Where Were the Feminists When Elizabeth Vargas was Mommy-Tracked?

Feminists are speaking out in droves regarding Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Her treatment by the media, opponents, and pundits is getting careful scrutiny from women’s advocates. That’s great. But the attention has caused me to re-focus on a question I had two years ago, which still bother me.

Where were the feminists when Elizabeth Vargas – brief holder of the “permanent” anchor position at ABC World News Tonight – had to give up her post upon becoming pregnant?

There are two important aspects to the story that beg for feminist scrutiny. First, Vargas left her position early in her pregnancy, and “voluntarily” chose not to come back to the anchor-chair after giving birth. Press-release pleasantries aside, it sure looks like mommy-tracking. This is an issue that is explicitly legal in nature, as it raises the prospect of colorable employment-discrimination claims under federal law. Where were the feminist law professors to lend this story a critical eye, forcing these concerns into the national consciousness?

The second facet of ABC’s maneuver begging feminist scrutiny is that Vargas’s downgrade came after her male co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, was sidelined following a severe head injury suffered in a roadside bombing in Iraq. The questions raised by this aspect are less legal than social, but deserving of examination nonetheless: Did ABC decide it could tolerate a woman in the anchor chair only if the feng shui on set was put into balance by a male presence?

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The three major-network anchor chairs are positions of enormous influence and power – arguably more significant – and I know I’ll get flak for this – than seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. While each justice gets only one of nine votes on the Court, each national anchor is one of only three people who deliver, and thereby shape, the national news for millions upon millions of Americans. Anchors generally wield considerable power over story selection and editing as well.

There are few people suited for anchoring the national news. Candidates need to be able to use disarming ebullience in one instant, and mass-casualty gravitas in the next. They have to project a sense that they could share a good-natured laugh with you over coffee, yet be your polestar in times of history-turning tragedy.

It’s a talent that NBC’s recent hire, Brian Williams, appears to lack. He would deliver the news of National Candy Day the same as he does for genocide: Punching. Three words. In every sentence.

Katie Couric, the new face of the CBS Evening News, also seems to lack the ability. After debuting to considerable fanfare, her sinking ratings quickly became tabloid fodder.

Virtually everyone who has done the national anchor job brilliantly has been male – Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite. Yet Vargas possessed the rare gift. Perhaps ABC could not overcome the image of a male anchor in their mind’s eye. But isn’t that why we have federal employment discrimination law? Too bad public intellectuals didn’t force America to confront the issue.