Can Women Anchors Break the Glass TV Screen?

by Karen Schulman, Senior Policy Analyst, 
National Women's Law Center 

With George Stephanopoulos planning to leave his Sunday morning news program, "This Week," for his new role co-anchoring "Good Morning America" on weekday mornings, there is a great opportunity to make the Sunday morning shows look more like America and American politics today. While we’ve broken many gender and race barriers in politics in recent years, the Sunday morning news shows covering politics are still all anchored by white men. ABC could take a major step forward by filling the opening at "This Week" with one of the many women qualified to do the job, such as Gwen Ifill, Soledad O’Brien, Andrea Mitchell, or Michel Martin.

It is extremely frustrating to watch a male anchor discuss with his all-male panel policies affecting women, such as abortion, without any input from women themselves. It is even more frustrating to watch a male anchor fail to even cover critical women’s issues or to watch him discuss issues such as the economy or health care without even mentioning their particular impact on women.

The Sunday morning shows have come a long way in getting more diverse guests and more diverse panelists to debate the issues. But that’s not enough. We need women not only debating the agenda, but helping set the agenda -- deciding which issues to debate, what questions to ask about the issues, and who will debate the issues.

With Nancy Pelosi sitting in the House Speaker’s chair and Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office, isn’t it long past time to have at least as much diversity among the people sitting at the anchor desk on Sunday mornings?