Women in Charge

In a New York Times opinion piece, former CBS News anchor woman Katie Couric is lamenting the departure of current anchor Norah O’Donnell from the anchor chair after the November election. CBS News has announced she will be replaced by two men, John Dickerson a long time CBS News correspondent and analyst who has worked for 60 Minutes and WCBS-TV anchor Maurice DuBois. Dickerson is white. DuBois is black. Three top executives on the program will be men with Bill Owens, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, having overall responsibility for the newscast. CBS says it’s planning to make the newscast different. It will cover stories with a 60 Minutes feel with regular correspondents.  It will use WCBS-TV meteorologist Lonnie Quinn to do weather stories. It sounds to me like it will look more like a local TV newscast.

Couric writes that the broadcast should look more like America. She points out all the strides women have made recently. She writes how there are as many women as men on the US Olympic team for the first time in history, and they’re doing very well. She says America is growing more diverse. There is Kamala Harris, an Asian and black women running as a serious candidate for president. There have been female network anchors for years. Barbara Walters co-anchored with Harry Reasoner in the 1970s, Connie  Chung co-anchored with Dan Rather in the 1990s. Diane Sawyer anchored ABC’s World News Tonight. Couric anchored the CBS Evening News for five years as has Norah O’Donnell. It has not stopped viewership from declining. She points out the Pew Research Center found fifty-six percent of people say they get their news on their phones. No kidding. I’m guessing the number is higher for twenty and thirty somethings. They are not watching network newscasts. They get news instantly from sources they prefer

The network evening newscasts are losing their relevancy. The audience is old people. Just look who is buying advertising time on the newscasts. It’s all drugs for every condition you can imagine showing people enjoying their lives so much better because they are taking these drugs. Just don’t listen to the side effects.

Women have made great strides in the television news business on all levels. They are easily equal to men from writers and producers to reporters, anchors and executives running big market stations. And yes, CBS News. Couric fails to point out the three top executives at CBS News and their owned stations are woman. Wendy McMahon is President and CEO of CBS News and Stations, Adrianne Roark in president of editorial and news gathering, she recently replaced another woman in the position, and Jennifer Mitchell president of stations and digital for CBS News and stations. And there other women in the executive levels of CBS News. They were in the position to put a woman in the anchor chair. They did not.

In the end, it doesn’t matter who anchors the network news. It’s a dying enterprise. The times of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, being the man America turned to for news are long gone. More change is coming. CBS’s parent company, Paramount is about to merge with media company Skydance. When it’s done, Paramount has already announced there will be widespread staff cuts. The women in charge at CBS News will be facing even more difficult decisions, maybe about their own futures.