Women TV News Anchors and Their Unforgiving Road to the Top

There’s an anecdote in Sheila Weller’s The News Sorority that takes place during the beginning of Katie Couric’s run as the first solo female anchor at the CBS Evening News. It was 2006, and at the time, CBS “was a very macho atmosphere,” according to one source the author quotes. Weller recounts how a male producer, over an internal audio line that everyone in the office could hear, said about Couric: “The only person I’ve seen who looks worse without her makeup on is Diane Sawyer.” A female producer, writes Weller, was shocked. “What did it say about a man in senior management that he didn’t know he shouldn’t say that, of his boss, out loud?”