What are your views on Natalie Morales ? (the journalist not the actress).
I say the most beautiful woman in the annals of recorded human history.
As a journalist, she’s stunningly mediocre and completely forgettable, Jim.
I have no opinion on Natalie Morales, whose name doesn’t ring a bell, but as a long-time watcher of news programs I find the current depiction of women journalists baffling.
Looks have been for many decades a major factor in the selection of on-air personalities, male and female. The better you look, the better chance you have of being promoted from small local stations to bigger markets to the network. Men could range down to merely ordinary looking but they had a cut-off: those who were deemed fat or old or ugly got shifted to radio news.
Women had to conform to a narrower range. Merely ordinary wasn’t enough. They needed to be good looking. This was even more true for the large-market local news stations and especially for weather girls, since many stations compete with one another on the basis of hotness, and not the outside temperature kind. Barbara Walters went from weather girl (and yes, that was the term used) on the Today show to a network anchor. For almost every other woman, their news careers tended to be shorter than men. They weren’t forgiven for aging.
CNN was the first to deliberately break this pattern. It hired a wider range of types and kept their women on air as they aged. Fox News, by contrast, uses beauty (and blondeness) as a selling point, with lots of shots of legs in minidresses as the talking heads sit on couches rather than behind desks.
The networks seem to be trying to have it both ways. They are keeping their star female reporters on just as long as their male counterparts and not holding them to standards of youthful beauty they can’t match. At the same time, most of the newer faces are clearly picked for beauty - and more so than I remember a couple of decades ago - in a way that male reporters are still not held to.
Is this distinction actually a factor in gaining and keeping viewers or do the male bosses just believe it to be true? I’ve never seen a study that addresses it. If anybody knows of one, please give me a link.
I agree, but about the other Natalie Morales. 
Who?!? Looks
Okay she’s on the Today show. That explains why I never heard of her. I don’t get much news from video sources. It’s low density for actually providing information compared to reading. Morning news shows are IMO among the worst of the bunch since they fill in a lot of fluff and banter. I don’t even consider eating breakfast to be something worth getting out of bed earlier for. Morning news is a lot lower on my priority list than food.
Daytime television is a vast wasteland. Pretty much everything about it is stunningly mediocre and completely forgettable.
And how is that different from nighttime television?
If we’re on the subject of attractive female TV “journalists”: I’ve had a huge crush on Jen Carfagno of the Weather Channel for at least a decade. Sigh…
How much do you think is casting, and how much is grooming? Clearly, before anybody gets in front of the camera they’ve been fashioned, made up and over, and impeccably coiffed. And the superficiality goes beyond looks; I’ve never heard a newsreader in the U.S. with any but the most bland accent.
So, yes, they pick newsreaders for more than just their ability to read the news. In a sense they can probably afford to. It seems like a job that lots of people want. If you have 2 opening, and 200 résumés, you can pick the one-out-of-one-hundred who has the right looks, the right voice, and some talent.
Since this thread is about her, here’s a photo link for the sake of reference.
I concur.
She is a lovely woman of intelligence and grace. I have no doubt she left the Today show because Matt Lauer wouldn’t leave her alone and she felt the situation was toxic (which it probably was) although I never heard her complain or accuse. Then her talent was wasted on fluff for a time, and I’m not sure what she is doing now.
Her intelligence and poise was particularly apparent when compared with Savanna Guthrie (sp?)who seems to me to be as deep as a puddle. Another example of Ms Morales’ charm and humility comes from covering the Olympics in Brazil. (As I recall, her father is Italian and her mother is Brazilian, so besides perfectly accentless American English, she also speaks flawless Italian and Portuguese, so she was a natural to cover a sporting event in a location where she was a native speaker.) She did a feature with Tom Brady’s wife who is apparently also Brazilian and was involved in certain ceremonies, Ms. Morales gushed about what a remarkable woman she is/was then. They even sang an impromptu version of The Girl From Ipanema together in the original language in which it was composed. Throughout the entire feature I kept thinking Ms. Morales was the more impressive woman in every way*, but I admired her ability to give the spotlight to her guest whom she obviously genuinely liked.
*e.g.: looks, intelligence, composure, world view (much deeper and more complex), fashion choices, singing voice, sincerity, and doubtlessly many more intangibles for which I do not have words.
Never heard of her, but I looked her up and she looks like what you’d expect from a tv newsreader.
Going by the pic in the link provided by NDP, meh. She is pretty enough, but so bland and generic looking to me. I like Judy Woodruff better, but I actually know who she is so…
When I had a long stretch of being unemployed, I watched Today regularly. Loved Matt Lauer(before I found out he’s a lech) and liked Natalie quite a bit. She certainly ran circles around Savannah Guthrie who’s advanced to lead cohost with Hoda Kotb. I can’t stand either one of them so I no longer watch that show. Also, I’m no longer unemployed so I’m happily unable to watch any of the morning shows during the week.
She brings to mind this classic:
By the time I finish writing this sentence, I’ll already have forgotten what she looks like.
If we’re going strictly by looks, I preferSoledad O’Brien, who anchored Weekend Today for four years.
And if you want the “most beautiful” American women journalists, I suggest you look up 1970s/80s-era photos of Connie Chung, Linda Ellerbee, Jessica Savitch, and Diane Sawyer, just for starts.
I was always a fan of ca-2001-2002 Rudi Bakhtiar myself, if we’re on the subject of good looking news readers.
Yeah, if anything the photo link that was provided doesn’t make her look especially good looking. Rather harsh looking to my eyes and kinda bony.
[Moderating]
Do we really need this thread?