Image via ABC News
Today, women are all too many in media, possibly more than men. In fact, every TV channel is sure to have a fixed number of female news anchors with activists imploring not to treat them as just a pretty face. But 55 years ago the idea of a female news anchor was unheard of and not welcome. Marlene Sanders, who passed away on July 16 at the age of 84, was the first woman news anchor on ABC. She was reported to be suffering from cancer.
One night, back in 1964, when newsrooms were populated almost entirely by men, ABC viewers beheld the unprecedented sight of a woman behind the anchor desk for an evening newscast, Marlene, who was substituting for an anchor, who had suddenly taken ill. She later took over for Sam Donaldson as the anchor of ABC’s weekend news, for three months, in 1971.
So novel and popular was this idea that for several years afterward, she anchored a five-minute afternoon news broadcast called ‘News With the Woman’s Touch’.
She became one of the first network newswomen to report from the field in Vietnam, in 1966, and one of the first women to rise to the upper reaches of management when ABC made her Vice President and Director of documentaries, in 1976. During her 14 years at the network, she covered the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.
“Marlene Sanders got there first,” journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers told Associated Press. “That women are finally recognised as first-rate professionals is due in no small part to the path-breaking courage of Marlene Sanders,” he added.
In 1978, she moved to CBS and won three Emmy awards, during her tenure there. She also played host to several public affairs programmes on WNET and taught journalism at New York University.
One of Sanders’s primary concerns was the status of women in the news profession. It was also the subject of her 1988 book, ‘Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News’, which she wrote with Marcia Rock.
“Women have made a great deal of progress on air, as you can see from TV news,” she told the Connecticut Jewish Ledger in 2010. “But they are not well represented in management, and the glass ceiling is still there.”
Image via ABC News
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