Doors Opening for Women Execs? : Television: Fox’s promotion of Lucie Salhany doesn’t mean that the male-dominated industry has changed its ways.

It probably figured that Fox TV, weaned on breaking tradition since its birth in 1986, would be the first major broadcast network to hire a woman as its boss.

When Lucie Salhany, 46, was named chairwoman of Fox TV on Tuesday, she became arguably the most powerful woman ever to hold an executive post at ABC, CBS, NBC and the fledgling network she now heads.

The power becomes more apparent because Fox is the pace-setting network that has forced the Big Three to follow its lead with reality programming and breakthroughs in attitude and concept with such hits as “The Simpsons,” “Married . . . With Children,” “In Living Color,” “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted.”

With its youth-oriented programs and small operating staff, Fox is generating profits at a time of economic distress for networks in general, and thus its every move is surveyed keenly by troubled competitors such as NBC for clues to survival.

What’s more, on Jan. 19, only two weeks after Salhany’s appointment, Fox will expand to six nights of regular series programming when it launches the one-hour dramas “Class of ‘96” and “Key West” on Tuesdays, a long-planned move.

With periodic TV movies on the seventh night--Mondays--Fox, under Salhany, will approach parity with the Big Three even though it offers fewer hours of programming.

As head of Fox Broadcasting Co., Salhany now holds a position on the level of Big Three chieftains Robert Iger of ABC, Robert Wright of NBC and Howard Stringer of CBS. Her boss is Fox Inc. Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

In the cable arena, there are several women at or near the top rung of key channels, the best known being Kay Koplovitz, president and chief executive officer of the USA network.

While women increasingly have occupied important, middle-management jobs at the broadcast networks, it was only in the last 15 years that even a few approached the top.

From 1978 to 1980, Jane Cahill Pfeiffer was chairwoman of NBC and a director of RCA, the network’s parent company before General Electric. But ironically, Pfeiffer was not really the boss of NBC despite her impressive title.

As Les Brown notes in his “Encyclopedia of Television”: “In that post, the highest ever attained by a woman in the broadcast industry, she reported to Fred Silverman, president and chief executive officer of the company. Pfeiffer had helped recruit Silverman for NBC while she was a consultant to RCA and then was hired by him and RCA president Edgar H. Griffiths to help reorganize and manage the company.

“While Silverman concentrated on the various broadcast entities, and particularly on rehabilitating the sagging program schedule of NBC-TV, Pfeiffer looked after administration, employee relations, legal affairs and government relations.”

Eventually she was fired in a nasty dispute.

In 1988, meanwhile, Barbara Corday, co-creator of “Cagney & Lacey” and former president of Columbia/Embassy Television, was named vice president of prime-time programs at then-troubled CBS.

As the No. 2 executive behind Kim LeMasters, president of CBS Entertainment, Corday had wider programming authority than any woman network official to that point.

It would be wrong to conclude that Salhany’s appointment means that male-dominated TV has suddenly changed its ways. No such luck. But as the network leader in undermining tradition, Fox may well be opening a few more doors for other qualified women executives.

Salhany is an expert in syndication--a huge source of program income--and since 1991 ran Twentieth Television, which produces such series as “The Simpsons,” “L.A. Law” and “In Living Color.”

She is also clearly tough. One year ago, at Twentieth Television, she surprised many in the TV industry by agreeing with ABC to cut short one of her own studio’s series for that network, “Anything but Love,” because she did not believe that the comedy had enough rerun potential to pay off its costs.

Despite Fox’s naming of Salhany to run its network and despite the top jobs that have been won by some women in film production and other entertainment fields, this week also brought a reminder of how few the major advances really are in key areas such as local TV: The news directors at Los Angeles’ top commercial TV stations suddenly became an all-boys club again.

What happened was that the only woman news director at these stations, Nancy Valenta of KNBC-TV Channel 4, was replaced by an import from Chicago, Mark Hoffman. And while reverse sexism is also wrong, does it seem logical that not a single woman is deemed qualified to be either the news director or general manager of these stations?

As 1993 starts, the good news is that 1992’s “Year of the Woman”--exemplified by the election of Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer as California’s two U.S. senators--shows signs of carrying over into TV’s future:

There are no more powerful producers than Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (“Evening Shade,” “Designing Women,” “Hearts Afire”); Diane English (“Murphy Brown,” “Love & War”) and Roseanne Arnold (“Roseanne,” “The Jackie Thomas Show”).

The bad news is that in many ways things are no different than in the 1930s, when, as Edward Bliss Jr. recounts in his book “Now the News: The Story of Broadcast Journalism,” a woman named Helen Sioussat succeeded Edward R. Murrow in a CBS public-affairs position and Good Housekeeping named her “Girl of the Month.”

Sioussat and other women broadcasters of the time were real pioneers. More recently, women such as Marcy Carsey--first as a significant ABC program executive and later as producer of “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne”--helped break down sexist barriers. And the appointments of Pfeiffer and Corday were also important in raising public awareness.

It took a lot of people to open that door that Salhany walked through this week.