Women in Television News Revisited [antikvár]

In reading Judith Marlane's Women in Television News Revisited: Into the Twenty-first Century, my own mind revisited a ten-day trial in August 1983. Christine Craft won her breach of contract lawsuit against Metromedia, Inc., in which she charged she had been dropped as an evening anchor from its Kansas City, Missouri, station because the generál manager and his male bosses believed her "too old, too unattractive, and . . . not sufficiently deferential to men." I covered that trial as a TV columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and later rejoiced with the "elderly" Craft (who was then in her late thirties) over her deserved victory and the five hundred thousand dollars in damages awarded her by the jury. The celebration was short-lived, for the verdict was subsequently thrown out by U.S. District Court judge Joseph E. Stephens Jr., who ordered a new trial. That second trial, in 1984, alsó resulted in a verdict for Craft, but one that she lost on appeal when it was later tossed out by the Eighth Circuit Court. Go figure. When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Craft's case, her long, frustrating day in court had ended. Yet her nationally publicized struggle against antifemale bias and stereotyping in television news was powerfully symbolic. It became a shining Bethlehem Star that was followed by other women journalists who rejected being defined and pigeonholed as "cupcakes" because of their gender. In losing a painful skirmish, Craft