The women journalists featured in a new PBS documentary broke into the media by arguing — and proving — that they could do the job just as well as men. Yet what holds your interest in She Says/Women in News are the times when gender really is important — that is, when a story is handled differently, even better, for the simple reason that a woman was on the case.

Take, for instance, Nina Totenberg, the legal-affairs reporter for National Public Radio. It was her reporting on Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment charges against her former supervisor, Clarence Thomas, that turned Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a national forum on gender in the workplace. Yet Totenberg recalls that her male colleagues didn’t even think Hill’s accusations were a story. (In an unexpected twist, Totenberg says it was her now-deceased first husband who urged her to push ahead with the Hill story. And now that former right-wing hatchet man David Brock has admitted to sliming Hill with falsehoods, can we all finally agree that Hill was telling the truth?)

Or take Geneva Overholser, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington campus, who in the late 1980s and early ’90s was editor of the Des Moines Register. Overholser recalls writing a column arguing that the journalistic practice of withholding the names of rape victims only added to the stigma. A courageous young woman read the column and volunteered to tell her story — a decision that led to a Pulitzer for the Register in 1991. Overholser talks about having to educate her male staffers not to be so squeamish, as when a copy editor changed "after he had ejaculated" to "when he had finished." Overholser changed it back, explaining that the final act of a violent rape shouldn’t sound like the last bite of lunch.

There are tales of sexual harassment in the newsroom that would be ludicrous if they weren’t real. CNN anchor Judy Woodruff recalls getting her first job in part because the man who hired her liked her legs. Rena Pederson, editorial-page editor of the Dallas Morning News, once had an editor who would actually walk up behind her and snap her bra strap. You couldn’t make this stuff up. You can only hope that it doesn’t go on any more.

Not that media organizations today have necessarily achieved gender-and-ethnic-diversity nirvana. ABC News anchor Carole Simpson, one of two African-Americans interviewed, comes across as the last angry woman, denouncing her profession for moving away from its traditional role of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted ("We don’t do much of that anymore") and for continuing to tell the news from "a white-male perspective."

You can accept that or not — and, in fact, Simpson is a bit of a loose cannon, having served a two-week suspension this fall for giving a speech in which she shared inside (and apparently false) details about some anthrax-laced packages sent to her network’s Washington bureau. But the very fact that this highly successful woman simmers with such anger is itself significant. And when she says that at the time she was hired, in 1974, she never would have believed that the Big Three prime-time anchors in 2001 would all be white men — well, you know, she’s got a point.

The executive producer and co-writer of She Says/Women in News is Columbia School of Journalism professor Joan Konner. The director, producer, and co-writer is Barbara Rick, founder of the independent documentary company Out of the Blue Films. She Says will be broadcast on Thursday, December 20, at 8 p.m., on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), and again on Saturday, December 22, at 1 a.m.

Issue Date: December 20 - 27, 2001

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