Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News (review)

Nicola Gutgold describes the purpose of Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News as follows: "This book will examine the careers and communication styles of the women who have made significant contributions in the dramatically changing world of television news, thus improving the opportunities for women in broadcasting and arguably in other areas that were once reserved only for men" (25). This sentence is symptomatic both of the breathless tone that characterizes much of the book as well as of its unmet need for copyediting. The grammar of the sentence leaves the impression that the book itself will improve opportunities for women, yet one assumes that what Gutgold meant to say was that the book examines "women who have made significant contributions in the dramatically changing world of television news and who have thus improved the opportunities for women in broadcasting."

Yet perhaps the original sentence is not, in fact, in error. Gutgold's profiles of television journalists Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, Elizabeth Vargas, Christiane Amanpour, Dana Bash, Candy Crowley, Andrea Mitchell, Judy Woodruff, Diane Sawyer, Leslie Stahl, Paula Zahn, and Katie Couric read a bit like biographies of Great Women written for young adults. This book's greatest use may be to inspire teenage girls that they, too, can make it to the top (at least when symbolized by an anchor's chair) in the man's world of broadcasting if they are willing to start at the bottom, to stare down sexism, and to work harder than the boys. In her chapter treating Barbara Walters, for instance, Gutgold calls Walters's career "a prophetic playbook for any woman or man considering a career in broadcasting" (32).

To be fair, some of the stories of these accomplished women are indeed inspiring; Barbara Walters has suffered more insults, difficult jobs, and personal tragedies than one person deserves and has flourished nonetheless. Yet reading about her in Seen and Heard only served to remind me of how much I liked her recent and well-written autobiography, Audition (New York: Knopf, 2008). The chapter on Christiane Amanpour is by far the strongest and most interesting, largely because Gutgold packs it with substantive descriptions of the important international stories the CNN reporter has covered in the past 20 years. Amanpour is half Iranian, and her family fled Tehran after the Shah was deposed. Her nuanced and deeply informed reporting about the Middle East, in particular, has enabled her to build a career of tremendous influence. Gutgold includes a generous amount of material in Amanpour's own voice in the chapter, and it belies a refreshing self-awareness about her role as what Gutgold calls "the voice of world events" (103). Although the Amanpour chapter has unusual depth, it, like the others, is cobbled together from various secondary sources. Only two profiles—on Dana Bash, whom Gutgold interviewed, and on Candy Crowley, who emailed with Gutgold—feature previously unpublished information from the subjects themselves.

The chapters also are uneven in their detail (Connie Chung gets 15 pages, Diane Sawyer gets less than half of that), their foci (some address personal lives, others are solely about professional identities), and their evaluative tone. For example, Gutgold judges Connie Chung harshly for her missteps in interviews, concluding (with no supporting evidence) that her "more aggressive style . . . turned off many of her viewers, who thought she was rude to her guests, even arrogant" (79). In the previous chapter, she applauds Walters for the development of an intimate interviewing style, based in reciprocal self-disclosure, which makes her so successful at asking probing personal questions during her celebrity interviews. It seems counter to the book's announced feminist stance for Gutgold to critique one subject for a style clearly coded as masculine and to praise another's stereotypically feminine approach. Yet Gutgold also, inexplicably, describes Judy Woodruff as possessing a "lady-like Southern charm" (140), notes that Andrea Mitchell is "petite" (131), calls Paula Zahn "statuesque...