NBC News special correspondent Chelsea Clinton was among the tvnewsers leading panels at today’s Women in the World conference. But it was her mother who got a thunderous applause and shouts of “2016!” when she took the stage at the fourth annual event. Hillary Clinton called women’s rights “a core imperative for every society.”
Clinton’s speech kicked off the day’s events, which featured an impressive roster of women from the television news industry: ABC’s Cynthia McFadden, Deborah Roberts and JuJu Chang and CBS’s Norah O’Donnell all moderated panel discussions on topics ranging from women in the tech industry to fostering female leaders.
Before moderating a spirited panel discussion about the epidemic of sexual abuse in India, McFadden (pictured above) talked with an Indian woman who was the victim of a rape. She sat with her back to the audience in order to conceal her identity. The woman, whose case is still pending in the Indian high court, described how she was raped by a male friend of hers four
years ago, telling McFadden through tears that she prefers to think of herself — and others like her — as “survivors, not victims.”
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, Oprah Winfrey interviewed a Zimbabwean woman fighting to modernize education in Africa, and CBS’s Lesley Stahl interviewed a 23-year-old Libyan woman who advocates for women’s rights in the wake of the Arab Spring. ABC’s Lara Spencer and CNN International’s Felicia Taylor are slated to conduct interviews during the afternoon session.
The interviewers and moderators no doubt relied on their television experience to steer the conversation and keep programming running efficiently. As McFadden said to loud laughter during her panel discussion: “I’m going to ask you all a very hard question and then I’m going to give you a very little bit of time to answer it, because that’s what we do in television.”
[Photo Credit: Roxxe Ireland/Marc Bryan-Brown for Newsweek Daily Beast]