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| Pauline Frederick c. 1955 |
When I was growing up, writing for school newspapers and thinking about going for a journalism degree, the three most visible women journalists were
Barbara Walters,
Pauline Frederick and
Helen Thomas. (On the print side there was also Gloria Emerson and Frances FitzGerald, who both wrote fantastic books about the Viet Nam War.)
Later, there was
Diane Sawyer, former beauty queen and Republican political strategist (she helped write Nixon's memoirs), and
Jessica Savitch, the weekend anchor at NBC who died tragically in 1983. I never watched the
Today Show, so never had an opinion about Katie Couric one way or another. I never watched a single broadcast of her prime time news show. I just never really put her in the same category as other women journalists. But they came later.
The three women who shaped me were Barbar and Pauline and Helen.
I cannot tell you how completely betrayed I felt when beteran White House reporter Helen Thomas suddenly revealed herself to be an anti-Semite. I took it personally.
I remember Pauline Frederick as a UN reporter. I thought that sounded very glamorous. I could see myself doing that--using my French and maybe other languages I'd pick up on the side as I covered stories in far-off places. The story is that when Pauline was first starting out, few men would agree to be interviewed by a woman so she approached their wives first. She was the first female reporter to broadcast from China and she had an early interest in "electronic communication." She died more than two decades ago at the age of 82, but she would have felt right at home in the world of Twitter and FB and YouTube.
And then there's Barbara Walters. Every female journalist working today owes a big thank you to Barbara. She's always been an easy target for jokes about her questions ("If you were a tree what would you be?") but I've done my share of celebrity interviews and you know...sometimes questions like that are the only way to break through the wall and get something like a real answer,
Barbara. She worked her way up to that slot on
Today and she paid her dues in a time when NO ONE would take a woman reporting hard news seriously.
Seriously.
That idea seems so quaint now.
Connie Chung was another journalist who was very visible in the late 20th century but she's kind of disappeared now. That's a shame.
Andrea Mitchell, another veteran reorter, is very visible right now, appearing at the RNC and DNC conventions, doing interviews from the floor while being virtually engulfed in balloons. She is a breast cancer survivor (this is Breast Cancer Awareness month) and a tough cookie who is in her mid-60s and shows no signs of slowing down.
When CNN came along it was thrilling because there was
Bobbie Batista anchoring the news and just being awesome by her very presence. And then there was
Christiane Amanpour, who was tough and beautiful and whip smart and reporting from war-torn countries. (I still had fantasies of being a war reporter myself.)
