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December 2, 2004
The network news landscape: lots of white, lots of men
Last night was Tom Brokaw's last anchoring of NBC's Nightly News, and starting tonight, Brian Williams will take over. Or, as Maureen Dowd puts it in today's Op-Ed, "one tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes will replace another tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes." Dan Rather will soon be succeeded by one of two white men, and Dowd also uses planned successions in network late night talk shows (Conan replacing Leno, 3 of the 4 candidates to replace Craig Kilborn) as more examples of the unchanging whiteness and maleness of television. (As an added bonus, Brian Williams apparently wants to get more in touch with our "Nascar nation" and spend more time in the field in "Dayton and Toledo and Cincinnati"... and presumably some places outside of Ohio as well.)
Brokaw himself has expressed surprise that the network anchor model hasn't changed at all since the dawn of television news, saying, "I honestly thought, eight or nine years ago, that when we left, that it would be the end of white male anchor time." Maybe that's because we all thought that feminism would actually have an effect on who holds positions of power in our country. Nope! As Dowd writes, "Feminism lasted for a nanosecond, but the backlash has lasted 30 years."
Now that we're lucky enough to have moved on from all that equal representation stuff to "post-feminism", we get to worry more about our inviolable right to be stay-at-home moms than about the homogeneous faces we see on TV, in Washington, and on corporate boards. Yeah, that's progress.
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Comments
Don't forget the closest exception to this is Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS: many nights Jim Lehrer is replaced or assisted by one of three senior correspondents, none of whom are both white and male:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ww/senior_correspondents.html
Not to mention that Newshour is about 1 million times better than the three other network news shows combined.
Posted by: adm at December 2, 2004 2:46 PM
This is a very valid point. The Newshour is a great news program and has made much more progress in creating a diverse team of newscasters than the networks have. But think of the difference in ratings between PBS news and the other three network nightly news shows.
We've addressed the lack of women in public leadership roles before in response to the NY Times Magazine article "The Opt-Out Revolution" referred to above. [http://amysrobot.com/archives/2003/10/the_optout_revo.php ] And all the same questions apply. Still.
Posted by: amy at December 2, 2004 5:29 PM
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Tracked on January 10, 2006 4:17 AM