A Historic Event for Women, Still Largely Covered by Men

A HISTORIC EVENT FOR WOMEN, STILL LARGELY COVERED BY MEN
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Alessandra Stanley]
On a night that crowned Rep Nancy Pelosi as the highest-ranking woman in United States government and Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Democratic front-runner for the 2008 presidential race, Tuesday night’s tableau of men talking to men all across prime time was oddly atavistic, a stag party circa 1962. Rep Pelosi told Katie Couric of CBS that by breaking the “marble ceiling” on Capitol Hill she was sending a message to “all women.” And that was perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that on election night Ms. Couric stood out as the one anchor not wearing a necktie. The gender gap on election nights doesn't match the rest of television news, where female reporters cover every field. It could be that men still dominate because election night is like the NFL: it’s always two guys in the booth doing the play-by-play, while women cover the sidelines. Maybe it’s the women who avoid signing on to a lifetime of covering politics; the campaign trail is fattening and requires far too much math. More likely, the election night throwback to the days of Brylcreem and cigarette smoke comes from a confluence of overconfidence and insecurity. Women are now so well represented on television that executives no longer feel the need to prove their commitment to equality, particularly now that they feel pressure to disprove the common assumption that other news sources are equal to the networks. Viewers no longer turn to network election-night specials for instant results and off-the-cuff analysis; all that can be found at any time, more speedily, on cable and the Internet. Election night on the networks is increasingly a performance piece: for the hour or so of prime-time coverage, the networks project grandeur and authority, seeking to show that they still count for more than counting up precincts. To many, gravitas still comes in a necktie and cuff links. CBS is showing that sometimes pearl earrings and lipstick can also do the trick.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/us/politics/09watc.html?ref=politics
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