THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW MARLENE SANDERS
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Marlene Sanders The networks aren't looking for journalists. They're looking for attractive personalities.' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Her face is familiar: Marlene Sanders...
...And there are very good people who don't want to work at the networks...
...But it goes by too quickly...
...The one woman news vice president at CBS today runs the Washington bureau...
...Q: What does that do to the image of ourselves presented on national TV...
...You don't get vacations, you don't get medical coverage, and then if you're fired you don't get anything—you don't get severance...
...But there are women who are simply ambitious individuals, and they will go along to get along, as a lot of politicians do...
...And at CBS, when they had their big round of firings about three years ago, they didn't really fire me...
...Sanders: I'm not bitter because I was lucky to be there early...
...They were two different languages...
...Now, they would argue that Diane Sawyer and Connie Chung and all these other people have news credibility, and certainly on paper they do...
...Bad working conditions...
...Who wants to cover a beat, and really know her stuff, and get a minute and twenty seconds to tell the story...
...It's not the greatest outlet for people who really care about the news...
...If you don't see blacks on the screen, if you don't see older women, if you don't see women of any kind, it all says who's important in the society, who's got authority...
...You don't come up with stories that are not legitimate stories, but maybe you can bring attention to stories that have been ignored...
...At some point, when my agent was negotiating with CBS, they said, "She's good, but she's not a star...
...No personal life...
...Certainly if you had three women anchoring the evening news, people would get used to seeing women in that kind of commanding position...
...This winter, she will anchor a Public Broadcasting System special on India and a Discovery Channel series, Profiles in Progress...
...Q: I find it offensive that some of the people I see on TV news shows call themselves journalists...
...Sanders: That's absolutely true...
...I work with young people who spend a lot of time being unemployed...
...Sanders: Well, it depends on the women...
...I read recently that the advertising agencies, who are very powerful, have discovered that a lot of older people have disposable income, so they've begun saying, "Maybe we don't just want to dismiss the older viewers...
...I did my job...
...I don't think women would have put Deborah Norville in that job on the Today show...
...I had enough qualifications so that being a woman never worked against me...
...You hire beautiful women...
...I think the men in charge were just so snowed by her beauty that they made a mistake...
...And they're commenting on the way they perceive their audience—the mass audience, the blue-collar audience, which is more and more the audience that watches network television...
...I have no glitz...
...No one will believe a pretty woman about anything...
...For them, it's an investment...
...The news was what they bragged about—not the quiz shows and all the other garbage that makes money...
...I didn't beat people over the head with it every minute...
...Sanders: Well, it means something to them...
...Norville is super-glamorous, but it's not working...
...Sanders: Well, it ebbs and flows, depending on who's in charge...
...It wasn't until years later that they began to say we should look more analytically at what it all means...
...A lot of women say, "I am not a feminist...
...You can talk to any number of women in the business who have horror stories—about not being paid as much as men, about not getting good assignments, about various forms of discrimination...
...Q: But they're of the generation that was hired in the early 1970s...
...I wrote my book so that I would get all these people who want to be anchorwomen off my back...
...As someone who was involved in the women's movement, I had a very fine line to walk, and I think I handled it well...
...The entertainment mentality has infected the news business—and that's a long-winded way of explaining why they hire glamour girls...
...In fact, there's been backsliding, because in the middle of the 1970s at CBS News there were four women vice presidents, and now there is one...
...And there are some things I ask them, like what they read...
...But I have books stacked up, and I have other things to do...
...Jane Pauley was not a threatening person...
...They just don't believe it...
...the local stations are another subject...
...Somehow, they don't make a distinction...
...The management area, as far as I'm concerned, is the crucial one, and we are not in there...
...Certainly hiring hasn't improved...
...I think there is something mindless about it...
...And we did a documentary on the Equal Rights Amendment, and we tried to deal with some issues that were important...
...Q: And what does this say about television news...
...But if they want to anchor, maybe they don't even need it...
...I never said that...
...Insecure job...
...The fact is that I was never sure whether they were worrying about my age, or thought I wasn't charismatic enough, or felt I was too boring on the air...
...There is the view that you have to do that to establish that you're just as good as they are...
...If you have women in charge—and I don't mean one, but parity—the decisions would be different...
...Let's put her someplace else...
...Women saw you and said, "I can be like that...
...You can see women in the morning, they anchor over the weekends, and they're on specials...
...I do tell them to go to small stations in small towns...
...Q: I get the sense that no matter what women do, it doesn't work...
...Q: What advice would you give to women who do find themselves in power...
...Q: Were there moments when you were tempted to gain acceptance by being less identified with feminism, by trying harder to be "one of the boys...
...In many instances, there's been backsliding in terms of visibility...
...They take one look and think, "I'll never look like that...
...I was the first woman to anchor at night...
...Sanders: It's the symbolism of who's delivering the news that is harmful...
...If there's a space shot, political conventions, any kind of special coverage, these guys are the ones on screen...
...What do young people tell you about journalism...
...I don't think they're terribly well educated, and I don't know how much intellectual curiosity they have...
...Sanders's recent book, Waiting for Prime Time, available in paperback from Harper Perennial Library, tells about the role of women in television...
...They want somebody with—the term has changed, it used to be charisma—somebody with presence...
...In 1976, Sanders became vice president and director of documentaries at ABC News, the first woman to hold a job at that level in broadcasting...
...I just tear my hair...
...And they're right—it exists...
...I was suddenly free of the oppressive last few years...
...Q: Does that mean anything...
...But it's a very murky area...
...If there weren't prejudice, we would be more visible...
...Q: But the notion that any woman on the air should be as beautiful as an MGM starlet—that's something new, isn't it...
...There are studies every year of how many women are among the most visible correspondents on the network news...
...They don't want to make waves, so they don't do anything except what the guys do...
...To see somebody like Deborah Norville is very threatening to them...
...The population is growing older...
...It's very good for feelings, it's wonderful for emotion, for color...
...I'm very straightforward...
...they just weren't in those jobs...
...Is this the right move...
...women are still a quarter or a third of the people on the air as reporters...
...Now the Larry Tisches of the world, the General Electric Corporations, etc., own the networks...
...We always got along...
...The hiring is still done by men, and for some reason or other they still go for credibility when they hire men...
...If you compare today to the period when I started in the 1950s, there's been a tremendous change...
...But they don't have the confidence that the public would buy a woman as the symbol of the network news operation...
...Q: I remember a feeling many of us had in the early 1970s that there was a male definition of news—war, oil, money—and then there was a female definition, which may have involved social movements, social change, how people lived...
...That really didn't happen to me until I lost my job as vice president at ABC...
...Q: When you were a television executive, did you consciously try to fight the pigeonholing of women...
...She covered the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and in 1964 understudied for an ailing nighttime news anchor...
...It has to do with several things that have happened to the business, including the change of ownership...
...I was the first woman to be a network news vice president...
...She went to ABC News and hosted a daily news program, News with a Woman's Touch...
...The networks don't just see those jobs as anchoring the evening news...
...with you...
...They didn't think I had that extra...
...In the early days, the only women in television were pretty weather girls...
...What I tried to do was look for black producers, because I thought that was terribly important...
...It just isn't...
...Then women said they wanted to be broadcasters and the men said, "You're not authoritative enough...
...Indeed, much of her career in television involved breaking new ground—either as a journalist probing the limits of a medium that was still in its infancy or as a woman seeking to advance the image and opportunities of women in television news...
...They would have said, "Is this what we want early in the morning...
...what they want to do is make it more entertainment-oriented so they can keep the audiences that are drifting away from the networks...
...Q: Your presence on television served a special constituency...
...When there's a corporate changeover, you can lose your position...
...There's no message that flashes, "Journalist at work...
...It's a strange business...
...Q: You give a lot of speeches on campuses...
...Sanders: They don't talk about journalism...
...But the networks are timid...
...It seems to me that what is wanted from women is different things at different times, and there's no way to judge what qualities will be in demand...
...But I think that after a certain point, it came to a halt...
...She had a comfortable manner, and that was more successful with viewers...
...Women are not there...
...It seems that with women, nobody looks at journalism skills...
...Nobody ever quarreled with my intelligence, or the fact that I could write, or that I could go out and do a story...
...I had been at the network nearly fourteen years—a pretty good run...
...Look at what they recently did with the Today show: They hired Deborah Norville to replace Jane Pauley...
...That's just frustrating...
...Sanders: Well, it's a very hard way to make a living...
...One of the ploys of the networks these days, because they're under heavy economic pressure, is to hire free-lancers who don't have to be given the economic-benefits package...
...Q: What do they read...
...They said go to radio, and I didn't want to do that...
...Sanders: Well, sometimes not an awful lot...
...Sanders: Well, don't forget that women are not anchoring the three major news programs...
...Sanders: The networks aren't looking for journalists any more...
...Q: How did you feel...
...And they're probably right...
...We would have more people in management...
...Sanders: I was always one of the boys...
...So if they really want to do that, there's nothing they can do but try it...
...They were on the screen, and television is just a smaller screen...
...Anything complicated is difficult to convey...
...But I was outspoken and I was active...
...And I think a lot of decisions would be made differently if more women were in charge...
...Would you have been treated differently if you had been a man...
...Nowadays, they have "authoritative women," and they seem to be firing them in favor of women who look like movie stars...
...I don't think television is good for dealing with complicated ideas...
...Q: You still look good...
...Q: You were accepted in that world for a while, but at a certain point it stopped...
...Sanders: No, but look at who's doing the hiring...
...In 1962, when a New York newspaper strike induced local stations to step up their news coverage, Sanders's employer, WNEW-TV, put her on the air as a reporter...
...Sanders: I felt enormous relief...
...They're looking for attractive personalities.' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Her face is familiar: Marlene Sanders was the first woman to anchor an evening television newscast, one of the first women to report from Vietnam, the first woman named as a vice president at ABC News...
...I'm talking about the networks...
...She was the first woman to read the news on television in prime time...
...A lot of them ask, "How can I be an anchorwoman...
...Q: Do you watch much TV...
...Q: What's the significance of that...
...I know they didn't think I had presence...
...I am a feminist...
...If you want to be a journalist, we can have a conversation...
...thing...
...I could stop walking around angry...
...They drag themselves out of bed, rush with the kids, go to work, whatever...
...In your book you confess to being drawn to what men would call female news, and you say they never respected it...
...It's just the movie mentality...
...Marlene Sanders: Well, that's partly true, I think...
...That's why I called my book Waiting for Prime Time...
...You went to Vietnam and you were trying to cover the effects of the war...
...Sanders's first job, in the mid-1950s, was as production assistant and writer on Mike Wallace and the News, and her career was linked to Wallace's for many years after that...
...But statistics show that in the last few years, the rest of the women in television—particularly on-air correspondents—have simply gone backwards...
...Sanders: I was one vice president among nine, and mine was not a powerful position...
...They're interested in making money...
...Q: But the men aren't necessarily getting prettier...
...it means that they're as highly overpaid as some of the men, so there's a parity of sorts...
...And if you want to be entertainment-oriented, you hire entertainment types...
...I look at the listings every day, and I do watch news and information programs...
...Sanders: Well, many people in the business would disagree Claudia Dreifus is a free-lance writer in New York City...
...Sanders: A long time ago, I did an afternoon show, News with a Woman's Touch...
...They don't see that...
...Q: You've said that broadcast news just isn't a good way to make a living any more...
...They're not beauties...
...Sanders: What's going to change that is the demographics of the country...
...I honestly felt I was out of jail...
...If you're a good journalist and you don't have what they consider presence, you're not hired for that kind of job...
...Why can't we see a good-looking older woman on television...
...The networks know that Leslie Stahl or somebody else could do that...
...The founders are gone—the Leonard Goldensons, the Bill Paleys, and so forth—who took pride in their news organizations, even though they created problems from time to time...
...they downgraded me...
...There will be more...
...Sanders: That's new...
...Bad hours...
...The young people see it as a very glamorous career, because it comes over this small screen with all the entertainment programs...
...Q: The men who give us the Deborah Norvilles—what are they saying to the world...
...I worked with men from the earliest days of my career, and I was always straightforward...
...Years later, some of the women who worked with me as correspondents at CBS News said they used to see that program when they were kids, and decided they could do that, too...
...Now that's a powerful job, and she has a lot of women in top positions who have pushed for women's issues...
...And who have been America's ideal women but blonde movie stars...
...I don't have that star quality they're looking for today...
...I don't want to talk to anybody who wants to be an anchorwoman...
...They want marquee value...
...They buy things after all...
...Sanders: They didn't want that then...
...I really was a role model, though I didn't even know the term then...
...we all know how to do that...
...Instead of having 48 Hours take a look at serious issues, you do glitzy stories, more entertainment than news...
...Sanders: I think they're saying what they think—that women are decorative and can attract an audience...
...Q: Let me ask this about your own career: I know you don't like to define yourself as someone who has been ill-treated in broadcasting, but it seems to me that you were treated shabbily by the industry...
...Is this what the women of America want...
...They wanted bang bang shoot-'em-up coverage...
...How should they behave...
...When Roone Arledge took charge of ABC News, Sanders moved to CBS, where she was an anchor and correspondent until that network experienced budget cuts and mass firings in 1987...
...For example, a lot of women news stars are making big money now—Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, and so forth...
...You do what you can where you are, if you are so inclined...
...She was a producer on his interview show, Night Beat...
...Her last interview for The Progressive was with Sergio Bitar in the August issue...
...we're all on that screen...
...Q: One impression I got from your book, Waiting for Prime Time, was that for women in broadcasting, the more things change, the more they remain the same...
...They would say, "No, we're not picking somebody from the Miss America contest...
...Sanders: The anchorperson is the symbol of the news operation...
...You're still getting Tom, Dan, and Peter...
...these women have been in the business for a long time...
...Picture the women of America getting up in the morning...
...Who's in charge is key...
...In the 1970s, though, there were a lot of changes for the better...
...There are three women over fifty anchoring local newscasts on commercial stations—one here in New York, one in San Francisco, and one in Miami...
...They don't want to abandon news entirely...
...Sanders: No, it doesn't interest me much...
...But at the network level, aside from those top salaries, and aside from the fact that a certain type of woman is now given star billing, things are stalemated...
...And they have...
...You can never really nail it...
Vol. 54 • October 1990 • No. 10
