What? Two Women Are Major News Anchors?

Well, hell, the times are changing. Little steps, people.

So, word's come out that Charlie Gibson (who I've always been fond of ... his awesome handling of this moment is one reason why) is stepping down from ABC World News, and Diane Sawyer will replace him as of January 2010.

Bill Carter and Brian Stetler mark this as a moment of ongoing cultural shift in The New York Times:

The arrival of Ms. Sawyer will comprehensively alter the long-established image of an avuncular male nightly news anchor. With Katie Couric, who took the CBS anchor position in 2006, two of the three main network news voices will be female, a role that in the past has punished others, like Barbara Walters and Connie Chung.

“You’re going to have, for the first time ever, two women competing as solo anchors in a television framework that just — within living memory — sort of destroyed every woman who tried to do it,” said Richard Wald, a former news executive at ABC and NBC.

Carol Jenkins from the Women's Media Center puts the promotion of Sawyer into perspective:

Here at the WMC we always say that women are 51% of the population-and that we should not be afraid to ask for 51% of the jobs in media. At this point women hold only 3% of the “clout” positions in media. Anchoring a network evening news program certainly adds to the power quotient.

So all in all, this sounds great. But a few worries of mine:

I fear that Sawyer will be forced to endure the sexist shit piled on Katie Couric when she became the first woman to be a solo news anchor for a major network in 2006. There are valid critiques of Couric, of course (though she earned major credibility last fall for her outstanding interviews with Sarah Palin), but let's revisit a few choice moments in the advent of Couric sitting at the desk that was once Cronkite's, shall we?

• Couric's own network Photoshopped her so she looked thinner.
• She was accused ... by Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor ... of "dumbing down" and "tarting up" the network.
• Howard Kurtz, prominent media reporter, asked Couric on CNN if her hairstyle was the secret of her success. Then Kurtz asked the same question to Brian Williams ... oh wait, he didn't. Because that would be stupid.
• This same Kurtz notes that in the wake of Couric's promotion, her "wardrobe has been analyzed by the Wall Street Journal, her makeup assailed in USA Today, her dating life examined by Parade magazine, her fitness for nightly news duty debated by columnists, cable combatants, bloggers and bloviators."
• And so on.

I hope Sawyer is taken seriously. Awful as the Couric case was, I hope that it carried the burn of her being the first ... and that now that both of them are major news anchors, neither will have to carry the full weight of their gender with them. Because, you know, they're different people with different skills and different weaknesses. And so progress happens.

Second concern of mine: In coverage of the news about Sawyer, I've seen some people worried that she is too "soft focus" and unserious to anchor ABC World News; these people are thinking primarily of Sawyer's career with Good Morning America (and echo worries about Couric's history with The Today Show). (UPDATE: It's curious that while Charlie Gibson had his own long run on GMA before becoming news anchor, few thought he was too soft for the job). Ann Friedman calls it the "NewsMommy" model -- choosing unthreatening women to serve the news to the public.

I hate for Sawyer's career to be diminished as 'newsmommy' or 'soft focus.' Leave aside Good Morning America, for a moment, Sawyer has worked as a local news reporter in Kentucky, White House press aide, presidential literary assistant (to Nixon, to be sure), political correspondent to CBS News and 60 Minutes, co-anchor of Primetime Live and co-anchor of 20/20.

She's interviewed everyone, including the last three (at least) presidents and their wives, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (one of the first interviews granted to an American), Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Robert McNamara, Manuel Noriega, & dozens of legislators and Supreme Court justices.

In short: props to Sawyer, and to ABC for choosing her. I believe she'll do a good job.

In the future, though, I'd like to see Gwen Ifill and Maria Hinojosa anchoring news shows too. They're great television journalists, and, if I may say so, TV news anchoring is still way too white.

Image Credit: Reader's Digest

Comments

[Joy Reed]

Charlie will be missed but I think Diane will be a great replacement.

[Lisa Stone]

I think Diane Sawyer is the best choice to replace Gibson.

[Nik]

Sorry for my ignorance, I'm a youngin', but how did being a news anchor destroy Connie Chung and Barbara Walters?

[Anna]

Hi Nik,

I think the article's referring to Connie Chung being ousted as CBS Evening News co-anchor, pretty much dumped entirely by the network, and having Dan Rather go it alone as the solo news anchor. Chung pretty loudly protested this.

Meanwhile, Barbara Walters was a co-anchor on ABC News with Dan Reasoner, who didn't like working with her. He was pretty disdainful of her, even on the air.