Katie Couric interviews Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. / CBS
My Time magazine piece about Cashmere Mafia, Lipstick Jungle and how they relate to the Hillary-era zeitgeist–i.e., what are the standards, and double standards, society sets for powerful women–is up here.
In the piece I briefly mentioned how women like Martha Stewart and Katie Couric encounter a sort of Goldilocks problem: they’re hated for being too hard or too soft. After the story closed, the Harris Poll released an eye-opening survey that’s very relevant. Women may have had problems breaking into the top echelons of the media, but there’s one power list they have no problem making: The list of most-hated media personalities.
The poll asked Americans who their favorite news personalities are, and who their least favorites are. Four women were listed among the favorites: Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren. Of these–Couric, Walters and Grace–three were in the top six of newspeople Americans hate.
(Note: I’ve appended the poll results at the bottom of this post. Sorry for the poor formatting–I need to learn how to do tables in Moveable Type. I’ll pretty it up later if I can, but the responses are broken down into the percentage response among all subjects, Republicans, Democrats and independents.)
Now you might say it has nothing to do with gender. As with Martha Stewart–as with most male TV personalities–there are gender-free reasons to dislike all these women. Still, you could say that of most of the men on this list too; it is, at minimum an awfully big coincidence. And while results like these are often influenced by politics (Democrats like Couric better here, for instance), look at the numbers for conservative talker Grace: even Republicans hate her, as much as Democrats do.
I can’t say I have a grand theory for this off the top of my head, but the (female) editor who passed this poll on to me had a pretty good one: there are fewer models in the past for women as public speakers and figures. So when you see a male anchor, you might think that he hearkens back to Walter Cronkite, or John Chancellor, or any number of other beloved models. A woman on a news show, on the other hand, is more likely to be seen as trying too hard to be like male anchors of the past (read “cold,” “shrill”) or failing to be like them (read “fluffy,” “soft”).
It’s hard not to draw a comparison to Hillary–who, whether or not you think the analogy is fair, is obviously a polarizing woman as well. So in fairness to the Obama camp–Warning! Bias alert!–I should note the main reason that black men are much less hated on this list: There are no black men on this list.
Thoughts? Dissents? Who wants to stick up for poor Nancy Grace?
TABLE 1
FAVORITE NEWS PERSONALITY
“Thinking now of the media in general, of the news and current affairs personalities listed below, which three would you say are your favorites?”
Base: All adults
Total Republican Democrat Independent
% % % %
Bill O’Reilly 23 42 11 19
Charles Gibson 17 17 19 19
Anderson Cooper 17 14 22 17
Brian Williams 16 16 20 12
Tim Russert 13 9 18 16
Katie Couric 13 10 17 12
Mike Wallace 13 9 17 16
Barbara Walters 12 10 16 12
Rush Limbaugh 12 28 2 11
Sean Hannity 11 27 2 7
George Stephanopoulos 11 8 13 14
Larry King 9 9 11 7
Keith Olbermann 7 2 10 9
Chris Matthews 6 5 8 8
Lou Dobbs 6 3 8 9
Nancy Grace 6 6 7 7
Bob Schieffer 6 4 6 9
Wolf Blitzer 5 5 7 5
Shepard Smith 5 9 3 4
Greta Van Susteran 4 7 3 3
Tucker Carlson 2 3 1 2
Alan Colmes 2 4 1 1
None of these 23 13 22 23
TABLE 2
LEAST FAVORITE NEWS PERSONALITY
“Of the news and current affairs personalities below, which three would you say are your least favorites?”
Base: All adults
Total Republican Democrat Independent
% % % %
Rush Limbaugh 42 24 60 50
Bill O’Reilly 23 10 34 29
Larry King 19 26 16 18
Nancy Grace 17 17 17 19
Katie Couric 16 26 10 16
Barbara Walters 15 20 10 16
Sean Hannity 10 3 15 15
Wolf Blitzer 9 13 8 8
George Stephanopoulos 8 14 3 10
Greta Van Susteran 8 9 9 6
Chris Matthews 6 11 3 5
Mike Wallace 5 10 2 4
Alan Colmes 5 9 3 4
Keith Olbermann 5 8 3 5
Tucker Carlson 4 4 5 3
Lou Dobbs 3 3 5 2
Anderson Cooper 3 4 2 2
Tim Russert 2 5 1 2
Brian Williams 2 3 2 2
Shepard Smith 2 1 2 2
Charles Gibson 2 2 2 1
Bob Schieffer 1 3 1 1
None of these 25 20 23 21