How Alessandra Stanley Helps Write in a Glass Ceiling for Diane Sawyer & Katie Couric

I have been read­ing a lot about the recent nam­ing of Diane Sawyer as Char­lie Gibson’s replace­ment on the evening news for ABC.   I noticed that ABC News declared that the glass ceil­ing has given away because now both she and Katie Couric (CBS) are anchors.  For­give me if I am skep­ti­cal of that claim.  Given it is being offered by the same net­work agency that Sawyer works for and there is evi­dence to the con­trary present.

The glass ceil­ing is an invis­i­ble bar­rier pre­vent­ing women from ris­ing to posi­tions of power within cor­po­ra­tions, a metaphor for what women our cul­ture face.   Cou­pled with the glass ceil­ing is that when women have risen to com­mand­ing posi­tions their abil­ity is degraded, with­out this the ceil­ing isn’t able to continue.It’s not the qual­ity of their work that has moved them up the lad­der but some qual­ity about their fem­i­nin­ity that has.

Sim­i­larly women who do not earn paid income are demeaned for their unpaid care­work, moth­er­ing is not a val­ued aspect of soci­ety. As if con­tribut­ing to soci­ety through care­work, like rais­ing chil­dren or vol­un­teer­ing to care for oth­ers, is unim­por­tant to a vital soci­ety.  Although I must note that jobs that are paid but are care­work jobs are also deval­ued, even though they also give an immense amount of value back to society.

One piece in par­tic­u­lar stuck out to me in this dis­cus­sion on the glass ceil­ing and Sawyer enter­ing the fray of the evening anchor’s chair. With recent piece in The New York Times, the Critic’s Notebook:The Rise of the Female Anchor by Alessan­dra Stan­ley, it appears the glass ceil­ing is still alive and well.  While one can under­stand that Stan­ley was attempt­ing to point out that there was a stan­dard that women must adhere to that is neg­a­tive & she did in a round­about man­ner state that there was still a glass ceil­ing.  The real­ity is that hav­ing two female anchors isn’t as pow­er­ful as it would have been 10 years ago before cable news and the online world of social media moved into the Network’s Big 3 territory.

How­ever, Stan­ley also helped per­pet­u­ate the stan­dard of women as unpro­fes­sional in their own right in her col­umn.  Stan­ley essen­tially is adding to the glass ceil­ing for her fel­low female jour­nal­ists and reporters, adding to the insti­tu­tional dis­crim­i­na­tion women face. Her ref­er­ence to the pres­ence of two evening news anchors that are women as a “cat­fight” and offer­ing them as a “Betty and Veron­ica” is set­ting the stage to demean both women.   Remem­ber, Stanley’s work is not offered as satir­i­cal but as a sup­posed crit­i­cal assess­ment of the media. If this piece had been satire one might have been able to play off the cul­tural insults women face, the stereo­type that women who com­pete with each other are going to gouge each other’s eyes out.

Addi­tion­ally, refer­ring to Diane Sawyer as “coy” and stat­ing Ms. Sawyer was “geisha like” in her accep­tance, paints her as a sub­mis­sive woman.  It does not give her the equal respect she deserves to her male peers (or female peers for that mat­ter).  When her work over the years does indi­cate she is more than qual­i­fied to be an anchor and I’m not sure what would have suf­ficed as an accep­tance.  Should she have shouted out “F-ck Yea! You bet your ass I’m an evening anchor.  Suck it Williams.”? While that would have been fun to watch, I doubt it would have kept her in the seat and hav­ing watched the clip I’m not cer­tain what was geisha about it. Thank­ing a coworker does not equal geisha. And  I’m won­der­ing how her response was really any dif­fer­ent than Gibson’s (whom she is replac­ing) response when he took the seat?  I don’t remem­ber him being bois­ter­ous but very con­sid­er­ate in his accep­tance (sim­i­lar to Sawyer), although I’m not sure any­one would call a man a “geisha” or say he was “coy” in how he waited to receive the position.

Sawyer is also cri­tiqued for not being mater­nal.  Stan­ley states:

Ms. Sawyer is not likely to have dif­fi­culty adopt­ing a more neu­tral, impas­sive per­sona for the new job. She is at her best, and most nat­ural, when avoid­ing human emotion.

Infer­ring that Sawyer is suited for this posi­tion because she is mas­cu­line in her emo­tion and refer­ring to the inci­dents with Elian Gon­za­les & the Dixie Chicks invoke the image of a woman who lacks the abil­ity to be warm or innately moth­erly.   While stat­ing her lack of emo­tive con­veyance is a pos­i­tive to com­mand the anchor chair, Sawyer’s drawn into the mater­nal role and appar­ently shown to lack this qual­ity.  Assum­ing that men do not have emo­tion is sex­ist, assum­ing that women should be a par­tic­u­lar kind of mater­nal is equally sex­ist.  Care­giv­ing qual­i­ties exist in both men and women, and there is no set way a woman should be when deal­ing with a child or “scold­ing” some­one (I’d call it dis­agree­ing, but obvi­ously women can’t dis­agree we “scold”).

Stanley’s stereo­types assert Sawyer is bet­ter suited for the male ori­ented news anchor posi­tion; while some­one like Couric (accord­ing to Stan­ley) is bet­ter suited for morn­ing shows.  It would appear in the charged stereo­types being offered that Couric’s peppy qual­ity is bet­ter suited for the moth­ers at home watch­ing these shows.  And every­one knows moth­ers don’t have brains to think about worldly things.  Leave those heavy hit­ting top­ics to the non-emotive men­folk, while we lit­tle ladies get our “slap happy morn­ing tele­vi­sion” while tend­ing to the chil­dren.   Sawyer is not mater­nal and there­fore has a brain suited for the genre of hard hit­ting news.

Then again, given that Stan­ley was taken to task for an error rid­dled piece, pub­lished in June 2009, on the late Wal­ter Cronkite by Katie Couric per­haps she could use some of that “slap happy” atti­tude of morn­ing TV to cor­rectly edit her own work.  The errors in that par­tic­u­lar piece round out a series of poorly researched and writ­ten pieces that have been pub­lished in The New York Times by Stan­ley.  Stan­ley could take a page from both Couric and Sawyer in the depart­ment of accuracy.

It’s frus­trat­ing to work extremely hard only to be reduced to a woman in a “cat­fight” or a “geisha”. Your work as a pro­fes­sional is taken out of the equa­tion and becomes sec­ondary if not com­pletely removed from the pic­ture.  Stan­ley as a pro­fes­sional rein­forces this with her piece on Sawyer.   When Sawyer, Couric, or any other female deserves to be eval­u­ated on the pro­fes­sional work she has com­pleted.  Not on out­dated stereo­types and not at the expense of tak­ing a side­swipe at moth­ers, as implied in her cri­tique of morn­ing TV and that Sawyer is bet­ter suited for hard­hit­ting news because she does not appear to pos­sess mater­nal qual­i­ties. It would be nice if Stan­ley would real­ize that and begin to strip away her own hand­i­work in per­pet­u­at­ing the glass ceil­ing for women by reduc­ing women to mere stereo­types, which in turn do noth­ing to help her as a woman in the pro­fes­sion of jour­nal­ism, report­ing, or the media.

Tagged as: abc, alessandra stanley, cbs, diane sawyer, glass ceiling, katie couric, media, NY Times