point to Chung’s circumstance if CBS News were to deny a client’s request for, say, a change in assignment due to pressing family or medical needs. “This certainly would be the argument of the next person who comes along,” said Allred, a legal issues commentator for KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles.

NBC News, for one, is trying to shape some sort of policy in this area. Don Browne, executive vice president, has taken a special interest in the issue, having been confronted with the pregnancies of several well-known newswomen in the last year. The area of family policy is so new and so uncharted in TV newsrooms that he calls his effort “a work in progress.”

“What’s emerging is that when you have these very talented women who have spent years getting where they are, it makes sense in the ‘90s to take it case by case and give these women the support they need to keep them at work and to keep them productive,” Browne said. “When you get to a certain level, there is not that much exceptional talent.”

Maria Shriver is a case in point. After becoming a mother last December, Shriver decided she wanted to travel less so she would have more time at home in Los Angeles with her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and their daughter Katherine. That meant leaving her weekend anchor positions on the East Coast. Had NBC been unwilling to “meet her halfway,” as it did, Shriver said she was prepared to leave TV for the time being.

“A network consumes you,” Shriver said. “I told them, ‘I cannot shoot seven days a week, 16 hours a day. I cannot give you my life. I will give you my working hours.’ I think that’s a reasonable thing to want. They still get a lot of work out of me.”

Shriver has been preparing personality profiles for her new series of prime-time specials, “Cutting Edge,” which is scheduled to debut Tuesday. She still works full-time, often out of her home, but she has her weekends free. And now when she leaves town on business, she has her baby and nanny in tow.

As it turns out, Shriver’s reshuffling of priorities isn’t a process only new mothers undertake. “The life is taking its toll on men, too, because of the sacrifice of time and the long periods away from home,” acknowledged NBC’s Browne. “Raising a child is no longer the single domain of women.”

One of Shriver’s cameramen, for instance, has asked for fewer out-of-town assignments so he can be available for his family. Anchorwoman Faith Daniels’ husband, Dean, a WCBS news producer, took paternity leave when the couple’s two children were born. “He has tried to pull back so he could be there when I couldn’t, to take our son to the doctor or whatever,” Daniels said.

“I think what’s changing the workplace for women is that men are changing,” said Daniels. “Men aren’t spending more hours at the office. Men are trying to work more at home. Men are trying to get out of the office to the Little League games.”

As profound as the changes in TV newsmen’s attitudes toward parenthood may be, attention will invariably focus on the newswomen who enlarge and expand right before the public eye, television being the visual medium that it is. There is some concern that high-profile motherhood could create a backlash against women.

Allred, who said she admired Chung’s openness, nonetheless thought it could have an unanticipated effect.

“I just hope this doesn’t mean that anyone should bring back the concept of the ‘mommy track,’ ” Allred said. Mommy trackers would establish dual career paths for women: One a fast track to the top for women who intend to remain childless, the other one less demanding, and therefore less rewarding, for women with families. “I don’t think women should be segregated because they are parents.”

So with television being the national hearth, is it inevitable that all this highly visible motherhood will have some effect on public policy? Not necessarily.

“Because I was allowed to bring my baby to work, was I able to get on-site child care at ABC? No. I worked on that for a number of years,” said Joan Lunden, who has been through three very public pregnancies as co-host of “Good Morning America.”

What it does is change attitudes, as Lunden quickly learned. Ten years ago, a session was scheduled to introduce her to the TV press. One topic Lunden was instructed to avoid was the recent birth of her first child; baby talk would undermine her image of a serious newswoman, ABC executives said. But the press wanted to talk of nothing else. So intense was the interest that, before the end of the session, the network executives had little Jamie delivered to Lunden on stage.

“They realized something was there,” said Lunden. That something was a connection between motherhood and the audience, something Jane Pauley experienced when the “Today” show ratings shot up with her pregnancies, something Faith Daniels learned about when she was with the “CBS Morning News.”

Word of Daniels’ pregnancy four years ago was welcomed in the newsroom with a reaction the anchorwoman hadn’t anticipated. Exclaimed her executive producer: “That’s great for the ratings!”