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.
Her husband, Cary Aminoff, said the cause was dementia.
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.
She was also known as a mentor to other women at the network.
“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 Ceiling at CBS News” (2023). “It was a very difficult time for me since I was used to being involved in all the events CBS was covering and talking with my colleagues.”
The panel concluded that the report had used documents said to be from Mr. Bush’s commander but that they had not been authenticated, that inattentive executives had approved it without rudimentary fact-checking and that it had been anchored by an overworked Dan Rather, who was also the anchor of “CBS Evening News.” He had left the scene of Hurricane Frances in Florida to do an interview for the report.
CBS fired its producer, Mary Mapes, and demanded the resignations of three executives who had overseen the segment.
After the panel’s report was released, Ms. Mason told “PBS NewsHour” that the episode was “very embarrassing to those of us at CBS News.” She added, “It’s going to serve to raise the consciousness of everybody here on how we have to do things better.”
Ms. Mason was promoted to senior vice president of standards and special projects. In that role, she oversaw the news division’s adherence to its existing rules of ethics and journalism and added new ones to prohibit political contributions and require approval for outside writing.
Her job also included reviewing investigative programming and potentially sensitive news segments; approving segments using hidden cameras; overseeing the use of confidential sources; and helping determine the reliability of documents.
“Linda was the conscience of CBS News,” Sean McManus, the president of CBS News from 2005 to 2011, said in an interview. “If there was a question in the division about standards or what was appropriate, Linda was the last wall of defense.”
Linda Sue Mason was born on Feb. 26, 1942, in Middletown, N.Y., about 70 miles northwest of Manhattan. Her father, Harry Mason, was a dentist, and her mother, Betty (Sanders) Mason, was a schoolteacher. When Linda was 8, polio caused partial paralysis on her right side; she recovered, but her right fingers were no longer flexible, which made it difficult to type later in her life.
At Pembroke College, the women’s school at Brown University, she was a freelance reporter at The Providence Journal. She briefly continued at the paper full-time after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in international relations in 1964. A year later, she received a master’s degree in filmmaking from Syracuse University, where she learned skills she would need for a career in TV journalism.
Ms. Mason joined CBS Radio in 1966. After two years, she was hired as a writer at “CBS Morning News,” where she produced reports but did not have a producer title. The show’s executive producer was stunned when she asked for a promotion in 1971.
In her memoir, she recalled him telling her, “Women can’t be producers.” She told him, “But I have been producing reports for two years.”
He promoted her several months later after he was promoted as well. Later that year, she was hired as a producer at “CBS Evening News,” the highest-rated network news broadcast. She eventually became a senior producer, staying at the flagship broadcast through 1986, five years into Mr. Rather’s tenure as Mr. Cronkite’s successor.
“She was supremely intelligent,” said Andrew Heyward, a producer who worked for her at “CBS Evening News” and was president of CBS News from 1996 to 2005. “At a time when the culture was not only male but put a huge premium on clubbability, she wasn’t clubby but so smart that she was a force to be reckoned with.”
For “CBS Evening News,” her work included reporting from Afghanistan and Vietnam as well as Beijing during the 1989 pro-democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square.
She was also a producer of “The Trouble With Rock,” a 1974 investigative documentary about the influence of the Mafia, drugs and payola in the music industry, including CBS Records, which the report accused of giving money and heroin and other drugs to disc jockeys in return for air play at radio stations.
“Without question,” Ms. Mason wrote in her book, “this delicate project taught me how to walk a tightrope when looking inside my own company.”
She won 13 Emmys and three Peabody Awards during her career.
Ms. Mason, who retired in 2013, is survived by her husband of 56 years; a daughter, Elissa Aminoff; a sister, Nancy Hauser; a brother, Roger; and a grandson. Another daughter, Beth Aminoff, died last year.
In 2000, Ms. Mason wrote a report for CBS on what had gone wrong after hers and other networks projected and then retracted that the Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, was the winner of Florida’s electoral votes in the presidential election that year. In the disputed vote recount that followed, there was much legal wrangling by the nominees before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against further recounts and effectively gave the state’s electoral votes — and the election — to Mr. Bush.
Four years later, Ms. Mason was put in charge of the network’s election night coverage. “We’d rather be last and right than first and wrong,” she told The Baltimore Sun the day before the election.
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