All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Margaret Lowrie Robertson, who was an International Correspondent in CNN’s London Bureau from 1993 to 2002. Robertson, one of the first female reporters to broadcast live from inside Iraq during the Allied bombing campaign, worked as a reporter in CNN's Chicago Bureau from 1989 to 1993 and also covered the Middle East for CBS News in Cairo. She is the author of Season of Betrayal. Below, Robertson discusses her surprise at the number of women on the "Evening News" – a stark contrast to when she worked at the network. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices.

On a visit to New York last month, I watched the CBS Evening News, along with millions of other people.

The anchor told the top story: A mass kidnapping in broad daylight at a center of higher education in Baghdad. Next, the Baghdad reporter popped up live on the screen. The anchor interviewed an Iraqi academic, then voiced over a couple of related topics before tossing to the correspondent on Capitol Hill.

And all of the above were women. The anchor, the Baghdad reporter, the Capitol Hill correspondent. Even the Iraqi academic. It was practically the ad break before the first sign of testosterone appeared.

An average night, perhaps, for CBS viewers now.

An eye-opener for me.

Having hardly seen CBS since we moved to London in 1993, finding this proliferation of women on the Evening News was akin to emerging from a Rip Van Winkle-type sleep to find an uber-race of intelligent, brightly-clad creatures had taken over Earth’s airwaves.

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