My problem with Norah O'Donnell

Is she stepping down because of sexism or her often disappointing work as an anchor at CBS?

Norah O’Donnell / Wikimedia Commons

I’m struggling to work up a healthy feminist anger about the news that CBS is replacing its anchor, Norah O’Donnell, with two male broadcasters.

Isn’t that move a tacit admission that a woman has been doing the work of two men and is being punished for it? And isn’t it another example of a pattern far too common in America: A woman has to be twice as good as a man to get half as far?

Not as I see it. It was time for O’Donnell to move on.

Only male anchors at the Big Three

It’s sad — if not appalling — that the U.S. will have no women anchoring the news at a Big Three networks when O’Donnell leaves the CBS Evening News after the election. Fifteen years ago, it had two: Katie Couric at CBS and Diane Sawyer at ABC.

That lasted a year or so, and after Couric and Sawyer left their posts, men alone anchored at the networks until O’Donnell took over from Jeff Glor at CBS five years ago. She’d served as the chief White House correspondent for MSNBC and in other high-profile broadcasting jobs.

A network plagued by sex-abuse scandals

More than two-thirds of all journalism graduates in the U.S. are women, and half of the local news anchors nationwide. With a pipeline that deep, you’d think CBS could have come up with at least one woman to replace O’Donnell instead of two men.

I live in one of America’s most conservative states, Alabama, ranked №1 on some surveys, and even here, people wouldn’t stand for that. Every local station in nearby Mobile has a woman anchoring or co-anchoring the evening news.

My reaction when O’Donnell moved into the anchor desk at the House of Cronkite was: Hallelujah. The Columbia Journalism review noted rightly that her appointment mattered not just for representation but for CBS, which had been plagued by sex-abuse scandals.

I stopped alternating among the networks — or holding out for the later PBS News Hour — and began watching the CBS Evening News. And I saw why the network liked its new anchor.

O’Donnell brought to her job a dignity badly needed in U.S. news. She’s never silly, a feat when terminal silliness afflicts the news at every level. I once saw her, along with male colleague, demonstrate the hand gestures for the children’s song “Baby Shark” — then at the height of its popularity — without looking absurd. How many of us could do that?

O’Donnell has also shown a welcome interest topics that matter to women, as Couric noted in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times. She has covered the long-term effects of Covid on women and done an Emmy-winning report on sexual assault and harassment in the military.

Yet — from my perspective as a journalist — she’s come up short in ways large and small. She’s consistently looked less impressive than rivals Holt and Muir.

Years of low ratings for the newscast

You can’t blame O’Donnell for the low ratings of the CBS Evening News, which has lagged behind NBC and ABC for decades. Nor is it necessarily her fault that she’s the least trusted of the Big Three anchors, according to viewer surveys. Sexism may play a role in that.

But O’Donnell has made other questionable moves. Some bothered me right away.

Not long after O’Donnell became anchor, a news story involved what she called “an historic” event twice in one broadcast. Some grammarians argue that “an historic” is correct in certain types formal writing.

But “a historic” is standard usage at U.S. news organizations, a principle enshrined in the AP Stylebook. “An historic” comes across as an affectation, or a sign that the speaker is clinging to a rule laid down by an old-school eighth grade English teacher.

O’Donnell was no doubt reading words written and fed into a teleprompter by someone else, but she had the power to change them. That she persisted with “an historic” struck me as out of touch.

Late to the Ukraine story

Other stories reinforced that sense. One segment had O’Donnell kneeling in front of a cage at the Mexican border that contained young immigrants. She said to a child one of those phrases you learn in high school Spanish, such as “Cómo te llamas?”

Like other networks, CBS has bilingual correspondents and had no need for O’Donnell to roll out her phrasebook Spanish. The spot came across as a feeble effort by the network to cast her as a boots-on-the-ground reporter to rival Holt and especially Muir at ABC, who has vastly more experience reporting on disasters. It threw onto relief the contrast between them.

Those are small issues, but O’Donnell has had less credibility than her rivals on major ones. After Russia invaded Ukraine, she stayed behind a desk in Washington when Holt, Muir, and Anderson Cooper of CNN rushed to Eastern Europe, where she arrived belatedly.

A news anchor doesn’t have to sleep in war zones to do the job well. Yet O’Donnell has too often cleaved her desk when other anchors have headed for the field. Her interviews also have hit less hard than those of women such as Martha Raddatz at ABC, Janis Mackey Frayer of NBC, and Lesley Stahl of CBS.

That’s made it harder to see what special qualities she has brought to her job, or what has justified keeping her in it.

The men who will fill her shoes

Perhaps CBS has stifled her. Her bosses may not have shown her talents as well as they have those of Stahl and Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan, who will contribute reports to the show headed by O’Donnell’s replacements, John Dickerson and Maurice Du Bois. It would hardly be the first time a network has held a woman back.

Some news stories about O’Donnell’s departure praised her for having “secured interviews” with people like Oprah Winfrey, Dolly Parton, and Hillary Clinton. It says a lot about TV that it’s an accomplishment to have corralled celebrities who have books, music, or policies to peddle.

Some journalists might consider those interviews a “get.” Others might see them, just as accurately, as letting celebrities use your show to gain free publicity for their favorite projects.

As anchor, O’Donnell did have the first network interview with Pope Francis. But leaders often give interviews to reporters they know won’t hit as hard as others. And is it surprising that the pope chose a reporter who grew up Catholic and attended a Jesuit university, Georgetown?

O’Donnell will remain at the network and do other big stories after her departure as anchor. And what she learned at the anchor desk may help her with new projects. Earlier this year, a CBS promotion for her meeting with the pope called it “a historic interview,” not “an historic” one. That may not be much, but it’s a small sign of progress for the network and for O’Donnell.

Jan is an award-winning critic and journalist whose work has appeared in national media that include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon. She also writes stories like this one on Medium.