Seeing the Forest and the Trees

April 2008

Passion—in one’s personal or professional life—is a double-edged sword. It can take you to incredible heights, but it can also blur your vision, as you get so involved in someone or something that you can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. This has happened to me, but as I’ve always said, nothing is worth doing if you don’t do it to the fullest and learn something along the way. And such has been the case with the special report on women in media in this issue.

My career started at CBS in 1980. Back then, ABC, CBS and NBC ruled the TV landscape and I was thrilled to be at the “Tiffany” network. What I didn’t fully realize was how much of a boys’ club the networks were. But I quickly had to learn. Within hours of starting, I was told to go to the consumer-affairs department and ask for the script of its report from the previous evening’s newscast. The producer was sitting with his feet up on his desk and smoking a cigarette. I stated my request, he looked me over, and without missing a beat he answered, “I’ll give you the script if you have dinner with me tonight.” I was speechless. I later learned from other women that what had happened to me, and even worse, happened all the time, and there was really nothing we could do about it. Dealing with inappropriate comments, harassment and lower pay scales was all part of the package back in the early ’80s. I always wondered what women had encountered in the ’60s and ’70s.

But I just plodded along, focusing on my work and trying to learn as much as I could. After CBS, I worked in Italy and in France, thoroughly relishing the best part of this business—meeting interesting people from so many different walks of life. But partly because of that earlier incident (and there were others) and partly because of my curiosity, I always kept a keen eye on women in the business, wondering what they had gone through, where had they gained their assertiveness, their belief in themselves, their ambition and their determination, and how they managed to balance family responsibilities and work.

As I got older and observed my niece, her friends and then my own children, I firmly believed that young girls should know what came before them, what struggles women had gone through, and what doors had been opened for them. Ten years ago I started research on an article, but nearly every woman I interviewed would only speak off the record. They were either afraid of admitting their problems or afraid of angering someone. So I dropped the project, but it kept percolating in my mind. About six months ago, I dove into it heart and soul, with passion—there’s that tricky word again.

I was so elated to be finally tackling a special report on women in media, but with the first conversations, I started to realize that my intent to put the spotlight on how tough it used to be for women was not the right angle. A woman I admire immensely, Linda Kahn, the senior VP of international TV sales and merchandising at Scholastic Media, rightly asked, Do young women even need to know what happened before? And I had to step back and say, This isn’t about me, it’s about this amazing group of women we have chosen to profile, and about their drive, their accomplishments, their enthusiasm. The message was clear. Women today are not dwelling on inequality. Of course there is a glass ceiling, but women are more preoccupied with another issue. The media business, driven by technology, is moving so fast that the main imperatives for any media company are to secure compelling content, adapt it to new platforms and find the right people to do both. And these imperatives have largely wiped the gender issue off the table. It’s not a “them versus us” world. It’s a “we are a team” world. If you dwell on gender you miss the big picture. In this fast-paced media business, you must have skill and passion, but you must be able to see the forest and the trees.

These women are only part of an impressive roster of executives in this issue, all of them dealing with these issues, including Jeff Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal; ProSiebenSat.1’s CEO, Guillaume de Posch; Endemol’s Aat Schouwenaar and FremantleMedia’s Tony Cohen. TV Asia Pacific snared exclusive interviews with Fuji Television’s Hisashi Hieda and Shanghai Media Group’s Li Ruigang, and TV Latina has TV Azteca’s Mario San Román. Our features look into the evolving advertising market, Europe’s pay-TV platforms, new children’s channels and much more.

Speaking of children, as I look at my exuberant, energetic and self-confident daughter, I want to help her prepare for the future, but I think I’ll keep my stories of past struggles to myself.