Natasha Walter: Bimbos, brunettes and the BBC

'Don't blame the women who think that the only way to get noticed is to strip off; blame the culture that means they are right'

Well now, that's something that we would never have guessed! Kate Adie has told an audience in Cheltenham that women who work in television news are still subject to great pressure regarding their looks, their youth, and their fresh-faced appeal to the viewers.

"They want women with cute faces, cute bottoms and nothing else in between," said Adie. Yes, she's noticed that women with grey hair, sagging jowls and irregular features are rarely seen in the studios facing the glare of the lights, or standing outside Downing Street commenting on Tony Blair's latest initiative, or wearing bullet-proof vests in northern Afghanistan. Such women are rarely seen anywhere on television, in fact. Some extremely beautiful or well-known females are allowed to remain as anchors of the less-watched news bulletins into their fifties but, in general, as Adie has brilliantly noticed, they begin to be sidelined as soon as they lose their dewy freshness.

One newspaper that ran the story of Adie's broadside against the news industry saw it as a perfect opportunity to run a couple of pictures of Kate. Not just Kate Adie as she is, of course. That picture had to go in, but it was printed as small as possible and it was inset within a picture about three times larger that showed Adie as she was. That Adie, the Adie of 33 years ago, with her thick hair and gorgeous pout, was perched on the edge of a desk, wearing a skirt that just reached to mid-thigh. This was, clearly, the more acceptable image of the redoubtable reporter.

As Adie reminds us, the dearth of older women on television news tells us quite a lot about just how far feminism has gone in that sphere – not very far. Of course, all the bosses can point to the dozens of young women flooding into television news, and claim to have feminised the industry. But while the change is so confined to young women there is still a long, long way to go.

There are many good young female reporters on our screens, and Adie is wrong to say that women are taken on merely because they have cute faces and cute bottoms. They are not – just like her, they are good at their jobs. Orla Guerin's reportage from Israel, for instance, stands with the best of its kind.

But will they suffer the same fate as their older colleagues, and start disappearing from our screens as they age? Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that they won't.

And that reality means that the women are stuck in a familiar Catch 22. When female journalists are in their twenties it's hard for them to complain about the way that women are treated. That's not because they won't have noticed, but they will be too junior, and they may also feel that they are benefiting from the industry's emphasis on youth too much, to be able to complain about it. But once they are in their fifties, like Adie, they might find that their own positions are still a little less secure than they would have hoped.

That means that any criticisms can easily be put down to mere pique – as her observations have been. A damning comment in one newspaper suggested that insiders blamed Adie's outburst on "professional jealousy". Certainly, a war reporter who has spent the past few weeks in Oman and, er, Cheltenham might have good reason for pique, but that is no reason to dismiss what Adie is saying.

It's depressing, but hardly surprising, that on the very day that Adie made her criticisms news broke that another fifty-something newswoman is quitting her job. Julia Somerville was once co-presenter of ITN's News at Ten. However, since turning 50 she has found herself increasingly sidelined, and in the past year her career has been reduced to a show on a local radio station. According to one newspaper, she, too, has told her friends that she is a victim of television's insatiable demand for young female news presenters.

Why is it that older women are still so sidelined on our screens? The problem arises from the whole culture of television news, which sees itself, more and more, as just a branch of the entertainment industry. And that industry grows ever more shameless in its parade of women actors and presenters as mere mannequins. Take yesterday's coverage of the National Television Awards, where the only women pictured by most tabloids were Carol Vorderman, with a red satin top held to her breasts by a thin silver chain, and somebody called Jane Wall, wearing a few scraps of transparent grey lace. Don't blame the women who think that the only way they can get noticed is to strip off; blame the culture that means that they are right – it is the way to get noticed.

And this is the culture that television news is infected by – the crude, bland, cartoonish side of the small screen. The fact that television news, in its search for ratings, sees itself more and more as just part of the entertainment business means that although the bosses know that, in theory, they should be able to keep older women on in their reporting and anchoring roles, in practice, they just can't face it. They have become so infected by the belief that television should be bright and fresh and pleasing on the eye and that although they let the ageing men – with their spreading girths and sagging faces – on to the screen, they are always desperately trying to leaven them with the charm and the smiles of young women.

This must be pretty depressing for the individual women, such as Kate Adie and Julia Somerville, who see their careers going down or sideways just when they are at the height of their powers. But it's also depressing for us, for the audience. Not just because we are denied more than the occasional glimpse of experienced older female anchors or reporters on our screens, but because the idea that news should be merely entertainment is corrupting the whole business and leaving us with few alternatives to tabloid television.

That reality has become all the more noticeable over the past month. One of the side-effects of this war is the way in which it has highlighted the holes in the news services offered by our main television channels, especially those flat little 10 o'clock bulletins that are, if you have a job or a family or a social life, probably your only chance to catch news on television. Their excessive emphasis on simple, visual images means that the only element of recent events that they have covered with any panache was the first atrocity. But if Channel 4 thinks its viewers are able to follow an analysis of world events that goes a bit beyond John Craven's Newsround, why shouldn't the BBC?

The fear of becoming wordy or complicated has led these evening bulletins to make tedious simplifications out of the most important story of our time. Whenever you switch on the news about the war on terror now you feel that you could be watching last week's coverage, or that of the week before – so little does the television news go in for analysis, and so little have the visual images changed over the weeks.

In a war in which visual material is thin on the ground you might think that the people who produce the television news could have seized the opportunity to rethink the way it tells long, ongoing stories. After all, we can tell from the rise in broadsheet newspaper sales that there is now a hunger for more viewpoints and more analysis. A few images of stubbly male reporters crossing a river on horseback or strutting around desert frontiers does not, in these complicated times, make for a complete analysis of world events. But perhaps some news producers haven't quite understood that their audiences can listen as well as look.

n.walter@btinternet.com