“She had to fight for every inch of acceptance before she broke through the barriers to produce her first documentary,” Mr. Moyers wrote in an email on Friday. “She showed women it could be done, but they had to be better than men at what they did. That drove her passion and paved the way for hundreds — maybe thousands — of other women journalists to rise in the field.”
Ms. Konner also wrote or edited a half-dozen books, including “The Atheist’s Bible” in 2007 and “You Don’t Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing” in 2009. She described her books as “takeout gourmet food for thought.”
Joan Barbara Weiner was born on Feb. 24, 1931, in Paterson, N.J., the daughter Martin Weiner, who was in the textile business, and the former Tillie Frankel, an artist.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951 from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., and a master’s from the Columbia journalism school.
In addition to her daughter, from her first marriage, which ended in divorce, she is survived by her husband, Alvin H. Perlmutter, an independent television producer with whom she collaborated on many projects, including “The Power of Myth”; three grandchildren; three stepchildren, Stephen, Tom and James Perlmutter; and seven step-grandchildren. Another daughter, Catherine, died in 2003.
Ms. Konner’s first job out of journalism school was on the women’s page of The Bergen Record in New Jersey. After six months, she began writing editorials, but left within two years for public television. When she was laid off, she took a job writing and reporting at WNBC-TV in New York before returning to public television in 1977.
In 1988, when she became dean of the Columbia journalism school and a professor there, she was already a trustee of the university.
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Ms. Konner was only the second broadcast journalist to be appointed dean of the school. (The first, in the 1970s, was Elie Abel, a former Times reporter who became a prominent correspondent for NBC News.)
She was credited with recruiting new faculty, creating a new doctoral program, instituting a part-time two-year curriculum for working journalists and generating $20 million in gifts and endowments. She stepped down in 1997 but remained publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review until 2000.
In 2001, she was one of three experts commissioned by CNN to examine the cable network’s 2000 presidential election-night coverage. They concluded that the coverage had been a “news disaster” that contributed to a climate of “rancor and bitterness” and recommended that exit polls no longer be used to project winners before the voting was over.
Ms. Konner summed up her journalistic credo in her inaugural address as the Columbia dean. “Most people are looking for good answers,” she said, “good journalists look for the right questions.”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/obituaries/joan-konner-tv-documentarian-and-journalism-dean-dies-at-87.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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