WAS SEXISM OR SKILL THE ISSUE?
How Norah O’Donnell Went Wrong
Why I should be outraged that a network is replacing its female anchor with two men, but I’m not
You might think I’d be furious that the CBS Evening News is replacing its anchor, Norah O’Donnell, with two male broadcasters.
Isn’t that a tacit admission that a woman has been doing the work of two men and is being punished for it? And isn’t it another example of a pattern far too common in America: A woman has to be twice as good as a man to get half as far?
Not as I see it. O’Donnell’s departure as anchor was overdue, and I can’t work up the healthy feminist anger I normally feel when a capable woman is sidelined.
No female anchor at the Big Three
It’s sad — if not appalling — that the U.S. will have no women anchoring the nightly news for any of the Big Three networks. Fifteen years ago, it had two: Katie Couric at CBS and Diane Sawyer at ABC.
That lasted a year or so, and after Couric and Sawyer moved on, men alone anchored at the networks until O’Donnell took over from Jeff Glor at CBS five years ago. She’d served as the chief White House correspondent for MSNBC and in other high-profile broadcasting…
