For most of television history, the anchors of the weekday evening network newscasts -- ABC, CBS, NBC -- have been men. In fact, only two women, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, have ever been solo anchors.
This week, CBS News announced that Couric’s replacement, Scott Pelley, is done as the ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor. It’s time for the network to close the gender gap in nightly news and choose a woman to be the next anchor.
Will you sign our petition asking CBS to hire one of the many competent women journalists to be the next full-time anchor of CBS Evening News?
Journalism legends Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, and Carole Simpson have served as co-anchors on the weekday evening network news, and Maria Elena Salinas is the current co-anchor for Noticero Univision.
However, men still dominate media across all platforms—television, newspapers, online and wires—with change coming only incrementally. Women are not equal partners in telling the story, nor are they equal partners in sourcing and interpreting what and who is important in the story.
Right now, only 32% of CBS Nightly News’ anchors, field reporters, and correspondents are women. Research from the Women’s Media Center found that female anchored news shows hire more women for these positions than their male led counterparts. Judy Woodruff's NewsHour on PBS, which she co-anchored with Gwen Ifill prior to Ifill's death last year, leads evening news broadcasts in producing the work of female news correspondents.
There are many female journalists who have the experience and qualifications to excel in the job. Gayle King, Norah O’Donnell, and Elaine Quijano, for instance, already have a proven track record at CBS, and others, like Soledad O’Brien, Kelly O'Donnell, Dana Bash, Christiane Amanpour or Andrea Mitchell, could come from another network to fill the role. And that's just to name a few; we’re using the tag #HireHer on social media to showcase the many diverse women candidates CBS has to choose from.
It’s 2017, long past time to have at least one woman anchoring the weekday evening network news. Please sign our Change.org petition and join us in asking CBS to hire a woman to replace Scott Pelley at CBS Evening News.