SALON

Friday, Sep 4, 2009 9:05 PM UTC

Is Diane Sawyer a “newsmommy”?

The future "World News Tonight" anchor has faced harsh commentary lately. But the strangest came from a feminist

By

Topics: Feminism, Broadsheet,

Following the Wednesday announcement that Diane Sawyer would soon occupy the solo anchor seat relinquished by a retiring Charles Gibson on “World News Tonight,” commentators were quick to weigh in. There has been talk of the entrenched, possibly apocryphal rivalry between Sawyer and her temperamental opposite, Katie Couric, advice to Sawyer not to take the job, with its aging, diminishing audience and gossip that Gibson is “livid” Sawyer was chosen to replace him. Yet perhaps the strangest response came from the feminist site Feministing, where writer Courtney Martin, after fretting whether Sawyer “would receive the same kind of scrutiny Couric has,” lamented the fact that Sawyer, like Couric, fits into a “newsmommy model.” The networks, writes Martin, apparently select “women who are non-threatening, aka maternal, for the top positions so as not to freak out viewers still not used the idea that women can be assertive, independent, and — gasp — childless.”

Now, I’m all for advocating for a culture that values women for achievements other than children, but to dismiss Sawyer as a “newsmommy” seems a characterization that is unthinking, superficial and misplaced. Sawyer is many things — smart, competent, often witty, exceedingly attractive — but “maternal” is not an adjective that springs to mind. You might even call her telepresence the opposite of maternal: glossy, self-contained, occaisionally remote. (Times television critic Alessandra Stanley once remarked upon Sawyer’s “poised, creamy insincerity.”) All of this, in addition to her wealth, her high-powered pedigree (she was an aide to Nixon, the first female correspondent on “60 Minutes”), and her high-powered marriage to director Mike Nichols hardly makes her “non-threatening” and “maternal.” She may, in fact, be the definition of threatening, at least on paper, and her popularity at “Good Morning America,” whose ratings her anchorship helped raise, perhaps speaks better of what will or will not “freak out” the American viewing public than any knee-jerk assumptions we critics might make. (Side quibble: Since when is maternal the “aka” equivalent of non-threatening? My mother certainly doesn’t fit that bill.) And let’s not forget the fact that Sawyer doesn’t even have children. So what, exactly, is it that qualifies her as maternal? That she is a woman of a certain age? This is the sort of stereotyping feminists have long worked to combat.

If, in some alternate universe, Sawyer had been installed in her new position for her warm, maternal appeal, merely saying that she “seems like a perfectly decent interviewer and a hardworking journalist” might be acceptable. But applied to Sawyer, this flaccid summation reads like a classic case of damning with faint praise. A 40-year veteran, Sawyer is no stranger to hard news; she has interviewed, among many other political and cultural figures, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, Antonin Scalia and every president (plus first wives Nancy and Hillary) since George H.W. Bush. The New York Times reported that when she interviewed Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley back in 1995, she prefaced her queries about their sex life with this slightly perturbed admission: “I didn’t spend my life as a serious journalist to ask these kinds of questions.” In 2008, Forbes ranked her 65th on the list of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.” She is said to command a salary of between $12 and $15 million a year. It’s the job of feminists like Martin to recognize and point out that Sawyer’s achievements led to her promotion as much as, and perhaps more than, her onscreen appeal. It is the job of any writer, but particularly a feminist one, to characterize that appeal as sharply as precisely as possible, not to peddle an age-old — and, in this case, inaccurate — female stereotype.

 

More Amanda Fortini.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 16 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
175 points176 points | 124 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
161 points162 points | 111 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
80 points81 points | 21 comments
vote
Judge tells lesbian couple to separate or lose kids: "unmarried sexual relationships -- including straight ones – can be grounds for losing child custody"
34 points35 points | 3 comments
vote
Anonymous rallies behind Kaitlyn Hunt
24 points25 points | 26 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations