Two of the three network evening newscasts are going to offer women as the lead anchors, and yet, the New York Times is still whiny. TV critic Alessandra Stanley dropped this ridiculous line in a Sunday Week In Review piece:

As in other fields, women seem to break through the glass ceiling just as the air-conditioning is being turned off in the penthouse office suites. Women anchors may turn out to be what women doctors once were in the Soviet Union, a majority without status or financial advantage.

"Without status" is just silly, but not as silly as "without financial advantage." Katie Couric makes $15 million a year at CBS; Diane Sawyer reportedly makes between $12 and $15 million a year. How they're disadvantaged is anyone's guess.

Stanley also uncharitably placed Brian Williams in a self-pitying category:

Mr. Williams, who ascended to the position of NBC anchor on the shoulders of an old boys’ club, now has to reposition himself as a member of a persecuted minority, the white male anchorman.

There is some humor in the idea that any male would complain that now men are being crudely discriminated against at the top of the TV news game on the basis of their gender. But Stanley is assuming Williams only got where he is by "old boys' club" connections, not on hard work or talent.  

Stanley's best competition in this contest of overwrought analysis of Couric's apparently heinous burden came from her former producer, Rome Hartman, last week in The Washington Post:

"What Diane should do is send Katie a bouquet of flowers and say thanks for getting there first and taking the grief that you really didn't deserve and that now I won't have to take."

Hartman should check on what most Americans would think of that statement: "Waah. It was so hard to take $15 million a year from CBS while keeping the network stuck in third place. Oh, the injustice!"

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center.