The news and the olds.

Diane Sawyer and me.I’m getting older. So are my friends. We tell each other how good we look and we mean it. We look healthy, alive, interested, interesting.
What we don’t tell each other is how young we look. Because we don’t. We look—more or less—our age. We know it and, while we visit our dermatologist and maybe even a plastic surgeon; while we wear flattering makeup, patronize talented hair stylists and care about clothes, we don’t make excessive efforts to fool anyone about how many years we've been gracing the planet.
So why does just about every anchor or news personality on tv—most of whom are in their 50s, 60s or beyond—so faux-young?  Look up Diane Sawyer or Nancy Grace, Leslie Stahl, Greta Van Susteren or Katie Couric on the internet and, odds are, one of Google’s first guesses as you type in their names includes the term “plastic surgery.”  Barbara Walters is pushing eighty but, counting in TV years, eighty isn’t pushing back.  And it’s not just the women.  Al Roker, Sam Donaldson and Sam Champion all rank high on the plastic surgery websites.I’m a true believer in the power of lighting, hair and makeup and I’m certainly not proposing that these knowledgable and experienced people look as if they’d just rolled out of bed to tell us about the most recent global disasters, political crises and economic trends.   In fact, I want them to look their best.  Still, how much Botox, plastic surgery, teeth whitening and fake bake are we supposed to be fooled by?We grew up with them;  we know approximately how old they are.  We know what we look like and we can probably even guess what they look like.As we grow older, looking in the mirror isn’t always great but it’s not always terrible, either. Like everyone else, we have our good days and our not-so-good days.  Diane and Katie, Barbara and Al are all very smart and very good at what they do.  Their age and experience are a large part of the reason they’re so respected.  How about letting at least a little bit of it show?  After all, what’s more powerful than authenticity?We women—and men—“of a certain age” grew up with TV and still have the TV habit. We’re the ones to whom TV wants to sell their relentlessly advertised arthritis-relievers and erection-enhancers.  Do the executives who hire on-air journalists think we forgot we knew their star anchors and reporters back in the day?Doesn’t occur to them that in their twisted zeal for youthification they risk insulting the very audience they most want to woo? The grown-up audience that hasn’t—at least not yet—deserted them in droves for the internet?

OOOOOH! Want to read more? My new Romantic Comedy/Thriller, THE CHANEL CAPER, is #1 in Comedy and answers the question: Is there sex after marriage?  It does NOT tell you how to lose weight—that's an Amazon ad I can't nuke.
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