Pioneering TV journalist Marlene Sanders dies

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES—Marlene Sanders, one of the first female broadcast TV journalists, died of cancer Tuesday at age 84.

Her son, CNN legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin announced the death on his Facebook page. "She was a pioneering broadcaster and, above all, a great Mom," he wrote.

Sanders was the first woman to anchor a prime-time network newscast, for ABC, in 1964, when she filled-in for Ron Cochran, who had lost his voice that night. She was also the first network TV female journalist to report from Vietnam, in 1966, and the first female vice-president of a news division, ABC, in 1976.

Barbara Walters, generally considered to be the first female news anchor, began her run as the co-anchor of the ABC Evening News in 1976.

In 1971 Sanders took over for ABC's Sam Donaldson for three months, anchoring ABC Weekend News on Saturdays. She produced hundreds of documentaries for ABC and switched to CBS in 1978 as a documentary correspondent/producer, where she remained until 1987. She won 3 Emmy Awards.

After her broadcast career, Sanders began teaching at New York University as an adjunct professor of journalism, where remained on staff until recently.

She died at the Calvary Hospital Hospice.

A native of Cleveland, Sanders began her journalism career assisting the late Mike Wallace on his Nightbeat local TV show in the 1950s, and switched to radio, working for WNEW in New York as the assistant news director, before going back to television.

Sanders' husband Jerome Toobin, a former director of news and public affairs for WNET, the PBS station in New York, died in 1984. She is survived by her son Jeffrey Toobin, and two grandchildren.