Gloria Allred: Ambulance Chaser of 'Feminism'

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14. Truly. You have to speak up. You HAVE to be loud and pushy and annoying.

You HAVE to get in their faces and make them miserable and force them to go looking for the Maalox bottle the instant your name comes up or your face and/or voice comes wafting over the airwaves. I had a friend who wound up in a discrimination lawsuit against CNN, and she determined that when it came time to go to court, she wanted the lawyer they dreaded seeing at the opposing table: "who do they LEAST want to see across the table from them? Well, that's who I want to represent me!" And indeed, she never worked again. But the size of the settlement, I'm told, made it unnecessary anyway.

Anybody remember Christine Craft? She was no gretchen carlson (actually, she had a BRAIN!) or meGYN kelly (cue the eyelashes!) and she was NOT unattractive. She just wasn't some blonde bimbo. She worked for a TV station in Kansas City MO as a news anchor and she was really good. And one day she got demoted to reporter because some focus group decided she "too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men." Never mind that her presence helped lift that station's evening newscast from third place to first. That was a shot heard round the country, I'll tell ya. EVERY woman I knew in the news biz was all over it. She left and went back out to Santa Barbara where she'd lived before, and soon enough, she sued for age and sex discrimination. QUITE a woman. Now there was a pioneer! She fought a big battle for the rest of us, and she's another one of my heroes.

I remember when she returned to Santa Barbara to get away from the national uproar that had arisen around her. I had to put a Saturday seminar together - about women and what we were still up against in the newsroom. Mainly newsroom. Not anything about the executive suite. This was early '80s. Collectively, we hadn't gotten that far yet. A mutual friend said Christine was exhausted and wanting to escape Kansas City, and was probably gonna hole up. I convinced her to change her mind and come to our conference as our keynote speaker. I remember telling her - "you will be surrounded by a room-ful of sisters who support you ferociously. You will get such a morale boost because we're all behind you and in total solidarity with you, so actually it might make you feel better to come and get some lunch and hang with us, and blah-blah-blah," and sure enough she came! And she was terrific! I think, at least I hope, that she felt reenergized by that whole afternoon. We were all glad she came, and when I turned around in this banquet room, I saw a few men standing against the back wall - fellow news guys some of us worked with, who wanted to hear Christine Craft's remarks. It was her first public comment since that whole "too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men" mess went public.

Wild times in those mid-to-late '70s and early '80s. Everybody had to make adjustments. The FCC basically declared that TV and radio stations had to start hiring more women in high-profile positions, like management and on-air. That's when you first started hearing female djs. By the time my career was kicking into gear, pretty much every rock station in town had some sort of news entity, and in there they usually had a token woman. Back when women were starting to get in, there'd be one female dj on staff. Usually she'd do nights or overnights. There might be another female part-timer on the weekends. That was what I did: news and public affairs, not jocking.

And we were there because there were requirements for a certain minimum amount of news and public affairs coverage on the air in order to satisfy your obligation to your community in return for being granted a license to broadcast in the public interest. And you had to keep a file available to the public, documenting all the programming you did that attempted to address some of the problems and issues and needs in your community. There was also an elaborate ritual dictated by FCC regulation - called "ascertainment." It was basically interviews that management people had to go out physically and do with other community leaders and city fathers and note what they said were problems or issues in the community. Your responsibility, if you wanted to get your license renewed, was to develop programming that addressed some of those concerns you were able to "ascertain" in your public outreach. We had forms to fill out and there was this big-ass binder full of this stuff. Actually I think it was several binders. Most of it was done by either the news director (me) or the public affairs director (usually another female). General managers and sales managers and the rest - all were supposed to be doing them too, but they mostly didn't and we in news and public affairs had to pick up the slack.

With reagan, all those requirements started going by the wayside. Deregulation and all, dontchaknow. Gummint BAAAAD. Regulations BAAAAD! Free market! Free market! And soon a lot of news and public affairs departments started getting cut back, in some cases, cut entirely. As did a lot of people's jobs, and sometimes careers too. And hell, it happened "on the other side of the building" where the jocks and programming and the music department were, too. Once the ownership restrictions were lifted after deregulation gained a foothold at the end of reagan, there was this feeding frenzy of buying up radio stations, including a lot of small mom-n-pop ones in small and medium markets. Hell, even in L.A. As more stations were swallowed up by these consortiums and syndicators and would-be networks, you soon had behemoths like ClearChannel and other outfits that could own as many stations in a single market as their money could buy, and often you'd have one set of management overseeing more than one station, which meant one station's management had been cleaned out and the remaining management had to double up on their workload.

Shit - this is just taking me back. Sorry to blather on. It's like with various other segments of the greater women's movement. Young people up-and-coming in this day and age don't always realize how hard it was for those of us (and hell, I was small-time compared to the biggest big-ass high-wire acts also sucking all the oxygen out of the TV Guide and Radio & Records magazines) worked and had to fight and struggle to get however far we got. And what-all we had to put up with, trying to earn our way in and just get a seat at the table. You have no idea. I saw this ad that was run in Broadcasting magazine in 1983 or something, and saw my little thumbnail photo on there with the other nine news directors in the chain. Three of us were women. All on the chain's West Coast stations, for whatever that's worth.

Those were pretty interesting times. This OP and, for that matter, the whole thread just really got me thinking back. Thanks for posting, boston bean! With lukewarm apologies to peggy noonan, this was what I saw at the revolution. Worked with some pretty crazy people.