When Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel was a television reporter in New Orleans, she was frequently asked to speak to school groups about her job and what aspiring young broadcast journalists should do to prepare for a career in the field.
“When those student groups consisted mostly of young women, I routinely offered what I thought, at the time, to be this sage advice: ‘If you want to be a movie star or a fashion model, spare the rest of us in TV news. Get out of journalism now and go take acting lessons or modeling classes. The broadcast industry needs smart, well-informed journalists who want to report the news, not hot chicks who want to be famous,’” Riegel writes in her latest column.
But Riegel acknowledges that advice appears to have been dead wrong.
“Flipping the channels on a recent morning, I was struck, as I have often been in recent years, by the wholly inappropriate dress of the admittedly gorgeous female anchors and reporters,” she writes. “Tight, short, sleeveless dresses—indeed, very much the kind of attire one might find at a cocktail party—are pretty much the standard on morning news shows now. So are stiletto heels, bare legs and long, flowing tresses that distract from the message and do anything but convey credibility.”
Riegel says that while the female reporters and anchors on local TV stations have thankfully not yet fallen prey to this trend—at least not in this market—larger markets are going the way of the networks.
“So are the female guests of the talking heads on national news shows, who apparently now take their sartorial cues from those asking the questions,” she writes. “Political consultants, mostly of the Republican stripe, seem particularly given to sultry dress, even those who are well past the age where they can pass for alluring.”
Riegel says this all matters because more than 50 years after the feminist movement began, women are still fighting for equality in the workplace, “yet they are often undermining their own cause by flaunting their sexuality and perpetuating stereotypes that actually work against them.”
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