Is Diane Sawyer a “newsmommy”?
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
