Celebrating--Cautiously--Women’s Gains in Television News

First off, the single most heartening aspect of Judith Marlane’s then-and-now book about women in television news, more than two decades after her first tome on the topic, has to be that many of the women Marlane interviewed 23 years ago still are in television news.

That would make them, let’s see, 50-ish at least, and the very notion that 50-ish women are still delivering the news on television, in mad-about-youth America, is as heartening as it is radical. So is the fact, says Marlane, that the size of their paychecks, adorned with more zeroes than heretofore (Christiane Amanpour broke the CNN six-figure record with a reported $2-million contract in 1996) is nowadays more influenced by good agentry than gender. (Still, it took court judgments, not necessarily conscience, to put the brakes on the worst of sexual harassment.)

But, lest anyone get too cheered up, there is a “yes, but” kind of sigh that breathes out of the book’s pages, hard as it may be to fathom that there have ever been troubles in the charmed lives of Mesdames Sawyer, Walters, Pauley, et al.

Splice 1970s’ feminism onto an enduring truth, “The more pigs change, the more they stay the same.” Marlane heard the usual career-woman laments of the tugs of work and family; women who 23 years ago were confident they could, cliche-fashion, have it all instead found that “all” was particularly out of reach in a biz that can put you in pinstripes in Washington one day and in a flak jacket in Bosnia the next.

Standing against these network veterans’ depth and staying power (part prom date, yes, but greater part pundit) is the Barbie doll matchmaking of local news stations that is, if anything, more pronounced: the suave older guy, the perky young gal--the Trophy Anchor.

Marlane quotes “Nightline” staffer Dave Marash to the effect that the “girlie factor” is worse now than before, where what gets hired is a hairdo, not a brain. Nonetheless, Marlane acknowledges, the top-tier women she interviewed “are obviously far better looking than the average population,” and were hired in part because they “fit somebody’s image of what a reporter should look like.”

All this Marlane has monitored in “Women in Television News Revisited,” an anecdotal, longitudinal survey of nearly a quarter-century. The head of Cal State Northridge’s Department of Radio-Television-Film for a dozen years, she spent some 25 years before that in front of an audience, in a career extending from en pointe in the Joffrey Ballet to on-air jobs in TV. That she can unfurl such a resume is testament to her skepticism in the face of employers who told her, “women don’t make reporters, they make babies.”

Nearly 20 years passed between the hiring of the first woman co-anchor on network weeknight news, Barbara Walters, and the second, Connie Chung. In each, the male outlasted his distaff side. Marlane says Dan Rather told her that “he was concerned he was the one to be let go, not Connie Chung.” But when she repeated the story to Reuven Frank, former president of NBC News, he said, “If you believe [Rather would have been let go], I have a bridge to sell you.”

As for growing older in the camera’s eye, let’s just say that blond is the TV newswoman’s version of gray. Or call it the Ed Bradley Syndrome: gray beard and one earring okay, gray hair and two earrings not.

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Christine Craft never got to the networks, but her experience and her landmark lawsuit made her a colossus on the news landscape all the same: a Joan of Arc to some women, a Banquo’s ghost, or Jacob Marley’s, to others.

Craft was the 30-something Kansas City news anchor, later hired by a Santa Barbara station, whose Midwestern bosses fired her in the early 1980s because they found her to be “too old, too unattractive and . . . not sufficiently deferential to men” on the air.

Precedent is not memory. Marlane fears that for aspiring young newswomen, the model of the Craft case, and how it served to keep somewhat at bay the demands that giddy women do demeaning stories, has dumbed them down rather than wised them up.

New York newswoman Carol Jenkins, who fought all the good fights for more than 20 years, told Marlane about being asked to cover a bathing-suit story, with the cameraman shooting from the floor at the women’s buttocks--no faces, just bottoms. Jenkins objected, saying that she and others had fought not to have to do such stories. The producer looked at Jenkins like she was several oranges shy of a crate. The producer was a young woman.

The women Marlane interviewed fretted that all the territory won in their wars over what goes on the air and what goes on in newsrooms is being lost by younger women who take the victories for granted. And virtually everyone, men and women, from Rather to ABC’s Judy Muller, worried even more about the conflating of news and entertainment, until the importance of the former is drowned out by the allure and the ratings of the latter, a climate in which the women are often better than the work they’re asked to do.

“Isn’t it sad,” Marlane muses, “that we’re entering the 21st century and I’m writing a book about that?”

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison @latimes.com