The Press: Prime Time for TV Newswomen

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The first woman network correspondent to cover a national political convention for TV had a double assignment. She was supposed to interview Bess Truman and Frances Dewey and, while she was at it, apply their pancake makeup. Pauline Frederick rose from that humiliating start in 1948 to a distinguished career as NBC's United Nations correspondent. By the time she retired from NBC in 1974, only a handful of women had followed her into the influential, hotly coveted but obdurately masculine preserve of network reporting.

That is changing. Mindful of the women's movement, fearful of Government action, and stung by a multimillion-dollar antidiscrimination suit filed against NBC by its female employees in 1975, the three major networks have discovered that women deliver the news as credibly as men. In the three years since Pauline Frederick left NBC (she is now a commentator for National Public Radio), the number of women network journalists on-camera has nearly doubled, to 25. While Barbara Walters was making headlines with her $1 million-a-year contract at ABC, three women moved into newsreading jobs. NBC assigned two women to cover Capitol Hill, and ABC and NBC put women on the prestigious White House beat.

Some male colleagues are critical of this female invasion. "It's the same thing as when blacks started to work in TV," grouses a leading Washington correspondent. "Instead of bringing them along slowly, the tendency has been to put them in high-visibility positions for which they're not prepared." TV newswomen do tend to be younger and less experienced than their male colleagues. For that reason and because they are "the first wave," they are highly competitive. As NBC Correspondent Douglas Kiker puts it, "When you want somebody to go out in a blizzard on a Sunday night to do a 30-second spot, they say, 'Send me in, coach.' They're coming from behind and they know it."

Some women journalists who have come from behind to carve out successful careers on-camera:

JANE PAULEY, 26, worked for less than four years at local stations in Indianapolis and Chicago before being chosen last fall as leading lady of NBC's Today show (annual salary: more than $125,000). "I've been blessed with the good fortune of my sex from the beginning." she says of her rapid rise. Though some TV critics have clucked over her dearth of experience, Pauley has demonstrated precocious poise in her Today interviews and ad libs. She shares the show's food features and other "women's" stories with Host Tom Brokaw. "Why not?" asks Pauley. "I can't cook to save my life." She rises at 4:45 a.m., works until midafternoon, retires before 11 p.m., and spends many weekends traveling.