Ladies of the nightly news

How the most electrifying campaign of our time changed everything for Katie Couric, Campbell Brown and Rachel Maddow.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, TV, Politics, Feminism, Katie Couric, CNN, Sexism, MSNBC, Rebecca Traister, 2008 election, Life, Sarah Palin

Salon composite

Rachel Maddow, Campbell Brown and Katie Couric

Oct. 30, 2008 | It was perhaps galling that one of the smartest questions asked of Hillary Clinton in the past 18 months was posed after a presidential debate in which Clinton did not participate. But it was appropriate that it came from a journalist who understands as well as the New York senator that the path to gender parity is lined with potholes.

"Why do you think Sarah Palin has an action figure, and you have a nutcracker?" asked CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric on her nightly webcast -- her so-called after party -- following the final presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain on Oct. 15.

Of course, Clinton didn't answer the question fully -- by, say, launching into a discourse on how her brand of female power is based on authority and competence that made her appear threatening, like a potential harvester of testicles, while the Alaska governor's brand of female power is based on her ability to winkingly climb the political ladder while never disrupting the fantasy that she is only here to conform to traditional feminine norms that do not threaten testicular dominance. No. Clinton just let out a loud (just once, for old times' sake) cackle and said, "I don't have any idea, Katie."

 Couric pressed. "You must have some idea," she said. "Do you feel like, 'Oh, the injustice of it all?'"

"No," replied Clinton, before turning mock serious. "But maybe someday I'll have an action figure. I mean, who knows? I still have aspirations!" 

Couric flashed her famous grin -- gummy but leonine -- and deadpanned, "A girl can dream, can't she?" 

Yes, she can! While pondering the meaning of this year's 18 million cracks in the White House ceiling, we might easily have missed the shower of shards falling from other glass domes, like those atop television newsrooms. In the final weeks of October, days before what many consider the most crucial election of our lifetimes, the probing interviews, fine-boned analysis and buzzy commentary showing up on television screens and Internet browsers all over the country are often delivered not in the deep rumble of a wizened Uncle Walt but in a higher register belonging to one of several female newscasters to have kicked ass, taken names and otherwise owned the coverage of the 2008 election.

Sure there are still men, like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, who have done notable journalism and created reverberating sound bites of their own this year. But if 2004 was widely touted as Jon Stewart's career-making election, then it would be more than plausible to call this year Katie Couric's (for her eye-crossing serialized interview with Sarah Palin and her impeccably timed career rebound) or Rachel Maddow's (for her Speedy Gonzalez scramble to the top of her profession and her sharply seasoned take on the race) or Campbell Brown's (for her fire-roasting of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds and her series of rants on gender, access and the presidency).

Call it historical accident or mere coincidence, but this election, built as it has been around two history-making female candidates, traditional "women's issues" like the economy and healthcare and the acknowledgment of the power of female voters, also happens to have been translated, interpreted and picked apart by women newscasters. And that's something new. 

In her 2007 book "The Terror Dream," Susan Faludi wrote, "Soon after the World Trade Center vaporized into two biblical plumes of smoke, another vanishing act occurred on television sets and newspaper pages across the country. Women began disappearing." Discussing the diminishing number of female bylines, talking heads and reporters covering the news, thanks to what she identifies as a post-terrorism ardor for mission-accomplishin' masculinity, Faludi argued that by the mid-2000s, "women's media profile remained depressed."

In 2008, American news desks, campaign press planes and anchor chairs were crawling with women -- and not just the fascistic sylphs of Fox News and the right. Women like Dana Bash, Andrea Mitchell, Candy Crowley, Gloria Borger and Donna Brazile were feeding us our news, and the breakout stars, like Couric, Maddow and Brown, were building audiences, asserting their perspectives on the unfolding narrative and making crafty use of the internets to stake their proprietary claim in this most surprising and enthralling of election cycles.

 Couric's renaissance has been both long awaited and gratifying. After her grab at media history in 2006, when she leapt from morning-show sweetheart to gravitas-challenged first female solo anchor of a network newscast, Couric's belly-flop was so brutal that it seemed possible she would never recover from it.

But anyone who has ever watched Couric -- as chipper morning interlocutor or as the unlikeliest bear trap George H. W. Bush ever got caught in -- knew that she had the chops for the job. Perhaps it was the sense that she had nothing left to lose that goosed Couric, this election season, to loosen up, take risks and carve out space for herself. In addition to her CBS evening newscast, Couric debuted her cheery, often trenchant webcasts on her own YouTube channel, a small move that instantly made her roughly 10 billion times more accessible to Americans under the age of 75 than her nightly news competitors.

 She also posed some brave and prescient questions, of presidential candidates and of the media itself, both on and off the air. In December 2007, in a series of interviews she did with presidential contenders, she asked John Edwards, with a quiet seriousness that in retrospect suggests she knew something we didn't, whether he could understand why some voters "don't feel comfortable supporting a candidate who has not remained faithful to his or her spouse." And it was in an interview with Couric that Cindy McCain confessed to (muddled) disagreement with her husband on the subject of abortion.

In early summer, Couric generated some old-fashioned media sparks by allowing that Hillary Clinton's ride on the presidential log flume might be splashier than some. At a speech in Washington, Couric suggested that "Senator Clinton received some of the most unfair, hostile coverage I've ever seen," and, in a later online commentary, noted that "one of the great lessons of [Clinton's] campaign is the continued and accepted role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media." These were risky comments, in that overheated moment, ones that tied Couric's narrative to Clinton's and positioned her as a gender-card player. They were ballsy enough to get serious blow-back from Olbermann on "Countdown," who named Couric a Worst Person, huffing and puffing: "It is sad that Ms. Couric could not have ... separated the hype from the news in her own promulgation of the nonsense that Senator Clinton was a victim of pronounced sexism."

But while Olbermann and colleagues Matthews and Joe Scarborough were having an avidly reported meltdown at MSNBC, Couric turned in what, by some accounts, was the best network coverage of the political conventions. Running around like a caffeinated jack rabbit, she stunned subjects with her ceaselessly blinking eyelashes before stripping their bones clean. In Denver, she nabbed Michael Dukakis in a security line; somehow Dukakis ended the conversation by apologizing to the American people for the Bush dynasty, a conversation that,  New York Times critic David Carr wrote, "demonstrated what has been apparent for the last two decades to anybody with a television: Ms. Couric is a highly skilled interviewer, and people tend to tell her stuff."

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