GLOBE EDITORIAL
The way it is
STARTING TONIGHT, Katie Couric does evenings. The queen of morning television gave up her ``Today" show throne to take the solo anchor seat at ``The CBS Evening News," prompting the question: Will America take her seriously?
Although lately the stuff of gossip sheets, it's no small question. The careers of men like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite cast long shadows. So listening to men deliver the news has become a national habit.
Women, meanwhile, spent years fighting for the chance to report hard news -- in a different voice and often from a different view.
``My Star-Bulletin editors thought I was joking when I asked them to free me from the society pages to cover the Vietnam War," Denby Fawcett writes in ``War Torn: The Personal Experiences of Women Reporters in the Vietnam War." Fawcett's editors said no, so she quit and went to war for another newspaper.
But even when women carrying cameras and notebooks jumped into the middle of fresh human misery, even when they have told stories of poverty, war, and despair, they have, over time, faded from public memory.
Photographer Therese Bonney went on what she called ``truth raids" during World War II.
``I go forth alone, try to get the truth and then bring it back and try to make others face it and do something about it."
Born in New York, Bonney was living in Paris when the fighting began. She photographed the war-torn lives of adults and children in Europe. Her pictures were published in major newspapers. After being rejected by commercial publishers, she collected some of the images in a book she published herself called ``Europe's Children." It was the war seen through the eyes of children, often in the midst of ruin. In December 1943, Time magazine called it ``the war's most shocking book."
Today Bonney is something of a footnote, famous largely inside the holdings of archives around the country.
Bonney has better-known journalism colleagues, among them Nellie Bly, Margaret Bourke-White, Martha Gellhorn, and former
When Couric goes on the air tonight , there will be questions about her clothes, her salary, and whether to refer to her as Katie, as ``Today" show guests did, or by her last name.
With any luck, history will ask more serious questions. What did she have to say? Did she force the country to look at unbearable things in the name of fighting for change? Did she help television audiences to trust a woman to deliver the news? Did she remind people of the many women before her who crawled through muck to tell an important story?
Stay tuned.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
