Marlene Sanders, one of the first female broadcast TV journalists, died of cancer one Tuesday at the age of 84. Jeffrey Toobin, her son, CNN legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, announced the death on his Facebook page. "She was a pioneering broadcaster and, above all, a great Mom," he wrote, reports USA Today.
Sanders, a reporter in the field, an Emmy-winning writer and producer of documentaries, and an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, breathed her last at the Calvary Hospital Hospice in Manhattan.
Sanders created history when she substituted for Ron Cochran, who was sidelined with a throat ailment, as the anchor of a network news program on the evening news on ABC. She later took over for Sam Donaldson as the anchor of ABC's weekend news for three months in 1971.
She became one of the first network newswomen to report from the field in Vietnam in 1966, and one of the first women to rise to the upper reaches of management when ABC made her vice president and director of documentaries in 1976, reports The New York Times.
"She had to fight a lot of stereotypes and a lot of ridicule," said Bill Moyers, who worked with Sanders on a documentary series at CBS. "But she hung in there and did really good work. She caused the first tinkling of the glass ceiling," according to the LA Times.
Marlene Sanders was born on Jan. 10, 1931, in Cleveland and grew up in nearby Shaker Heights. After attending Ohio State University for a year, she decided to try her luck as an actress. Her acting career went nowhere, but in 1955 she found work as an assistant to Ted Yates, the producer of "Mike Wallace and the News," a twice-daily report broadcast on a local DuMont Television Network station. It was her first foray into a world where she went on to create history.
Sanders felt her legacy was in her coverage of the women's movement. "As I look back on my career, the women's movement provided an exceptional point when time, place and position all came together to give me the power and focus to contribute to the country's awareness of the status of women," she wrote in her 1988 book, "Waiting for Prime Time," according to the LA Times. "For once, I seemed to be in the right place at the right time."
Her husband, Jerome Toobin, died in 1984. She is survived by her son and three grandchildren.
