The Press: Prime Time for TV Newswomen

The first woman network correspondent to cover a national political convention for TV had a double assignment. She was supposed to interview Bess Truman and Frances Dewey and, while she was at it, apply their pancake makeup. Pauline Frederick rose from that humiliating start in 1948 to a distinguished career as NBC’s United Nations correspondent. By the time she retired from NBC in 1974, only a handful of women had followed her into the influential, hotly coveted but obdurately masculine preserve of network reporting.

That is changing. Mindful of the women’s movement, fearful of Government action, and stung by a multimillion-dollar antidiscrimination suit filed against NBC by its female employees in 1975, the three major networks have discovered that women deliver the news as credibly as men. In the three years since Pauline Frederick left NBC (she is now a commentator for National Public Radio), the number of women network journalists on-camera has nearly doubled, to 25. While Barbara Walters was making headlines with her $1 million-a-year contract at ABC, three women moved into newsreading jobs. NBC assigned two women to cover Capitol Hill, and ABC and NBC put women on the prestigious White House beat.

Some male colleagues are critical of this female invasion. “It’s the same thing as when blacks started to work in TV,” grouses a leading Washington correspondent. “Instead of bringing them along slowly, the tendency has been to put them in high-visibility positions for which they’re not prepared.” TV newswomen do tend to be younger and less experienced than their male colleagues. For that reason and because they are “the first wave,” they are highly competitive. As NBC Correspondent Douglas Kiker puts it, “When you want somebody to go out in a blizzard on a Sunday night to do a 30-second spot, they say, ‘Send me in, coach.’ They’re coming from behind and they know it.”

Some women journalists who have come from behind to carve out successful careers on-camera:

JANE PAULEY, 26, worked for less than four years at local stations in Indianapolis and Chicago before being chosen last fall as leading lady of NBC’s Today show (annual salary: more than $125,000). “I’ve been blessed with the good fortune of my sex from the beginning.” she says of her rapid rise. Though some TV critics have clucked over her dearth of experience, Pauley has demonstrated precocious poise in her Today interviews and ad libs. She shares the show’s food features and other “women’s” stories with Host Tom Brokaw. “Why not?” asks Pauley. “I can’t cook to save my life.” She rises at 4:45 a.m., works until midafternoon, retires before 11 p.m., and spends many weekends traveling.

MARGARET OSMER, 38, unlike Pauley and other newcomers, made it the hard way. A Cornell graduate, she broke into television in 1961 as a researcher in the CBS legal department, spent seven years as a CBS reporter at the U.N. and two as a producer-reporter for ABC’S weekly Reasoner Report before becoming a newsreader on the network’s Good Morning, America show a year and a half ago. She makes $50,000 a year, “and that’s low compared to men who’ve had this job.” Being a woman helps at first, Osmer believes, but in the long run it is harder to be taken seriously: “Some men say they like to get their news from a man. But that’s because they’re used to seeing men in certain roles—doctors, lawyers—and it takes time to change it.”

MARILYN BERGER, 41, joined NBC last winter after a decade as a diplomatic reporter for Newsday and later the Washington Post, and last summer became the network’s senior White House correspondent. The transition to television has not been easy. “I’m a loner, and TV is very much a group art, with a camera crew and a producer,” says Brooklyn-born Berger. She dislikes being “pinned at the White House” for staged events when she could be out developing stories. Says she: “If I had the chance, I’d like to have my own half-hour interview program, or be one of the reporters on a weekly television magazine show where you could dig into a story at greater depth.” At present, Berger is trying to put more decibels into her scholarly, soft-voiced delivery: “I should project more, be more dramatic.”

CATHERINE MACKIN, 38, covers Capitol Hill for NBC all week and then flies to New York to anchor the Sunday night news, which she took over last summer. It is a demanding regimen, but it does not bother Mackin: “People who do what we do are fairly driven people. I’m a compulsive worker.” Mackin worked her way from,her home-town Baltimore News American to become in 1972 the first woman network television floor reporter at a national political convention. Though some viewers find her taut and aloof on-camera, off-camera acquaintances insist she is quite the opposite. “I have a small circle of friends,” she says, “who don’t mind if I come late to dinner.”

LESLEY STAHL, 35, is telegenic disproof of the premise that girls who wear glasses seldom get studio passes. She has resisted suggestions from her bosses at CBS—and her mother—that she replace her horn-rims with contact lenses. After Stahl’s first network stand-up report, her mother complained from Boston: “Sixty million Americans saw you tonight. One of them was my future son-in-law, but he’s never going to call you for a date because you wore glasses!” Actually Stahl, who now makes more than $50,000 a year, is one of the few women correspondents who is married. Her husband: author and former New York magazine Writer Aaron Latham, 33. “I couldn’t be married to someone who wants me home at 6 o’clock,” says Stahl. “Aaron knows all about the news business. He told me that the most romantic thing I said to him in the first year after we met [in 1973] was do you really think Nixon is going to resign?”

RENEÉ POUSSAINT, 32, was born in Spanish Harlem, studied at Sarah Lawrence, the Sorbonne, Yale’s law school and U.C.L.A., sold advertising for a radio station in Malawi, translated a tome on anthropology from the French, and taught at Indiana University. Finding that her Indiana students paid more attention to television than to books, Poussaint fired off copies of her resume to television and radio stations around the country. CBS hired her for its Chicago outlet, and three years later made her a network correspondent there, at $28,000 a year. But Poussaint considers network reporting just another step in her relentless quest for learning and experience. She talks of going back to teaching, or helping an African nation set up its own television industry. Says Poussaint: “I don’t intend to spend the next ten years of my life jumping on and off airplanes trying to explain the national debt in one minute forty-five.”

ANN COMPTON, 30, the first woman assigned by a network to cover the White House, may be the most enthusiastic journalist in Washington. “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t thank my lucky stars that I’m where I am,” she says. Tall (5 ft. 9 in.) and, as she puts it, “big boned,” Compton scurries through the White House, buttonholing Carter staffers, befriending Secret Service men and vacuuming the place clean of stories. A drama major at Virginia’s Hollins College, she covered Virginia politics for the CBS Roanoke affiliate. ABC hired her in 1973 to anchor network radio newscasts and a year later dispatched her to the White House. Compton spends so much time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that the Georgetown house she bought last year on her $55,000 earnings remains unpainted and unpapered. Her social life is similarly neglected. “There is no way I’d put up with any man who had a life-style like mine,” she says, but allows that eventually “I’d like to go back to Virginia. I want a station wagon full of kids and wet bathing suits.”

Some critics allege that these and other video Valkyries are making it on their looks, a charge that could also be applied to men in TV. NBC’S Mackin feels that “the cosmetic end of TV is a burden for women. Viewers are tougher on us. They look at our clothes more closely than at a man’s.” ABC’S Osmer recalls the day in Washington when the wind kept messing up her hair, as well as her stand-up report; a male correspondent helpfully produced a can of hair spray from his attaché case.

Despite their numerical gains, women still constitute only 13% of all on-camera network newsgatherers. Some who have made it fear that the tide for women is ebbing. “There’s less of a tendency by the networks to hire women just because they are women,” believes ABC’s Compton. Marlene Sanders, ABC’s vice president for documentaries, is more optimistic. “Women have only just been admitted to the system. Five years from now more of us will be ready for top jobs. It takes time.” Too much time, some women fear. Says Public Broadcasting Commentator Lynn Sherr: “Think of the possibility of two women anchors on a network news broadcast, and you’ll understand we’re still in the Ice Age.”