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In-Depth: Women and the Future of the News

August 17, 2006

As “citizen journalist” bloggers, newsmagazines, and whatever the hell they’re showing on Fox continue to raise questions about media integrity- there’s been a lot of talk about how news will be shaped in the future. The answers remain to be seen, but one thing seems certain: Women will be the ones who shape it.

When I tell this to Mary Alice Williams, she says, “I’ll tell you a secret. They always have.”

Williams is a mother of three daughters. She was the first woman to win an Emmy for anchoring the NBC Nightly News. She was Vice President in charge of CNN’s New York Bureau. She is currently a correspondent at CBS Radio, the lead anchor at Discovery Health, and interestingly, the inspiration behind the “Desperate Housewives” narrator, Mary Alice Young.

When CNN was starting out, in 1985, the staffers referred to the New York Bureau as “Petticoat Junction.” It was the first time that women were almost completely running the show, and Mary Alice Williams was the pioneer who made it work.

“I didn’t have the option of restricting my recruiting to roughly half of the brain pool -- I had to use the whole brain pool, and there were so many smart women out there who wanted to work really hard…and many of them (were) far more collegial than some of the men. The New York Bureau was overwhelmingly female, and we were supposed to do only business news, but we ended up building an empire.”

To quote Linda Ellerbee: “And so it goes.”

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Sci Fi Has Your Shows!

For months now, BBCancelled's community boards have been raging with questions about how to find some seriously brilliant but regrettably cancelled shows. There's good news, we found them! They’re over at the Sci Fi Channel!

In early August, in a deal with CBS Paramount, Sci Fi acquired the rights to some of the best series made in the past few years. The list includes:

“Star Trek: Enterprise” -- the prequel to the original series starring Scott Bakula.

“Haunted” -- Matthew Fox receives messages from dead people while solving crimes.

“The Invaders” -- Scott Bakula (again) tries to save the earth from space aliens in an acclaimed mini-series by Stephen King.

“Threshold” -- a female government analyst and her team of scientists face off with an alien lifeform.

“The Stand” -- based on the Stephen King novel and starring Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald, who toil through a post-apocolyptic, disease-ridden world.

“The Langoliers” -- starring Patricia Wetting and Dean Stockwell who wake up on a cross-country flight to find that there are only a handful of people left in the world.

Also included in the deal were “Tales from the Dark Side,” and several made-for-TV movies, including Primal Force which is about mutant baboons. That’s right. You heard us: Mutant. Baboons.

Sci-Fi will also continue it’s exclusive showing of “The Twilight Zone” and other brilliant but cancelled request: “Dead Like Me.” There you go. Knock Yourselves Out.