How women invented the talkshow

The hit sitcom “Hacks,” starring Jean Smart as a talkshow host who breaks the glass ceiling for women, just wrapped its fourth season on Max. As delightful as the series has proved to be, it reminds us that women were actually pioneers in broadcast interviewing, not wannabes.
Three women revolutionized not only how women were viewed but also the concept of broadcast interviewing itself. Making this long forgotten bit of history more fascinating: They all used the name “Martha Deane.”
The story begins in 1934 when program execs at WOR radio in New York invented a fictional character, a grandmother with dozens of relatives, who would chat about family matters on a daily broadcast. This was a bold move. A study on the psychology of radio, conducted by Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, showed that both male and female listeners overwhelmingly preferred male announcers. The researchers found that audiences’ primary reasoning was, “women seem to them affected and unnatural when they broadcast.”
Nevertheless, WOR hired Mary Margaret McBride, a newspaper reporter from Missouri to be Martha Deane. After a few weeks she became so confused by the details of her faux bio that she confessed to listeners, “I’m not a grandmother! I’m not a mother. I’m not even married … The truth is I’m a reporter who would like to come here every day and tell you about places I go, people I meet.”
What could have been a career-ending scandal turned out to be a stroke of genius. Listeners loved her candor. Shedding the fictional backstory while retaining the pseudonym, McBride continued as Martha Deane at WOR for six years, earning the unofficial title, “First Lady of Radio.” Later, using her real name, she worked at CBS, NBC and ABC. At the height of her popularity McBride’s audience was estimated at nearly eight million people. Her tenth anniversary was marked by an event at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. On her fifteenth anniversary the party was attended by 54,000 adoring fans at Yankee Stadium and was hosted by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.

When McBride left WOR she hand-picked one of her closest friends to succeed her, the veteran journalist Bessie Beatty. Beatty had been a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers and for a few years was editor of McCall’s Magazine. Rival Time magazine once labeled her “Mrs. Know-it-All.” Beatty only played the Martha Deane role for two years and was succeeded by Marian Taylor Young, who took over in 1941 and remained there, five days a week for 32 years, conducting over 10,000 interviews.
Beatty honed an approach to interviewing that was unique for the times: appealing to a large female audience without bothering with what was commonly known as a “women’s angle.” “Women’s angle? What’s that?” she once asked. “Women are people. If a story is good, it’s good. If it’s bad, it’s bad.”
In the season finale of “Hacks,” Jean Smart’s character quits her show with a rant about network interference. She sounded like a real Martha Deane.

Copyright 2025 Peter Funt distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.