Abstract
Americans have long looked to the “;weatherman” to keep them informed on the atmosphere’s itinerary. In the first few years of television, the new medium gave people exactly what the word weatherman implies: a man, and usually a white one. Weathercasting thus reflected a society that shunted women and ethnic minorities as far from positions of authority as possible.
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Notes
Mark Reynolds, Kathy Strebe, and Ada Monzon, “AMS Membership Survey Results: The Broadcast Meteorology Employment Field,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 89, no. 8 (2008), 1186.
Barbara Matusow, The Evening Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 65.
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Roger Turner, “Keeping Meteorology Masculine: The American Meteorological Society’s Response to Television ‘Weather Girls’ in the 1950s,” Weather, Local Knowledge and Everyday Life: Issues in Integrated Climate Studies, eds. Vladimir Jankovic and Christina Barboza (Rio de Janeiro: MAST, 2009), 147–158.
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Lazalier, “A Report on the Results of a Television Weather Survey,” 5–6.
June Bacon-Bercey, phone interview with author, 14 July 1989.
Melvin Durslag, “TV Weathermen,” TV Guide (24 March 1973), 6.
Pam Proctor, “All They Do Is Talk About the Weather,” Parade (7 September 1975), 13.
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Ray Ban, phone interview with author, 28 July 1989.
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Vivian Brown, interview with author, The Weather Channel, 30 October 2008.
Ibid.
Bob Papper, “Women in TV News at a Record High but Minorities Drop,” RTNDA/Hofstra University 2009 Annual Survey, http://www.rtnda.org/media/pdfs/Women%20and%20Minorities%20Survey1.pdf (accessed 29 July 2009).
Kris Wilson, “Opportunities and Obstacles for Television Weathercasters to Report on Climate Change,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 40, no. 10 (2009), 1457–65.
Valerie Voss, phone interview with author, 17 February 1989.
June Bacon-Bercey, “Is There a Future for Women Meteorologists in the Broadcast Field?” Proceedings, 12th Conference on Weathercasting, AMS, Seattle, WA (27 June 1982), 11.
Valerie Voss Crenshaw, phone interview with author, 26 April 2009.
Lynette Rice, “On the Air: Warm Front,” Entertainment Weekly (11 May 2001), 64.
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June Bacon-Bercey, phone interview with author, 14 July 1989.
Ibid.
“About Janice Huff,” WNBC, 14 April 2009, http://www.nbcnewyork.com/station/community/About-Janice-Huff.html (accessed 26 July 2009).
Alan Sealls, phone interview with author, 4 June 2009.
Ibid.
Maclovio Perez, phone interview with author, 12 April 1989.
Ibid.
John Toohey-Morales, phone interview with author, 1 June 2009.
Ibid.
Frank Batten with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 182.
Belinda Sym-Smith, quoted by Batten, The Weather Channel, 184.
“Hispanic Programming: Mining the Market,” Broadcasting & Cable 133, no. 36 (2003), 26.
Richard Ortner, e-mail to author, 24 August 2009.
“Pam’s Journal: At It Again,” KMGH, http://www.thedenverchannel.com/health/2726615/detail.html (accessed 29 July 2009).
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Stuart Tomlinson, “Jack Capell, the Forecaster who Predicted the Columbus Day Storm, Dies,” The Oregonian, 15 June 2009, http://blog.oregonlive.com/weather/2009/06/jack_capell_the_forecaster_who.html (accessed 29 July 2009).
Jack Capell, phone interview with author, 28 June 1989.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bob Lynott, The Weather Tomorrow (Portland, Oregon: Gadfly Press, 1987), 157.
Jim Little, letter to author, 30 June 1988.
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© 2010 Robert Henson
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Henson, R. (2010). Breaking through the Glass Map. In: Weather on the Air. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-00-3_6
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