Marlene Sanders, born in Ohio, Cleveland, on the 10th of January 1931, is one of the relatively few women who were successful television journalists starting from the 50s and 60s. She has married once, and has two children. Her son Jeffrey Toobin is a highly regarded lawyer and non-fiction author. Sanders's most notable journalism achievements include being the first woman to deliver first hand reports from the Vietnam War, as well as producing award-winning documentary films. She was also the first anchoring woman in a major evening news show. Furthermore, Marlene Sanders was the first female vice president of
ABC's News division. She has received three Emmy awards for her correspondence work. Marlene was a graduate of the Ohio State University.
Marlene's career started in New York's WNEW-TV (then: WABD-TV) where she was both a reporter and also a producer for the journalist Mike Wallace. Sanders worked there for five years until she eventually quit in 1960. After that, her TV career remained rather uneventful for three years until she became a correspondent and news anchor for
ABC News in 1964. In 1966, she was the first woman to broadcast from 'Nam and thus gained a semi-celebrity status in the United States. She was also the narrator of some documentaries produced at the time; however, she focused on narrating documentaries only later in her career.
Sanders started anchoring broadcasts as a replacement when the regular newsanchor got ill, but later became the substitute anchor for the famous Samuel Donaldson. She became the Vice President of
ABC News in 1976; during her term, Marlene supervised the production of documentary films, too. After two years, in 1978, she left
ABC to join
CBS News as a producer. Sanders worked along highly regarded journalists, such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and others. After ten years of work as a producer at
CBS, she left, allegedly because of issues with
CBS's administration. She then began working as a freelancer and, from time to time, narrated documentary films. Marlene also worked as a graduate journalism professor at New York University and Columbia University. Marlene was also a consultant at the Freedom Forum Foundation's Media Studies Centre from 1977 to 2000. Her work there mainly included consultations and organizing panels on issues of the modern media.
Marlene is a wonderful example of what will power can do. At the time when she started to serve as a news anchor, women were mainly secretaries and had only recently proven themselves as high class workers by doing mens' labor during World War 2. In 1994, Sanders, together with Marcie Rock, another highly regarded woman journalist, wrote a book about her industry, "Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News". In the book, Sanders described her experiences which she experienced; for example, in the book Marlene writes about her struggling to get to the top while lesser qualified men receive better paid jobs than she does. Marlene Sanders will be remembered not only as a dedicated newswoman and a documentary author, but also as an important women's rights fighter.
