Washington Press Club Foundation

Carole Simpson: Interview #5

September 8, 1993 in Washington, D.C.

Donita Moorhus, Interviewer

Carole Simpson - September 8, 1993 Tape 1 of 2

September 8th, 1993
Listen to audio

Carole Simpson - September 8, 1993 Tape 2 of 2

September 8th, 1993
Listen to audio
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Moorhus: We ended up last time with George Bush. You had gotten to ABC, and we were talking about your coverage of George Bush. I ended the interview by saying, "We'll continue with George Bush next time," and you said, "Oh, I think that's enough." [Laughter.]

So I think we want to talk today about the other things you have done since you've been at ABC. I have a list of them, but why don't you start with some of what you were doing when you first got here.

Simpson: When I first got here, I came under false pretenses. I had been told that if I left NBC and came to ABC, that they would either like to put me in the White House, to be a White House correspondent that would work with Sam Donaldson, or that I would be a "Nightline" correspondent, which at that time, both sounded very attractive to me.

So I came to ABC with that expectation, that I would be doing one of those assignments after some period of working in and learning people and how the process worked here. Lo and behold, it was not that at all. I ended up being general assignment. The first week that I came at ABC was the Air Florida crash.* Remember the horrible plane crash in the Potomac River. All of us were kind of pulled in, so I didn't think anything odd about that. We were all kind of brought in to cover that huge story hereóthe blizzard and the metro subway crash. It was just a lot of spot news that was happening.

But after that, I was just in the mix of general assignment correspondents, and I would say, "Excuse me. What about those other assignments we talked about?"

"Well, we need you here." Always I have heard, "You're so valuable to us in the position that you're in," that often you didn't get opportunities that you thought you were ready for. I had done a lot of plane crashes and hurricanes and weather stories and news conferences and demonstrations, and had really come to ABC thinking that I would move to this higher level of being at the White House or a "Nightline" correspondent, which I really wanted to be. It's typical of how they promise you everything before you come, but it's a different story once they've got you signed on the dotted line.

George Bush became one of my assignments, but it wasn't a full-time assignment. Because [Ronald] Reagan was an old president, they thought it was important to have someone that was working into the Bush operation and would know him and know the family, know his top staff. Whenever he would leave the country, I was assigned to be with him. As I may have mentioned before, it turned out to be a good assignment, because I did see the world with him. I went to twenty-seven countries with him, on five continents. So I really got to see the world, and it was

______________________ * An Air Florida jetliner crashed into the Potomac River while attempting to land at Washington's National Airport in January 1982.

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not something that I was reporting on, because they weren't interested. It was almost like a body watch, a death watch, of just being with him in case something happened to Reagan.

Then especially after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, it became important to ABC and, naturally, to the other networks [to cover Bush]. We all kind of paid closer attention to Bush then, because it was an older president who had been shot, and we needed to be ready if there was some transition of some kind, to have people that were in place that knew him. That was the nice part about it.

The not-so-nice part about it was that I was back again, as almost a young reporter starting off in the business, being called in the middle of the night and hearing, "Go to this tornado," and, "Go to this flood," and, "We need you to cover this convention." So my life was back again the way a beginning correspondent would be. That is, you know, the stuff you did when you first started, of being, at a moment's notice, ready to hop and go there. But I did it. I was being well compensated for it, and it was a job.

Moorhus: It was a job that had some satisfaction.

Simpson: Yes. I signed on the dotted line, and they, by all rights, can assign me to anything they want me to cover. When you work for a network, they really own you. All I got written in stone was that I would be in Washington. They were not free to move me to another bureau or something like that, because I had a husband and family here. So that's about the only thing that was guaranteed me. No air time, no assignment, no anything could you get written into a contract. But I've always been a survivor and have always thought, "This, too, will pass," you know. "Just keep your nose to the grindstone." I've always been that kind of person. "If this is what I'm needed to do, I will do it, and do it the best job that I possibly can."

I became what in our business is called a fireman, and that is someone that they can, at a moment's notice, put on the air to anchor if they need to, send to any of the agencies, because I'd covered State Department, I'd covered the Congress, I'd covered the White House, I'd covered all of the various agencies, and networks need people like me. Most of them have two or three people like that, people you know are going to get the story, no matter what it is, that they're experienced enough in a number of areas, that no matter what it is you assign them, they're going to be able to do that.

So I did that. I did that foróhow long? For six years, from 1982, when I came, till 1988, I was basically doing whatever it was they needed me to do.

Moorhus: Was that through two contracts?

Simpson: That was through two contracts. Right.

Moorhus: So in the contract negotiation in '84-'85, did you raise the issue of your assignment, and express desire for something else?

Simpson: Right.

Moorhus: What happened?

Simpson: And they gave me the title of senior correspondent. [Laughter.] They always give you a title if they can't give you anything else. I was given that title. I was given a lot of substitute

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work of anchoringófilling in for people on the weekends and doing a lot of news briefs, whichóas much as we hate them; it's only thirty secondsóyou're reaching a much larger audience than even is reached by our evening newscasts, because you're in prime time. So instead of ten or fifteen million people that may see our "World News Tonight," you're being seen by thirty or forty million people that are tuned in to prime-time television.

So I got to do a lot of news briefs. They promised I would do some of that and do more substitute anchoring, and the title and some additional money. Money can buy a lot. [Laughter.] Money can buy a lot of things. Again, the thing is, "You're valuable to us in this fireman capacity that you have, that we have someone that we can call on to fill in for Peter Jennings or to fill in on 'This Week With David Brinkley' or to go to the tornado or do whatever. You are important to us."

I also spent a lot of time during that period of time filling in for people who would go on vacation, for example covering the White House, so Sam Donaldson and I often covered Reagan together. I did a lot of his [Reagan's] trips to Santa Barbara when he would go for the summer, and do reporting there, and I did a lot of fill-in work at the White House, because I was covering Bush, too. It was a natural tie-in because I knew those folks and knew the White House operation. But I never had the title of White House correspondent, although I spent many months in there covering the Reagan years.

That was '82. That contract came up about the same time the women's stuff happened at ABC. Had we begun to talk about that at all?

Moorhus: No, we need to talk about that.

Simpson: Because all of this is kind of working in. You'll see it all kind of come together.

When I came to ABC in 1982, I had left NBC, and I had spent eleven years at NBC, so I had many, many friends. We had gone through the seventies and the women's movement, and many of us were women who had struggled and fought very hard to get to where we were. So at NBC, we had kind of a little support group. There were women correspondents and producers, and we would get together and go out to dinner, go out to drinks after work, and stuff like that. It was kind of a nice networking that women had at NBC when I left.

Moorhus: Is that in spite of the lawsuit that had been filed about NBC?*

Simpson: Yes. I came in '74 to Washington, from Chicago, and I think the lawsuit had been filed in '73. It was under court order. NBC was under court order to make 50 percent of its hires, for some period of time, female. Most of us had come after this. These were not women that had filed a lawsuit or had been involved at all. It was just folks, just women. Again, there were few of us in the news business at that period of time. We just found that you needed somebody to go to and say, "Where do you buy pantyhose? Where's the ladies' room?" [Laughter.] "I'm feeling stressed out. Can I come to your office and cry?" It was just because there were so few of us, that we kind of gravitated toward each other in the same way that I gravitate toward people of color that I find in the business. Because there were so few of us, you always kind of sought each other out.

______________________ * The NBC lawsuit is discussed by Marilyn Schultz in her oral history interview.

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So I had left this supportive environment with women and minorities at NBC, and, again, there were precious few of either of them. But I come to ABC in 1982, and there were actually quite a few more women that were here than I had found at NBC. But I came into this building, I came into this very building, and people didn't talk. Bettina Gregory was here, Ann Compton was here, Catherine Mackin was here. I'm trying to think of the women correspondents. Susan King was here. There were quite a fewóat least five or six of us. I kind of reached out to them, and "kind of" was not responded to in a fashion that I expected at all.

What had happened was, every woman here had been set up to be in competition with the others, so when I came on the scene, here is yet another woman. Here's somebody who had been at NBC, that had come from another network, so here was somebody else that would come in and compete for air time. And I found this really, really strange. Susan King and I had been on the Bush campaign in 1980, when she was at ABC and I was at NBC, so I knew her, and I started talking to her. I'm going, "What's going on with these people? I mean, they scarcely speak. What's with the women in this bureau?"

And she said, "Well, you know, we really do need to talk. Everybody's competing with everyone else." And men do this. They do. I can remember having men say, "I've hired a woman to give you some competition," thinking that I don't see myself in competition with men. So it's like a divide-and-conquer scenario, which throughout my career I have heard, and it was clearly operating here at ABC in a way that I had not seen it at NBC. So Susan said, "Let's get together with some of the women. I'll invite people over to dinner to my house, really kind of, Carole, even to meet you." Kathleen Sullivan had just been hired. "And let's just have some of the correspondents and some of the women producers. Let's get together."

So she had a dinner. It must have been by '83 now. We talked about it. I'd been here about a year before we got to this point. And so she had a dinner party at her house, and there were about twelve of us there. Ann Garrels was here. At the time she had just come in from Moscow; she had transferred to Washington from Moscow. So there were a number of reasons. There were some new correspondents, women coming from overseas, Kathleen Sullivan had been hired to be the new star, to anchor the morning news. Clearly she was on a fast track for anchoring. So the purpose of the meeting was just to get to know some of these other people, and I will forever be grateful for Susan King, for making that first happen. I probably helped it by saying, "What's going on here? Why are people not talking to each other? Why are people not friendly with each other? Why aren't we going out to lunch and having a good time?"

It was a week night, maybe a Thursday night, and we went to her house. Again, as I recall, there were about twelve of us. There were women producers and correspondents. We sat around the table, and we talked about wonderful thingsóboys and make-up and clothes. [Laughter.] The stuff we talked about in high school. Ann told us when she was in boarding school in London, how they ordered the breast cream and massaged their breasts with this cream that would make them [grow], and we were just talking about female fun kinds of things.

All of a suddenóthat particular day, Bettina Gregory had covered this man threatening to blow up the Washington Monument. I don't know if you remember that. He drove a truck up to the Washington Monument. It was a big story. He had dynamite, a truckful. It turned out he had nothing, but there was a standoff at the Washington Monument all day long with this crazy man threatening to blow up the Washington Monument. And Bettina Gregory had been out there all morning long, reporting, keeping up to date on what was going on. That evening, for "World News Tonight," a man who had not been staking this out and out in the cold all day long,

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watching this story happen, was given the story to put on the evening newscast. She was talking about, "I really am upset about this," and, "Here it goes again, this kind of thing happening."

Then you start hearing other people saying, "Well, that happened to me. I was doing such and such, and they gave it to Mike von Frend." We looked up and realized it was happening to all of us. We had all experienced that kind of thing, where we had been on the story, but for the evening newscast, the visibility, the prestige, the air time was being taken from us and given to men. All of a sudden, this very wonderful conversation about breast creams making our breasts larger turns into a very bitter, frustrated [experience], and story after story. Then the producers started chiming in about, "I know So-and-so was hired and got much more money than I got," and, "I've been here for ten years, and he comes in and he's given the White House producer job." And it was just incredible, this evolution from this happy, happy time to this very bitter, angry, frustratingóand we realizedóah! We had many, many things in common, and the common thing that we had was sex discrimination. We were all being discriminated against, had seen men come in and take things due us, and be given the assignments, the opportunities, the air time, all these other kinds of things.

We realized that night that we had to do something, that clearly we had common problems, we were not fighting each other, that clearly we were being set up by menóand little things, the little underhanded comments. One thing they use against women all the time is, "She can't write very well." Writing is a very, very subjective thing. You could take ten of us, and we could all go out and watch the same news event, and you'd get ten versions, perhaps, of how somebody would start, what sound bites they would use, how they'd wrap it up, because we bring to our stories our own experiences, what we've seen in the past, whether we've covered demonstrations or seen news events like that before. You might bring some historical perspective in. But that doesn't mean one is better than the other one. It's a different point of view. But because that's a subjective judgment, it's something that I have seen used time and time again in this business to deny opportunities to people, and women in particular.

So you'd hear this stuff. "Well, she can't write." Well, they tried that with me, but fortunately by that time, I had spent eighteen years in the business. Nobody could tell me that I couldn't write. I taught writing at Northwestern University. I would not accept that, where some women would internalize that and think, "Gee, maybe I can't. Maybe I can't write." It's the mind games that they would play on us.

There was one woman correspondentóand I don't feel comfortable using her name. I haven't discussed this with her. But to give you an example of the kind of thing that would happen, I'm one of those people that if they gave me a story at a quarter to six, and I have to get it on at 6:30, I can sit down and bang it out. I go on automatic pilot. It ain't gonna be the greatest thing in the world, but that isn't what's important; they need the story. So I can crank it out. This is in that fireman capacity. I have seen people in similar situations, women in particular, be given that same kind of assignment, and then those doubts start, and they are absolutely crippled by not being able to go ahead and do it, because they start self-doubting, "Am I going to be able to do this?"

This one correspondent in particular here at ABC News one time had takenóand she had gotten to this point, because one time she had written a script and had taken it down to our senior producer. We have to show it to the senior producer in Washington, who approves it, and then it goes up to New York to the other senior producer. It goes through many processes before you are given script approval to go ahead and track it and cut the piece. By the time you take the script down to them, you've worked on it quite a bit. You've gone through several revisions yourself,

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and so by the time you take it downstairs, you've kind of got it where you think it should be. The senior producer took her script and he tore it up in little pieces, in front of everybody sitting around the rim. He tore it up into little pieces, put it in his hand, and threw it in her face, and said, "It was lousy. Do it again." Now, I've had them do that to me, and I say, "Excuse me. That's the best I could do. What's wrong with it? Tell me what's wrong." But she couldn't. She just couldn't do that. And every time she would sit down then to the typewriter, she was terrified of having to go through that experience again, and literally was frozen at the typewriter and could not write.

I've never seen anything like that happen to a man. I've never heard any man describe a situation like that, that has happened to them. So it was clearly a thing to kind of make us crazy, make us not do as well, and play these mind games. I kept trying to tell her, "Don't let them do this to your head. They will do these things to your head. You cannot let it happen." I told you before, the whole thing about my being "lazy." I know how that stuff can operate on your brain. You can't accept it. You cannot accept those thoughts and internalize them. She ended up not ever being successful again here and had to leave.

Moorhus: Had that incident with the torn piece thrown in her face, had that happened before this dinner party?

Simpson: Yes, and it became a subject of this dinner party. No, we had all heard about the kinds of things that we were experiencing and what it was doing to us.

So that night we decided that we had to do something, that we were going to meet again, and that we should bring more women into the process. We started collecting notes and started thinking about things and what was happening. We began to routinely haveómaybe once a monthówe began having social gatherings kind of like we did at NBC. It would be at someone's house. It might be breakfast on Saturday morning. We invited speakers in, and then we'd talk. But we realized that the women here together had never come together at all to talk about common problems and things like that.

So it became the ABC News Women's Group, and we brought in women that worked in the budget office, women that were in personnel, women that were camera people in our technical department, and we started being more and more inclusive with bringing ABC women together to talk about things. Now, all of these social things would end up having this undercurrent of bitterness and other things, and then it really became increasingly clear that we had to confront management.

Moorhus: Was there any resistance to going beyond the professional news staff, including personnel people and budget people and technical people?

Simpson: No, there really wasn't. There are artificial separations of us anyhow. Here our engineers are considered engineers and not part of the news division, because we're editorial. But we work with them. We're out on the stories with them. And, God, you want to hear some stories, you should hear some of the stories that the technical women have had to go through in terms of discrimination and vile treatment and the things that they had to put up with. It was all part of our picture that we needed, of what was going on with women in all divisions of the company.

We also knew that Ronald Reagan was in office, and that there would be no help at the national level. Nobody was enforcing EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission].

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Nobody cared about affirmative action. The signal had been sent clearly by the Reagan administration that corporations did not have to worry about that anymore. The Equal Rights Amendment was declared virtually dead. Women's issues were moved to the back burner. And so it was clear that if anything was going to change, we were going to have to change it, and that we should begin by going through channels. There were some women that right away wanted to file a lawsuit, and we clearly had material that could have produced litigation against the company. We had some firebrands, and we had the more calm, reasoned ones like me, that said, "Let's go through channels. Let's exhaust our channels. Let's see how far we can go with the company first, before we resort to things like that."

At the same time, NOW's [National Organization for Women] Legal Defense Fundóa lot of people wanted a piece of this action. Little stuff was starting to filter out, and people were talking to lawyers. We were getting calls. "If you want to file a class-action suit against ABC, let us know." There was much, much help available. But I really thought it was important for our own credibility to work within the system first, and we'll see how far we get. Then if we must resort to that, then we will.

I was very passionate about it, because I had been doing it a long time. All of us had been doing it a long time. We were women in our thirties and forties, who had paid all the dues the men had told us we had to pay to get to these upper reaches of the company, but the glass ceiling was so real and so intact. I hate to use that cliché, but it really was, "You can go this far, but no farther" in so many levels, in so many areas of the company.

Moorhus: How was the group organized? Were you actually elected chairman, president?

Simpson: Yes, eventually.

Moorhus: How soon did that happen?

Simpson: Much later. So let's see. We kept meetingó'83, '84. 1985 was when we began the confrontation with management. I and others decided that we were going to go in armed with not [in a whining voice], "We're women who work for the company, and we really are not getting a chance. Please give us a chance." I wanted to go in with facts and figures, that we've done our homework, that we've really done our homework.

My husband is a management consultant and knows computers intimately. I said, "I want to do a content analysis of our shows and show how often womenó" These are quite common now. You see Joe Foote, Southern Illinois University, and all these other people now do these routinely, of how many women and how many minorities, and how many this, and who are the most visible correspondents. So those are quite common. But we were breaking new ground here in 1985.

We took a year. We took the previous year. We got all the rundowns. This was all hush-hush. We got rundowns from every broadcast. My husband and I worked with them. He entered them into the computer so that it would spit out whether it was male, female, white, black, Asian, whatever, and did [the number of] appearances on each broadcast. We did "Good Morning, America," we did "Nightline," we did "This Week With David Brinkley," we did "World News Tonight." What other shows did we have? Was that it? Those were the four major news shows. We didn't do weekends, because the women were always on the weekends. That's where we showed up, on the weekend news. So we didn't even bother. We knew we would do okay on weekends. We wanted to look at our major broadcasts. This is where the major resources of this news division were going, into those broadcasts.

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So we got the rundowns, quietly. I had stacks of them at home. My husband and I would go through and we'd log everybody, every correspondent, how many spots they had. He could spit it out fifty ways from Sunday, in different terms. We did pie charts.

While we were working on this, in March we were invited to celebrate Barbara Walters receiving the Silver Satellite Award from American Women in Radio and TV. All of the women correspondents of ABC News had been invited to be there and support her. They were flying us in from all over the country, to come to a luncheon for Barbara, and then that night to go to the awards ceremony and be supportive of her.

Moorhus: This is March of '85?

Simpson: This is March that we were told that in May, we would all be invited up there. And all members of management were going to be there. So we knew that's where we were going to have to do it. If all of the executive producers, all the top management were going to be there to celebrate with Barbara, this was the place we were going to have to do it.

In the meantime, George Watson was hired as bureau chief of ABC, and he came in February of '85. We had begun our work and had begunóbut he came in, and we decided, "Let's go talk to him and tell him what we needó" I got ahead of myself, because in February we came up here [seventh floor], three of us, to meet him and welcome him to Washington, and tell him that we had some problems, we thought, in this bureau, with women getting on the air and stuff like that, and we wanted to talk to top management about it.

He said, "I think you should." He was new to the bureau and hadn't been aware of what was going on. He said, "I think you should." So he probably told them, "You've got a problem down here in Washington." And so they were going to make nice-nice to us by inviting us up [to New York]. I think that's how it happened, really, was to make nice-nice to the women correspondents and keep them quiet by inviting them to this lovely luncheon and this kind of thing. Okay?

What we wanted was a serious sit-down, but since that didn't seem to be forthcoming, we realized that we had to prepare it and do it at this luncheon, even if it was for Barbara. So my husband makes up thisóI have it downstairs if you want to see it, but I have a packet of materials that we preparedópie charts, bar graphs, everything, how many, what percentage of stories done by women on "World News Tonight," what percentage of stories done byóand we prepared this documentation so thatóI mean, there would be no way that they could question [our assertions].

In the meantime, we also found out, because we had women now working in the budget office, we found out that the women producers were making, on average, 30 percent less than the men producers, doing the same jobs. Management was blown away. It's like, "How could you find out?" Well, we're reporters. [Laughter.] We get sources, we cultivate sources, we get people to take a look at things like that. So we had the goods. Okay? We had all the documentation.

And I was selected to be the spokesperson at this meeting. Because, as I say, we had some firebrands, and we didn't want them going off. They thought I could be more reasoned, maybe because I was a black woman and they wouldn't jump on me quite as quickly as they might another one. But all women were alerted, except poor Barbara Walters, that we were going to somehow at this luncheonóand the core group was out of Washington.

Moorhus: Was New York involved?

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Simpson: We got them involved after this, but they didn't know that we had been doing all of this research. We travel. I don't get to talk to the other women correspondents in other bureaus that often and stuff like that, but we alerted them that we had been doing this, and that at this luncheon, just be prepared. Any stories you haveówe had a telephone tree and everybody calling everybody, to alert them.

So we go up May 5, 1985óI'll never forget the day. I went out and bought a beautiful blue silk dress that had women's faces on it. [Laughter.] I was in my feminist dress totally. It had beautiful cameos with women's faces, but it was my power dress, empowering me on women's behalf to do the speaking at this thing. What I did was write about a ten-minute presentation, leading up to the documentation and so on, and memorized it so that I could talk it. There were no notes. Again, you know, I know how to do that kind of thing, so it was serious preparation for this. It was like, "How are we going to do this? How are we going toó" I had decided that if Roone Arledge said, "Pass the salt," I would have [said], "Speaking of saltó" [Laughter.] I was going to find some opening to be able to launch into this at some point at this luncheon. It was our only chance.

So we go to the luncheon. This is when we were still at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, the corporate offices, and they had a huge, lovely executive dining room upstairs there. We all flew in, we met, and we went upstairs. Leonard Goldenson was still the president of ABC. He was there to greet us. Barbara was there, and all the executives were thereóthe executives of every show, and all the vice presidents. We had a cocktail hour. We were all dressed up. We looked very nice. I think Leonard Goldenson remarked that we looked like the ladies from the garden club. This was just more ammunition for me, that we were not seen as serious. And I mean, nobody was in gloves and hats. I mean, what a thing to say! We still were not viewed as serious journalists working for this man's network. We all looked so pretty, we looked like ladies from the garden club. So this gave me more muster, okay?

Beforehand, I'm in a hotel room. We're going to lunch, and I start with the shakes. All of a suddenóI'm all ready for this and have got this thing memorized, and all of a sudden I am shaking like crazy, like I can't do it. Sheilah Kast was with me. Rita Flynn was with me. It was 10:30 in the morning. They order white wine. [Laughter.] Hoping to get it into me intravenously or something, "Carole, take this. Settle down. You've got to do it." Okay? So they were all like counting on me.

As I say, once we got there and that man said the comment about the garden club, that was all I needed to lose whatever, you know, willies I had about getting up in front of them to do this. Remember, it's '85, so I'm still a relatively new correspondent. Most of the other women had been there much, much longer than I hadólike Lynn Sherr and Bettina [Gregory] and Ann Compton and Rebecca Chase. I was actually one of the newer correspondents then. But I felt so strongly about this, I mean, I was happy to do it because it was like, "Give me a break. Why are we still talking about this? What is going on?"

Barbara came in, and, again, we should have told her what was going to happen, but we didn't have a chance. I mean, we were so busy with getting all this, and we had these documents for each member of the management team there, and all the executive producers. We were so busy with getting all this stuff together and getting our facts.

So we go in, and we're having this lovely lunch. I'm just waiting, looking for when is the time. People are eating. Roone gets up and makes a toast to Barbara, how proud we are of her and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. "We're so happy that she's here." She said, "Well, thank you, Roone."

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She responded to his toast, and what a wonderful experience it had been at ABC, on and on. And she said, "I really have to go. I'm sorry. I'll see all of you tonight, but I've really got to go and do something for '20/20,' and I'll see you tonight."

She got up to leave, and I said, "Barbara, before you leave, just on behalf of your sisters, your ABC sisters, I'd like to toast you and to say how proud we are of you and how much you have made possible for the rest of us."

She said, "Thank you very much," and she starts to go back. I'm standing up. I say, "Now that I have all of your attention, Mr. Arledge, there are some things that I really think we need to say to you. We don't get an opportunity like this often where all of you are here. We're so proud of Barbara, and she has meant so much to all of us, all the breakthroughs that she made possible. But we have a problem."

Moorhus: Big "but."

Simpson: Big "but." "But we have a problem at ABC." And then I launch into myóyou could hear a pin drop. I wish I had a tape. I think I was pretty darn good. [Laughter.] People tell me that I was kind of marching and strutting, and from time to time I'd put my hands on my hip, and I was really in total control of the situation. I said, "Pass those things out. Somebody pass those things out." I said, "We want you to look. We've documented it, and we think we have institutional sex discrimination at ABC. Not a conspiracy to keep us out. I just don't think it'só"

Moorhus: That conscious.

Simpson: Yes. "You just haven't thought about it. You haven't thought about the fact that we beam to an audience that is 50 percent female, yet women are doing only (I think at that time it was) only 9 percent of the news that was reported on 'World News Tonight.' We have to assume, with more than 50 percent of the population female, that more than 50 percent of our audience is probably female. Yet we are not getting any female perspective."

At that time we had no women vice presidents. We had no women bureau chiefs. We had no women who were foreign correspondents. We had no women who were executive producers of any of our broadcasts. We had no woman that was on our assignment desk deciding what stories [would be covered]. We realized why it was the way it was, and that was because women were not players in what we covered, how we covered it, or who covered it, or how much time it got on the broadcast. The stories that were of concern to women, like issues of child care and pension reform and sex discrimination, stories like that were not even being reported. The problems of working women in the work force, women's health issues, and things like that, just were not being covered. They weren't being covered not because we weren't trying to sell the stories, but we were selling them to men who could have cared less about those kinds of things. From a good business standpoint, from a good rating standpoint, it seemed to make sense that we should broaden what we beam to our audiences, and that we speak to a segment of our audience that is not being spoken to.

I'm telling you, you could hear a pin drop. All eyes were on me. I could see the women smiling. I mean, they were giving me power, because I could tell that they're back there, "Give it to them. Do it, Carole. Do it."

I said, "I'm sorry that we had to spring this on you, but we weren't going to have another opportunity like this. Forgive us for not advising you that we were going to take this

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opportunity." Because it was like 2:30. We stayed till five o'clock, continuing to talk after I finished my presentation. I started about 2:30. After I finished what I had to say, I said, "Would any other women like to chime in on anything that I've had to say? Do you want to bolster what I said?" They all sat there like lumps. I'm like, "Oh, God, is anybody going to say anything?"

Then Roone Arledge got up and said, "Carole, I'm not sure what to say."

I'm like, "Oh, God, you're fired. How dare you come up here andó" [Laughter.] And he said, "I want to tell you something. I never really thought about what you're saying. We need to think about this. I really just never thought about it." I think that's correct. Because there wasn't anybodyóRoone came out of the sports world, the jocks and stuff like that, and then he came to news, and he was doing both news and sports at the time. It's kind of this male thing, right? I mean, he didn't have any women that were part of the decision-making process, and so it probably did never occur to him. It probably never occurred to him, the kinds of things that we were telling him about the stories being taken from us and whatever, and the fact that there weren't any women that were part of the product that we were putting on the air in 1985. I mean, we've been at this a long time. I've been in the business for twenty years, you know, and it doesn't seem right.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Moorhus: Roone Arledge was confronted with this. His initial response was positive.

Simpson: It was.

Moorhus: Or at least receptive.

Simpson: Yes. And so then my colleagues, my female colleagues, all started chiming in, and they all had their stories, and they all had theiróand there was this wonderful free-flowing discussion. Remember, the executive producer of "Nightline," the executive producer of "Good Morning, America," the executive producer of "World News Tonight." All of those executives were there, as well as all the senior vice presidents over news coverage, news-gathering, our foreign news coverage. All those guys were there. It was fifteen women correspondents and about twelve men that were sitting around this table.

Moorhus: So it was fairly evenly divided at that point. Did any of the other executive producers, the men, second you?

Simpson: Sure, as soon as they got Roone's cue. They take their cue from him, right? Once they see that he's going, "Maybe you're right, and maybe we need to rethink what we're doing, and maybe we need to rethink our product." See, he had set the tone already, so there was nobody arguing, "Yes, we ought to continue doing what we're doing."

All we were saying is, "Give us an opportunity. Don't block us from the opportunities. Why should I, after twenty years in this business, be covering a story and it be taken from me and given to a man? You don't have the confidence in me? If you don't have the confidence in me, why don't you have the confidence in me? What is it?" It really got kind of heated with women saying that kind of thing, you know. "What is it about us that you would think that a man could do the job better than we could, just a priori, without any thought?"

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We left that meeting with his promising that we would meet again, that we would consider this, that he was going to study our documents, and that we would change it. We would change this. And afterwardsóit was incredible, because, as I said, it was a pretty terrifying experience to go up in front of these people, as I said again, to be a fairly young correspondent at ABC, a new correspondent at ABC, to face these [executives], and to have them respond in a positive manner like that.

People came up to me. Roone, afterwards, kept telling me how dynamic I was, how articulate I was, and I'm like, "Are you surprised?" So many people were saying, "Gee, you're really articulate and you're really dynamic." You know, I've been doing this. This is what we do. I'm a communicator. This is what you pay me to do. This is what you hired me to do, to communicate ideas and things like that. But it was like they were all so surprised that we could talk and that we could document and that we could have analysis and that we could come to them, come to the table, on equal terms, and look them in the eye and not blink.

So we felt very, very good about what had happened. Mission accomplished. Lynn Sherr had left our meeting and had run into Barbara, and she said, "Are you just coming back from the lunch?" Lynn said, "Oh, yeah, we had this incredible meeting about women at ABC." She goes, "What?" And Lynn went on to tell her what had happened and what I had [done], and she said, "Oh, my God! That's fantastic. I wish I had known. I would have liked to have stayed for that." It would have been great if she had been there with us.

Anyhow, that night at her speech, and all the executives were there for that, she changed it. She said, "I've got to change my speech." That night when she received the award, she told in her speech how she had been one of the people in the early days for women, who had pulled a plow and had plowed up the dirt. And that other women now should not have to plow that dirt again. They might have to go around the fences that might have been knocked down. They might have to step over some of the boulders, but they shouldn't have to be plowing that same ground, and she went on to say, how about the women of ABC. It was really the most supportive thing, "These women have worked hard and they deserveó" I mean, she just echoed and punctuated everything that we had said in the meeting, and sent a strong signal to management that she was on our side.

She later sent me a note and said, "Thank God for what you're doing. I'm behind you 100 percent. If there's anything you need me to do, I'm with you. Use my name." And I will forever be grateful for her. I mean, this woman doesn't need us. She's so far above in the stratosphere and stuff, but yet she cares. Unfortunately, I think too many women who are up there don't care. They made it. They don't care about anybody behind them, they really don't. But she still cares. I love her for that. I will never forget the support that she gave us. It was critical to us then, because now we've got our biggest gun on our side.

Moorhus: Publicly.

Simpson: Publicly, in a public fashion. Then the stuff starts filtering out into the papers. Now it's in Variety. I don't know who called the press, but it started appearing that ABC newswomen had confronted management. I decided not to talk to the media. We would have other women talk to the media. I needed to have management know that, "I will deal with you on behalf of women, but I'm not going to be playing this out in the press. If it gets out in the press, it ain't gonna be because I said it." I thought it was important to keep that, so that they could always feel that what we talked about was in confidence, and that I would not be running to the news media.

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But it got out, so now everybody wants us on talk shows and wants interviews. I refused to do everything except the "Donahue Show," which I did in December of that same year it started leaking out. The "Donahue Show" had me, Connie Chung, Maria Shriver, Lesley Stahl, Mary Alice Williams, who was then at CNN [Cable News Network], Jane Pauley, and Joan Lunden. We did two one-hour broadcasts. The hook, the peg, was the ABC womenówhat is happening to women in media. And we told our story.

I almost got into it with Lesley Stahl on the air, and with Connie Chung. One of the things that I pointed out was that some women get to a certain point, and all they would have had to do was just look at our diamond rings. Everybody was married. But if you looked at the size of the rings, I mean, we were on with not journeymen correspondents like I was. These women were anchor ladies. Lesley was the only other one [correspondent], but she was at the White House at the timeóWhite House correspondent. What I was really talking about was kind of the run-of-the-mill, every-day correspondent. Yes, you all have arrived, you know, but they have cars pick them up, they have make-up artists, they have a lot of support staff and stuff like that. I was talking more the average correspondent at any, all the networks.

Moorhus: Those whose diamond rings are not as large as the group that was speaking.

Simpson: Exactly. I said all they had to do was look at our [rings], because they were kind of like knocking down what I was saying. Lesley said, "I just think women can get as far, if they work hard enough, they can get anywhere." I got calls from CBS women who said they wanted to go through the television when they heard her say that, because she was the one that had been at the 1972 convention, and they had [Walter] Cronkite, [Dan] Rather, they had all the seats, and they put "woman" on her chair. She was all upset aboutóshe had a desk that was put in the hallway. She had confronted all of this stuff. But then I later heard that she was in contract talks with CBS at the time, so she didn't go on. I mean, CBS was the most wonderful place in the entire world, and every woman who ever wanted to get any chance could get it at CBS. And again, it was the average folks. It was the other kinds of peopleóthe producers and the regular correspondentsóthat didn't have the advantages. That's who we were talking about.

So that generated a lot more attention. The press stories went on and on.

Moorhus: How did the other women respond? You mentioned Connie.

Simpson: Connie and Lesley, yes.

Moorhus: Connie and Lesley were both at CBS?

Simpson: Connie must have been at NBC then and doing that "American Almanac." She was doing that magazine show.

Moorhus: So she was saying the same kind of things as Lesley, like, "If you work hardó"

Simpson: But she didn't realize thatóthis whole thing about being a minority, she would not accept the fact. She was exotic. [Laughter.] That's why she got a look-see when other people might not have. I'm not taking anything away from her talent, and I think she's a talented woman

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and worked very hard to get where she was, but she was very attractive and exotic, and CBS capitalized on that kind of thing. Black people aren't quite as exotic as a beautiful Asian woman might be. But I mean, not even recognizing that her minority status might have helped her get notice where somebody else might not. She would not even acknowledge that, that "It's all just hard work." Excuse me, I have worked all my life and know a bunch of other women that have, and, you know, opportunities are still denied us.

So after our meeting with Roone in May of 1985, I think we met again in September with a small group of management people. He appointed a committee to deal with us, and we had a committee of women that would work on these issues. We met and were going to measure the progress. Roone said, "Give us six months and see if you notice a difference." So we kind of came up with a series of things that we thought were necessary to improve women's status at ABC, and among them were women in management, women in top management, women that were part of the assignment process.

We thought we very much needed a recruiter to bring in qualified women. "If you don't like these women and you don't think these women can write and all these other things, then we need to go out and recruit the kind of women that you think are going to be the kind that you can put on the air every night like the men."

Then we thought we needed career development. We wanted employee evaluations. My husband works at a companyóhe's vice president of a companyóand he is required by the company, every six months, they have these employee evaluation sessions where you must sit down with your employee and say, "Well, you're not getting a raise this time, because we still think you need to work in these particular areas." We thought if we had something like that, where women could get the benefitówe've seen men tracked and put on a fast track as soon as they walk in the building. Women were never fast-tracked like that. "Okay, we're going to give you an opportunity to work in a small bureau. Then we're going to give you some overseas experience. Then we're going to bring you back and have you anchor on some weekends." It was like all laid out for them. We felt that if we could have the opportunities to routinely meet with our supervisors and work on those areas, [it would help us.]

Like this thing with writing. Nobody would ever tell you. You just all of a sudden weren't on the air, and you didn't know why you weren't on the air. Behind your back it's being said that you can't write, but you would never know. No one would ever come to you and say, "It's because of your writing. We think you need to work on your writing." "You're getting too fat," or, "You've been showing up late for work," or, "We can't depend on you." But some feedback. We wanted that very strongly.

So we came up with all of these things that we thought would improve the process, and we thought an important part of that would be an ABC News Women's Advisory Board that would be established, that could bring issues to management. We had lots of sexual harassment issues, tooóserious ones, particularly involving our younger women, our young desk assistants that come in from college, and these older guys prey on them like you would not believe. So we thought we needed a continuing entity that could advise top management on issues concerning women. And we established that, and that is what I am chair of. I am still chair of the ABC News Women's Advisory Board.

Moorhus: Is that specific to the Washington bureau?

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Simpson: No, no, now it's company-wide. We had elections, and we did the whole thing. Representatives from each category. The board is made up of thirteen women, and they represent categories of employeesóproducers, people on the desk, writers, news administration, the budget controllers, graphic artists, all the different kind of divisions, job classifications.

Moorhus: When was that created?

Simpson: That would have been created in 1987, and we've been in existence [since then]. We're pretty much out of business now, because women have really made great inroads. We can look back and see a lot of progress.

We asked for a pay equity study on the women's salaries at "World News Tonight." They resisted it. We said, "We think we really need it." The legal staff advised them, because that was litigation. That was clearly litigable. Same job, same qualifications necessary, with a $30,000-a-year pay differential? The women, on average, were making $60,000, and the men $90,000, doing exactly the same thing.

So we asked for a pay equity study and asked for an outside firm to come in and do it, and they did it. They got a company to come in, and what we had said was correct. The company explained that the way it happened, it was not conspiratorial, it was not a deliberate attempt to discriminate against women. Their explanation was that most women at ABC had come up through the ranks, had been DA, PA, then production.

Moorhus: What's DA?

Simpson: Desk assistant, entry level. Production assistant, next. Then you become a production associate, then an associate producer, then a producer. The company had a written rule that if you move within the company, you can't get more than a 10 percent pay increase. Most of the men who came as producers to "World News Tonight" had come from outside the company, had agents, had been hired from other places, and so came in and were able to command these higher salaries. This was their explanation, that there really was kind of a two-track system of how men and women were moving through the company. Women were staying and moving up through the ranks, and men were moving around a lot more, and that's why it happened.

But at any rate, they found the median, which was about $65,000, and they raised all the women that were below that up to that. And some men. I think forty-five women got increases in salaries. Even though we were looking at the "World News Tonight" producers, they did it companywide, for all producers. They found the median for all producers, brought women up to the median, and there were some men, I think fifteen men. But it cost the company about $250,000. It was an incredible victory. I think that was the clearest cut victory that we had, on that money issue.

Now you look around, and we still don't have as many women on the air as we would like, as many women correspondents as we would like, but it's a lot better, a lot better. Most of the movement and most of the improvement has been behind the scenes. We now have three women vice presidents. The vice president of news-gathering (that's over the assignment desk)óI told you about that inputóis a woman. We have two women bureau chiefs. We have two women executive producers of prime time magazine shows. There are now women senior producers on almost every broadcast. I'm anchoring on the weekends now. It's been incredible, so we're almost out of business. Every now and then we'll have an issue on child care, but a lot of improvements were made.

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We got a woman on "Brinkley" ["This Week with David Brinkley"]. There had been no woman on "Brinkley." That was another one of our issues. "Nightline" continues to be a problem, in terms there is no woman that is a correspondent, that does the "Nightline" reports. Cokie [Roberts] is filling in for Ted [Koppel] sometimes when he's gone. But in the number of women guests that are brought in on the show and stuff, there are still some issues involving "Nightline," but there are women that are part of the process in a way they never were before. There are more women producers and that kind of thing.

Moorhus: Was there the possibility of a lawsuit lurking behind the scenes, and was that ever hinted at from the management side, as well as from your side?

Simpson: It was hinted at not by me, but it was hinted at in many of the stories that were written by other people, and clearly that was a factor, and the company realized that.

During that period of time, I don't know if you remember the Cecily Coleman case. ABC had a project called "Vote." That would have been 1984. It was "Vote '84," something like that, but it was a public service campaign to register people to vote and get people more interested in the political process. There was a woman who was working here in Washington for a vice president of the company named Jim Abernathy. He was not in the news division; he was in another division of the company. But she was working for him. She was here in Washington. They were preparing for a big seminar that was going to be held on Capitol Hill, and she went to our personnel office and had charged this man with sexual harassment, that he was really pestering her and had implied that her job was dependent on it. She went to personnel, and the next day she was fired. She was fired. She filed a lawsuit.

All this was coming up about the same timeóthe timingóand Capital Cities taking over ABC [announced March 18, 1985], there were a lot of things that came together to make them responsive in a way that they might not have been, had not these things been happening. She filed suit, and the company earlier that year of '85 had to pay out $650,000, and this man was fired on the sexual harassment charges. So that was lurking. They had just had that experience of having to pay out a big chunk of money. Some graphic artists here had charged race and sex discrimination, and a lawsuit was pending there. There were some age discrimination things filed. There was a woman, a lesbian, a woman editor in L.A. that was called a "dyke" by some guy, and they had to pay her $75,000. So there was a lot of stuff happening like that.

Capital Cities came in. Dan Burke and Tom Murphy, that run this corporation and bought up ABC, came in with a strong record on women and minorities. In this period of time when we were working on this issue, word was sent to meóthe merger became complete in January of 1986, and as I told you, we met in May of 1985. After it hit the press, word was sent to me from higher-ups at Capital Cities, "Go ahead and do what you have to do, and do not worry." Word had been sent to me that, "We're going to see how they handle it, how the news division handles this. But you have no fear." So that was empowering, too, knowing that they were watching and that I would not get in trouble for what I was trying to do, because they realized that we were right. We were absolutely right.

Cap Cities was going to take over the company, so the news division, knowing their record on women and minorities, which was strong with Capital CitiesóDan Burke was incredible on those issues, and had begun internships and had women editors. I mean, it was a personal thing with him. So Capital Cities had always, from 1973, done a lot affirmatively in terms of women and minorities. They wanted to see how they [news division] would handle it. Clearly there were

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a lot of influences that made Roone Arledge and the news division respond in a very positive fashion on this thing.

I have to tell you one other story that I neglected. In our smaller meetings, after I said he had set up a committee for us to meet with, and a small committee of women, we couldn't have these big group things, so we'd have these small committeesóDebby [Deborah] Leff and IóI don't know if she told you this storyówe had gone to New York to meet with Bob Siegenthaler. He was then a vice president of news. He's now president of broadcast operations and engineering. We had gone to meet with him and Joanna Bistany, who, after our meeting, was named a vice president of ABC, oddly enough. Isn't that interesting? In September we got our first woman vice president of news.

Moorhus: That was September of '85.

Simpson: '85, after our May '85 meeting. She and who else? There was another man that we met with. We go into the meeting to talk about we wanted this recruiter, and we were discussing the ways we thought that we could implement things to make things better for women and improve the status of women at ABC, and at one point, Mr. Siegenthaleróand I like him very muchóbut at one point in our conversation, he said, "Well, I didn't come here to play patty-cake with you all."

I said, "Patty-cake?" [Laughter.] "Patty-cake? You think we're here trying to play patty-cake? Nursery rhymes? Do you not think this is serious?" I mean, I was furious. Debby wasóI could see her just seething. She started grabbing the arms of the chair. I could just see that she was furious. It was so inappropriate, and it was such a put-down to us of this discussion, and I thought, "This thing isn't going to work." I said, "Clearly this is notóI mean, if you can't deal with us as adults and not use nursery rhymes talking to me, then we're not going to get anywhere with this."

And he goes, "Well, now, calm down. Calm down."

I said, "No, I'm not going to calm down. I find this offensive. Are we going to be serious or we're not going to be serious?" It was the way he said it, and it was in such a demeaning manner. I said, "Well, I'm going to have to get together with my people and see whether this is even worth pursuing."

We left there on a very bad note, and Debby and I were so angry. It was like, "These people are not going to be serious. I want to deal with Roone. Don't give me these people that are going toóif I can talk to Roone, you know, but don't give me somebody that's going to talk to me like this."

She and I left 47 West 66th Street after this meeting, so angry, so mad, we went shopping. [Laughter.] I spent $700! I guess years from now, when people will listen to this, they won't think that's a lot of money. It was a lot of money.

Moorhus: It was a lot of money.

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Simpson: She bought a belt for $150 and a skirt for like $200. She spent over $300. I spent $700. It was like, "We'll show them." [Laughter.] "We're going to goó" Then we went to the airport. Our shuttle wasn't there. We got a huge Hershey bar, one of those great big Hershey Almond bars. We're sitting in La Guardia Airport with our packages, all packages of clothes, eating this Hershey bar, saying, "We'll show them. I mean, we're going to eat this chocolate bar. We're going to spend all our money on clothes. We'll make them feel bad." [Laughter.] And we laugh about that now so much. It was like, is this a typical female response or what? I'm sure men would have gone out and gotten drunk, as mad as they were about something like this. But we went shopping and were eating chocolates, stuffing our faces with chocolate. It's so funny now! But it seemed just the appropriate thing to do after we were so mad at what had happened. That was just an aside.

Moorhus: That's a wonderful story. [Laughter.]

Simpson: Isn't it? Chocolate! We were just stuffing chocolate in our faces, and we had spent all this money. Did not need these things we boughtó$150 belt! Debby's going, "What was wrong with me?" We were in there just shopping away, just shopping. It was retail therapy. We call it retail therapy now. [Laughter.]

Moorhus: You mentioned Debby, and I was going to ask about her as you were kind of cataloguing the successes. Debby did not feel the same sense of success and satisfaction here at ABC.

Simpson: And it's because she came from a very narrow perspective, because she worked for "Nightline" at that time. She worked for "Nightline" and was on that one broadcast. Someone like me works for many broadcasts, travels a lot, comes in contact with women in other bureaus, so I had much more of a companywide view of things and how they were happening. Her personal experience was a terrible one. She's very smart, clearly, very talented, and again had that glass ceiling. I don't know if she told you about how she was senior producer and filled in for Rick Kaplan, but they wouldn't name her executive producer of that broadcast. No, they'd go and get Dorrance Smith. Clearly, she knew the broadcast, knew the people. People respected her. For every right reason, she should have gotten that job.

Then she goes to "World News" and became one of the first women to ever sit on the "World News" rim. That was another big breakthrough for us. I was thrilled that she is now part of the domestic coverage, and we're going to get these women's stories. She made a big difference. But dealing with the guys on the rim [was tough], maybe she may have told you some of that. Her experience was pretty much confined to her own personal experience, because the role that she had with us was because she was a lawyer and had successfully sued the University of Chicago. She was kind of like our legal advisor, so she wasn't involved in the statistics-gathering and the other kinds of things that I was involved in. She didn't want an up-front role. "I'll do what I can behind the scenes," and she was totally supportive and stuff like that, but never took an up-front role. So I think that's why, because it was such narrow casting in her view of what was happening to me, Debby, on these various shows that I'm working on, I guess is what soured her completely, because she really was given a raw deal.

Moorhus: And some of the women that are now in positions of making decisionsóthe vice presidents, the executive producersóare those women that were promoted from in-house, or are those women that they brought in from the outside?

Simpson: They were all in-house.

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Moorhus: Do you think if Debby had stayed, she would have gotten what she wanted? Pure speculation, I realize.

Simpson: I think so, because her talent was certainly something everyone was aware of, or she wouldn't have gotten the opportunities. She went from "Nightline" senior producer to senior producer on "World News Tonight," then senior producer on "20/20." She had really important, high-level jobs, not as quickly as she may have wanted them and deserved them, but that had certainly been the case throughout my career. I think she was impatient with the process and just saw that it was going to be a long while, after that "Nightline" thing didn't work the way she wanted it to work. [Pause.] I even wonder if her stature is part of the problem.

Moorhus: That's interesting. You mean the fact that she's just about five feetó5'2"?

Simpson: She is tiny, tiny. I think there is a bias against short people, that you're not going to get the respect of other people. I never saw her having a problem with that. But I just wonder if they thought of her as just this little tiny pixie kind ofóbecause Kathy Christensen, whom she told you about, is coming back.

Moorhus: Oh, is she?

Simpson: She left Baltimore Sun. She's very tall, a more imposing figure, kind of. I don't know. It'll be interesting, because she left in disgust, too, because she hated it, but is now back.

Moorhus: What is she coming back as?

Simpson: She's coming back as like number two on "World News Tonight." Before she did just the foreign news. She was senior producer over foreign news, but now she's like senior broadcast producer over much of the broadcast. It's a much higher position. So she's coming back.

Moorhus: I asked Debby if she would consider coming back into journalism, not specifically ABC, and she said, "No way."

Simpson: She did?

Moorhus: Yes. That her journalism career was behind her. People can change their minds.

Simpson: Right.

Moorhus: But your sense is that women have achieved many of the goals that they set out in 1985.

Simpson: We have. As I say, we are now up to twenty women correspondents, which we still have fifty men correspondents, and still only twenty. That's where our biggest problem has been, in getting correspondents on the air, but they're still hiring.

One of the things, and it is a problem, because I do recruiting for ABC, too, is the network does not have the allure that it used to. Women now want some quality of life. It's a tough job. You're traveling a lot. You can, at a local station, make a lot more money than some of the network salaries. There are people that I used to work with in Chicago that make much more money than I do now, and they're still in local news in Chicago, and you have a life. You're not on the road constantly. So it's kind of tough now to find women, good women, that are willing to give up their life, which you almost have to do, to work for a network, because it's so demanding.

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Moorhus: You said that you had been assured your position was not in jeopardy. Were there any women that were hurt by their involvement with the women's cause at ABC?

Simpson: Rita Flynn, who was the firebrand with me. She was the bomb-thrower, and I was the voice of reason. She ended up leaving here, feeling that she was treated badly. And we're not friends anymore. She kind of justóI tried to keep in touch with her, and I think she feels I gained in the situation and that she lost and I'm the reason that she lost. I don't think that's it at all, but she was very, very bitter and very unhappy. Because she was more outspoken, you know. I'd say it with a smile, and I think that's important to negotiation, that you get my point and I'm strong and you know that I'm serious about what I'm saying, but I say it in a way, I kind of sugar-coat it to some degree until I just get where I see that doesn't work, and I might have to use profanity to make you get my point. Then you will get my point. But she's just thisóit was all out there.

Moorhus: And strident.

Simpson: And strident. If you look at the "Donahue Show" and you see how she came off and how I came off, and we're both ABC women talking about ABCóand I give her credit for what we did. She helped push. She was very important to our movement here at ABC News. I think you need both those kinds of people to work people, but she just felt she was treated very shabbily. She was number two at the White House and they wouldn't let her go toójust a series of things happened just in her own career here at ABC, and she feels that she was punished.

Moorhus: Did she stay in journalism?

Simpson: I don't know where she is now. She moved out to Oregon. Somebody told me she left her husband and she's back here. But I don't know what she's doing. I've lost touch with her.

Moorhus: What about Susan King? She's now out of the network and in the local ABC station.

Simpson: And you just saw what happened to her.

Moorhus: No.

Simpson: She's been replaced as anchoróLabor Day. So she's no longer anchoring at Channel 7, but looking for other work.

Moorhus: Did her leaving the network have anything to do with the women's advisory group, the women's movement here?

Simpson: No. I think she wasn't happy here, and she got a good offer from the local station. It was like double her salary. She thought, "Oh, God, what are people going to say? I'm leaving the network." I'm going, "You fool! You fool! Go!" [Laughter.] She left here to go to NBC, WRC. She was there first and then went over to Channel 7. So over the last ten years she's been in local news. But now she doesn't know what to do with herself.

See, I mean, what's happening, Renee [Poussaint] and she were both making very high salaries, and it's the same story at all the local stations. They're getting rid of their very talented, high-priced talent, and bringing in cheap folks to save some money. So they brought in this young black, pretty black woman, who may be twenty-eight or something, Lori Stokes, Congressman [Carl] Stokes' daughter, to replace her.

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Moorhus: Is there an element of ageism in that?

Simpson: She thinks there is, but then you look at Judy Woodruff, who is a year older. She's forty-seven. She left PBS [Public Broadcasting Service], now at CNN. She [Susan King] feels, "I'm a forty-six-year-old white woman, and agents are telling me nobody wants me." I think it's more the money, because I think Susan has a big following in Washington. She's been around a long time. I think it's the money, because local stations find the ratings stay the same whether they pay you $100,000 or $300,000.

Moorhus: As some of the women who fought some of these battles in the seventies and eighties get older, they're pushing the limit that had been sort of set about the age at which women could stay on the air.

Simpson: Right.

Moorhus: And there is an issue of salary. Are they going to keep pushing the age limit?

Simpson: I am. I'm pushing it. I mean, I'm fifty-two. Ten years ago, I would not have predicted that I would still be doing this. At fifty-two, I'm a lot better than I was ten years ago, twenty years ago. I look back. Maybe I was thinner and prettier and more energetic, but now I have maturity and seasoning and the ability to approach these stories, and I can talk about them with authority because I've done it and I've seen it. I've been to Beijing and I've reported on South Africa. I was there. So I think I bring so much more to my job with the experience that I've had, and it's a snap for me. I can go into a story like that, I don't have to agonize about it. I can write it in no time. I mean, I'm just so much better.

Now, whether ABC will continue to see that and the public will continue to see that, how long they'll see that I bring a dimension that someone twenty-eight could never bring to the jobóI hope we don't lose that, because I know that I can bring more to the American public now as a reporter than I could. If we start being bottom-line driven, rather than focusing on the journalismóthat's the frightening thing that's happening in the business that really concerns me now. But look, all of us are fifty or pushing it. Lesley Stahl is fifty. Connie Chung is forty-seven. Diane [Sawyer] is forty-eight. Barbara [Walters] is sixty-two. We're pushing it.

Moorhus: Good. Let's take a break.