Catastrophe!

Oh, Martha-Ann, lend me your fainting couch. I have just read the most alarming report in the Boston Globe, and I need a soft place to catch me as I swoon, a mint julip, and a handsome, preferably dark-skinned, man to fan me with palm fronds STAT. It seems that the number of male anchormen on the teevee news has reached an all-time low. Great Caesar’s ghost, Martha-Ann! How are we to understand the news if it is not delivered with the gravitas that only a proper baritone can convey?

In the television news industry, a good man is getting hard to find.

Heavens, just like everywhere else. It’s all ladies, metrosexuals, and poofters anywhere you look these days.

The ascent of women is a natural progression in the industry. The scarcity of men in the pipeline is another story.

The numbers of anchormen, which started declining 10 years ago and now are at an all-time low, have left station managers scratching their heads and college journalism professors pondering their enrollment. At Emerson College, there is just one man in the graduate broadcast journalism program. There are 20 female students.

''A lot of young men are encouraged to go into law and medicine, engineering and math," says Coleen Marren, WCVB's news director, who has noticed the trend.

Noted: Women are succeeding because men aren’t trying.

Marren said that although her stash of resumes from prospective males and females is the same size, the stronger candidates are women. That became a problem in 2003, when she began a 17-month nationwide search for a fresh male face to replace Everett at 11 p.m. ''We auditioned at least 10 people," Marren said.

In the end, [WCVB-TV anchor Ed Harding] got the job. ''The best person was in-house," Marren said. ''We did a thorough search."

Noted: The majority of strong candidates being female is “a problem.”

Also noted: A man still got the job.

Shari Thurer, a Boston psychologist, adjunct associate professor at Boston University, and author of ''The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy," goes further. ''In the era of 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' newscasters were macho and fiery. Now they have to be so neutral and unbiased that . . . it doesn't seem manly," she says.

''It's more respected to be a pundit than an anchorman because a pundit can have an opinion," Thurer adds.

Noted: Women are neither fiery nor opinionated by nature, so perhaps they’re just better suited to the bland dissemination of factoids that masquerades as news these days. (Which probably also explains the dearth of female pundits and prominent columnists, I guess.)

Once all the pop-psychology and gender stereotypes were exhausted, we finally get down to some more viable possibilities that could explain the disparity.

Yet experts say young men are backing off from the low-pay scale that awaits them upon graduation.

The $20,000 salary of the average anchor in a small market is more than what a woman in a smaller town could expect to make directly after graduation in lots of fields. This is not exclusively the result of pay inequality, but also because of a disparity in what is considered entry-level work for women vs. men. Women who graduate with a business degree, for example, are much more likely than men to find themselves in an administrative role in their first post-graduate job. Women start their business careers as secretaries, and hence with lower starting salaries, in larger numbers than do men. So women may not consider the starting salary in one field as an impediment in the same way their male cohorts do. That’s not a good thing, but it’s reasonable to assume this is a contributing factor to why women may outnumber men in the field.

But, some argue, women move up faster in the business.

''If you dress up the average woman coming out of college and put on makeup, she looks like an adult. The average man coming out of college looks like he's going through puberty," said Bob Papper, a professor of telecommunications at Ball State in Muncie, Ind., and the director of the RTNDA's annual study on television news.

Women may advance more quickly than men for a reason that’s outwith their control. It’s, again, not a good thing that men are hindered by arbitrary expectations predicated upon image, but it’s also reasonable to assume this makes the field more attractive for women and less attractive for men.

''There is so much interest in sports broadcasting, more than the jobs out there can support," [Chris Tuohey, an associate professor of broadcast journalism] warns. ''We keep encouraging our male students to take a look at doing news. The market is right now for moving up."

If men, in greater numbers than their female counterparts, are going into broadcast journalism to compete against one another within a limited niche, while more woman retain a larger focus—making them more prepared for anchor roles—then men are self-selecting themselves out of the competition. Ditto if they’re eschewing the field entirely because they see opportunities for more money and quicker advancement elsewhere. And that’s really not much of a story.

Of course, it’s a lot more fun to pretend otherwise.