Anchor Job Has Chain Attached

In my day there were very few women on television, and the ones who were there were definitely held to a higher standard. They had to be beautiful and smart and talented and work harder than the men, and even then they weren't really taken seriously.

My first day, believing that I needed to look serious instead of sexy (I had been portrayed as a vixen and a tease in a New York magazine cover story), I curled my hair to make it look really short, wore hardly any makeup, put on granny glasses and a yellow safari jacket. I looked hideous. I thought that might help. It didn't.

Not only that, I didn't know that the red light meant that the camera was on, so I kept looking in the wrong direction. I was killed by the critics. They were right. I was a disaster. I lasted four months.

Couric, of course, is a total professional. She has reigned as one of the most popular and talented TV personalities in history. She has interviewed politicians for years and had no difficulty sitting down with President Bush.

Today there are more women than men anchoring the news around the country, according to a recent survey. People are used to seeing women and have accepted them. That part has changed. Solo anchoring the evening news, however, is the last bastion. And the thing that has changed the most is this: Katie Couric is the managing editor of "The CBS Evening News."

Whether the show succeeds or fails is more her responsibility than it ever has been for any other woman. She has input on how she looks, talks and acts, how she handles herself on the air, what segments to air and in what order. People who are asking how her stylist allows her to wear so much makeup or those sexy shoes or that white jacket need to understand that it's her decision.

And though some have criticized the more feature-oriented format, it may turn out to be a brilliant choice. We won't know for months. If the show fails, it will be seen as her failure. If it succeeds, it should be seen as her success.

Katie Couric has done a brave thing. She hasn't just stepped into a man's shoes. She's wearing her own. Is she ever!

Her predecessors are rooting for her.

"I felt proud of her," said Walters. "I thought she was charming, relaxed and professional." The managing editor title, she added, "is a big thing."

Said Woodruff: "She's off to a great start. I just hope the critics will apply the exact same standards to her and ask the same questions they do to Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson. "

Connie Chung, who anchored "The CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather from 1993 to 1995, said with frustration, "People are still asking if she's got the right stuff. She was on the morning show for 15 years. She's a good reporter, a good interviewer, she knows what she is doing. You don't hear the word 'gravitas' used about men. With them, it's a given."

ABC's Lynn Sherr, the first woman to anchor a regularly scheduled prime-time network series ("USA: People and Politics," on PBS), thinks the stakes are "much, much higher" today than in the past, when anchors were just trying to do the best reporting and to lead the news division. "Now it's about saving the news divisions, marginalized by cable and the Internet and our little iPods." Sherr, who just wrote a memoir called "Outside the Box," thinks "a woman's got as good a chance as a man to do that."

The interesting thing here is this: Not one of the women quoted above is still an anchor. Will Couric make it? Can she?