She Was a CBS News Producer When Few Women Were

Detailed summary

Linda Mason started in an entry-level job at CBS Radio in 1966 and rose through the news division’s ranks to senior vice president. She was 84.

Linda Mason, an Emmy Award-winning journalist at CBS News who was the first female producer at “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite and who was put in charge of reinforcing the division’s standards after a botched “60 Minutes” report on President George W. Bush’s military service, died on Oct. 28 at her home in the Bronx. She was 84.

Ms. Mason stood out for her long rise through the male-dominated news division. She started as a desk assistant at CBS Radio before moving into jobs of increasing responsibility, including senior producer of “CBS Evening News”; executive producer of “CBS News Sunday Morning” and the documentary news series “CBS Reports”; and vice president of public affairs, developing programming and overseeing standards.

“We took it for granted that every woman was going to be a secretary or a researcher, and she had made it to the exalted position of producer,” Marcy McGinnis, who started at CBS News as a secretary and later became a producer and senior vice president of news coverage, said in an interview. “I looked to her as my North Star. Oh, I wanted to be like her. And she was nice to me and other people like me who didn’t matter at the time.”

In 2004, as a vice president, Ms. Mason was CBS News’s liaison to an independent review panel convened by the network to investigate a flawed “60 Minutes Wednesday” report about Mr. Bush, which was broadcast two months before his successful campaign for re-election. It purported to raise serious questions about the president’s Vietnam-era Texas Air National Guard service and whether he had received preferential treatment because of his family’s political connections.

Her role was to answer questions from the panel — led by Louis D. Boccardi, a former chief executive of The Associated Press, and Dick Thornburgh, a former attorney general of the United States — about CBS’s reporting methods.

“For months, I felt as if I were in isolation, quarantined,” she wrote in her memoir, “Speak Up: Breaking the Glass…

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