Too Many Women Are Bad News?

Here are some points extracted this WaPo article about television news shows, taken out of sequence from the original article.

1. There are few jobs in front of the camera of television news shows, and most of those jobs are low paying.

…Although the rewards of making it to the top of the business remain great — anchors make millions of dollars and reporters typically make more than $200,000 a year at the network level — there isn’t that much room at the top.

Fox News Channel, the top-rated all-news cable network, for example, employs fewer than 100 anchors and reporters. The biggest local station in Washington, WJLA — whose newsroom is combined with cable’s NewsChannel 8 — has just 43 reporters, sportscasters, weather people and anchors.

Employment in the business, at all levels and positions, amounts to only about 25,000, says Bob Papper, a Ball State University professor who conducts the RTNDA’s surveys.

As a result, newcomers tend to start their careers in small markets, at less-than-modest salaries. The median annual salary for a reporter working in the smallest third of TV markets is $20,000, according to the RTNDA.

From there, it can take years to climb to a larger and better-paying station. The heady days of the ’80s and ’90s — when all-news cable stations were blossoming and broadcast stations were expanding their newscasts to more hours of the day — appear to be over. For a young person, Papper concludes, “you could make the argument that it’s [more lucrative] to go into the military than it is to go into TV news.”

2. Men still firmly dominate the (presumably higher paying) management jobs behind the camera.

Outside of a few traditionally male bastions — the sports guy, the weathercaster, the boss — men are disappearing from TV newsrooms. …

Despite women’s gains, men still overwhelmingly are in charge of stations’ news operations. Almost 80 percent of news directors and 68 percent of assistant news directors were men, according to RTNDA’s most recent figures.

3. Even though men are largely still in control of content decisions, having female anchors and reporters reading the stories “feminizes” news shows, and this may drive away male viewers.

…the male exodus threatens the traditional anchor model, in which a male-female duo is sitting at the head of a symbolic nuclear family. There is also some debate about whether the “feminization” of the newsroom has led to a more female-oriented news agenda.

Although cause and effect are hard to separate, there’s no doubt that the news looks much different today compared with how it did before women were a factor in producing the news. …

When Andrew Tyndall, who publishes a newsletter that tracks network news, recently compared “CBS Evening News” broadcasts from November 1968 and November 1998, he found striking differences. In the earlier era, he says, the subjects tended to be limited to government, politics and the Vietnam War, and it was unusual for a woman to be a news source (a report about the Catholic Church’s policy on contraception, for instance, quoted only men).

By the late 1990s, subjects that had all but been ignored years earlier — abortion, child care, sexual discrimination in the workplace — were part of the serious news agenda, he said. Women also regularly reported the news, and were often interviewed on it.

Tyndall found something even more remarkable when he looked at the brief tenure of Elizabeth Vargas as the lead anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” (Vargas went solo during this period after newsman Bob Woodruff sustained serious injuries in Iraq three weeks after being named co-anchor). The hallmark of the Vargas era, he said, was an increased emphasis on “sex and family” issues, those presumably with a strong appeal to women. In March and April, for example, ABC devoted more time to stories about contraception, abortion, autism, prenatal development, childbirth, postpartum depression and child pornography than CBS and NBC’s nightly newscasts combined, Tyndall found. Since being replaced by Charles Gibson, the number of such “family” stories has tailed off on “World News Tonight.” ….

Nevertheless, Gumbert, the consultant, worries that anchor chairs and reporting ranks might become so female-dominated that male viewers will be alienated. “I think it’s going to be problematic,” he says. “The average viewer wants balance, both in the kinds of stories that are reported and who appears on camera. They want to see a reflection of their community. Once that balance gets pushed too far in one direction, then the editorial decision-making will change significantly, too. It can’t help not to, because what interests men and women is different.” …

And if men are driven away from watching television news because “too many” women are reading it at them, that would be some kind of societal disaster, apparently.

–Ann Bartow