Women in TV News: Then & Now

It was 1980, and while on holiday in Australia from my home country, New Zealand, I noticed an extraordinary lack of women anchors on Australian network channels.  In fact  I counted four women for a country with a landmass the size of the United States.

This looked like an opportunity for me as a television news journalist with ambitions to work in live television, and after sending out audition tapes of some of my work on a NZ network current affairs program I got the call. Rupert Murdoch’s Channel Ten was starting up Good Morning Australia, I was paired with a much younger Gordon Elliot, (who still appears on US television from time to time.)  

So I’m now Number Five, but my troubles were just beginning.  

The Murdoch PR department was more interested in having me photographed in shorts or a swimsuit while I was trying hard to convey a serious journalist persona. There was a tendency to give me the soft stories, the interviews on items about home and family, babies, sick children, fashion.  The director General of the U N would always go to the male anchor.

Research was skimpy and in short supply.  Live television was tough for someone used to working with film and editing, so I lasted one year there before moving to launch the rival Channel Nine Today Show with cohost Steve Liebmann in 1983.

There the big argument was screen position. In the western world we read from left to right, top to bottom, so the viewers’ left of screen is the most powerful position.   I was given L of S by accident, until someone researched this and I was moved the very next day.  I never sat on that side again no matter how often I argued the point with the executive producer. 

However, Channel Nine was less inclined to feed the Women’s Issues to me, and not once was I asked to wear shorts.  It felt groundbreaking.

Today, nearly forty years later, the position of women in television is vastly different.  Opportunities for competent women abound. 

And the Me Too Movement is a new and valuable protection.

Now I see some shows with two women fronting, some with three anchors and nary a man in sight.  I see news with older women presenting, (much older in some cases) and there is little doubt that women are valuable and taken seriously in the industry. Left of screen seems irrelevant in today’s television world. 

But there’s a downside we should not turn a blind eye to.  

Maybe these women aren’t being asked to pose in shorts or swimsuits, but their position on screen is still being sexualized in so many ways. What they wear, their makeup and demeanor looks very much as if male executives are still calling the shots.

Consider false eyelashes.  
Consider long, flowing hair more suited to a big evening out than a serious news program.
Consider cleavage.  
Consider the contrast between the women on screen – unerringly good looking- and the men, often quite plain.

Consider the way production process hardens women’s voices, and increases the nasal tones, presumably to create gravitas.

Consider how we want to be seen by the viewing world.

I rather think we still have a long way to go. 

About the Author

After St. Margaret’s College, and brief forays into University studies at Canterbury, Sue Kellaway began a lifetime of travelling and living in different countries around the world.

In 1975 Kellaway began her television career as a reporter with the newly formed South Pacific Televison, in New Zealand– in news and current affairs. With  NZBC’s “Close Up” she covered the elections in Zimbabwe which brought Mugabe to power – interviewing both Mugabe and his opponent Joshua Nkomo. In 1981 she was recruited by Rupert Murdoch’s Channel Ten  Australia to launch the new breakfast show – Good Morning Australia with Gordon Elliot. 

But a year later  after a court battle over contracts, which created the precedent that “a kiss on the cheek does not constitute a contract”, she moved to Channel Nine to launch the Today Show,  co hosting with Steve Liebman. At that time she was a member of the Australian Federal Better Heath Commission and Contributing Editor for the New Zealand Womens’ Weekly, commuting between Sydney and Auckland. 

She wrote Women and Well Being (Collins) and Sue Kellaway’s Healthy lifestyle for Australian Women (Angus & Robertson) published 1986, and in the same year she left the Today show. For one season she hosted the Tonight Show in New Zealand  but retired from television altogether in 1987. Kellaway lived in Auckland for ten years and  then in London and Surrey (UK) for 20 years, with her husband Charles Bidwill spending time in their homes in Mexico, and Hawaii. 

Since 2017 she has lived in Miami Florida close to her children and six grandchildren.