News

When NBC Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert collapsed and died suddenly at the age of 58 last week, one of the most poignant comments came from broadcast diva Barbara Walters, who wondered during an interview with NBC whether it was the stress and the strain of the job itself that killed Mr. Russert: "Maybe we blame this whole business - was he too tired? Did he travel too much? Was this stress? Is this business, in its own way, a killer?"

Ms. Walters' "for whom the bell tolls" comment had a ragged truth to it -- nobody knows better than Baba Wawa, as she was famously caricatured by comedian Gilda Radner because of an inability to pronounce her r's, what price you pay for being at the top of the television heap.

In her recently published, wickedly readable bestseller Audition, Ms. Walters reveals the cost of her high-altitude television career, which has included blowing through three marriages, enduring public ridicule and paying a gender surcharge the likes of Tim Russert never had to pay.

Even though she was the main draw on NBC's Today morning show from 1964 to 1976, Ms. Walters was not only denied the title of co-host for 11 of those years, but, she writes, one of her on-air male partners -- Frank McGee -- demanded to his bosses that she not be allowed to "join in on the important and newsmaking interviews."

After Ms. Walters, who was already a national celebrity, objected, she was allowed to ask only the fourth question in any interview with "powerful persons."

In 1970, when feminist leader Betty Friedan marched 50,000 women down Fifth Avenue in support of equal rights and Ms. Walters asked to cover the story, she was told by her boss: "Not enough interest."

And in 1976, when she famously, for $1-million, became the first woman to co-anchor a network evening news show, she faced hostility from her ABC co-host Harry Reasoner and was roundly mocked from coast to coast, with one newspaper comparing her to a Rockette reading the news. Even Walter Cronkite, the king of gravitas, grumbled that her appointment gave him "the sickening sensation that we're all going under."

She didn't last as a news anchor -- perhaps her personality was too outsized for that role -- but she continued to host other news shows and specials interviewing world figures such as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, U.S. president-elect Jimmy Carter and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. And also, of course, conducting tearful celebrity tell-alls.

Now she also provides a senior voice of reason (she is, after all, 79) on The View, a daily women's talk show she invented that is alternately a hideous shriekfest and a newsworthy discussion.

Thirty years later, nothing seemingly has changed for female anchors, except the amount of pay (purportedly $15-million) that Katie Couric, one of Ms. Walters' successors on the Today show, is drawing as she faces her own failure as anchor of CBS's evening news.

The broadcast was not doing well before she took it over in 2006 and it has continued to slide. Critics complain that Ms. Couric is too "perky" and wears too much makeup. Rumours are that she will be replaced within the year. The top executives say they were surprised by the vitriol flung at Ms. Couric, including complaints that she was too soft in her approach.

For all her pilloried softness, Ms. Couric was one of the few top American journalists brave enough to openly criticize the U.S. media's complicit role in the coverage of the Iraq war, recently calling it "one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism." Perhaps the only thing soft about Katie Couric is her voice.

"There is a percentage of people out there that probably prefers not to get their news from a woman," the president of CBS news told The New York Times.

That may sadly be true but it's ridiculous. Are we still that hung up on the male voice? Clearly, women can succeed in the so-called gravitas business - on both Radio-Canada and the private station TVA in Quebec, the anchors are women. And European television seems to think women can drone on about the news just as well as men.

Canada, home of the late, great broadcaster Barbara Frum, has also seen women such as Wendy Mesley and Alison Smith sub for Peter Mansbridge, The National's anchor, many times (and never once have I fallen asleep the way I do when Mr. Mansbridge walks me through the news).

Television news today, like much of popular culture, has become a land of extremes - filled with Doberman pinscher-like cable opinionators such as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann who offer testosterone-tinged anger, and male news anchors who come across as wise and extremely competent, but not, alas, very interesting.

You could argue that the networks actually muddled the debate about women in senior news positions by hiring Barbara Walters and Katie Couric. Perhaps they needed to choose less flashy personalities.

Whatever the truth, no woman has succeeded yet as anchor of a major American network news show. The genre itself may die off, killed by the Internet and time-pressed lifestyles, before they get the gender thing right.

Ironically, according to The New York Times, Katie Couric, on the verge of losing her job as anchor, may be considered to replace the late Mr. Russert as moderator on Meet the Press, perhaps restoring her "brand" as a viewer-drawing, highly personable host.

I'll eat my feminist epaulets if she gets it. In fact, I think I can predict exactly what the big bosses would say to that: "Not enough interest."