Carole Simpson became a broadcast news reporter to make a difference.

In her work — she was the first black woman to work in the Washington, D.C., bureau for NBC and later moved to ABC as a weekend anchor — Ms. Simpson sought to use the power of her position not just to report the facts, but to make Americans see the injustices that plagued both their country and the world.

One such moment in her career was a piece she did on the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program, which helps supply nutritious food to low-income women during pregnancy and to their children for the first year of their life. At the time of her story, Congress was considering cuts to the program.

“I went down to Denton, Texas, which is an area that has a social cross-section of poor Hispanics and whites. I sat in a room with a camera when some social workers were telling a family that they could no longer get WIC food. The tears rolled down the mother’s face, and all she could ask was why,” she recalled.

“We did a montage of different people hearing that the program had been cut and afterwards congressmen told us that the phones started ringing off the hook with constituents telling them that they better not cut this program,” she said in an interview this week at her Oak Bluffs home.

“It really touched people, and those are the kinds of stories I would try really hard to do. You don’t give statistics and numbers if you want people to care. You have to show what the impact is on real people.”

Stories like this helped propel Ms. Simpson through a career in journalism that spanned decades and social movements, culminating in her recent memoir, Newslady.

When Carole Simpson began her career in radio, the country was still in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement, and for a young African-American woman trying to make her way in a business that was still dominated by men, it was not easy to break the bonds of both racial and gender-based discrimination. But she made a career of fighting the prejudices that held her back.

In her book, she details many episodes in which her male colleagues would taunt her on air, resorting to desperate tactics to break her focus, or bombarding her with explicit sexual references.

Ms. Simpson, along with several colleagues at ABC, brought their complaints of sex-based discrimination to their superiors, waging a fight for gender parity that she said still exists today. “People who read the book tell me they’re still facing the same discrimination that I faced in 1970s and 1980s. It’s so depressing — I thought if I were an activist trying to get things changed back then, that young women and minorities would not have to face it later on. It’s still happening, and it’s worse than in the 1980s. Did I do all that for nothing?” she wondered out loud, adding:

“I miss being on television, but I’m sort of glad because I can’t stand the direction it’s going in now. All of the reporters and anchors are beauty contestants who don’t know anything about what they’re reporting. They’re all blonde with perfect teeth and they don’t report the news!”

Despite the new face of network news, Ms. Simpson believes that it is not what the American people want to see. They would prefer to see people who look more like them, who can deliver the news with some authority, she said.

And she believes the networks need to reflect the diversity of the American social landscape in the anchors and reporters they choose: “America is changing, and you have to understand how it’s changing in order to be a reporter,” Ms. Simpson said.

Currently, she teaches a course on cultural diversity reporting, along with other journalism classes, at Emerson College in Boston. After she left the broadcast news business in 2003, she moved to Boston with her husband to be closer to their daughter. She immediately was offered a job as a journalism professor at Emerson, and that in turn brought her to the Vineyard.

“For our 40th wedding anniversary, our daughter rented us a house in Oak Bluffs and I just fell in love. I love being near the ocean so I thought, I have to have a place here. To get away from the city, to hear some birds and see green trees and breath fresh air, it’s just other-worldly,” she said.

“The Island is like one big cultural festival, and I feel like I’ve fit into the fabric of the Vineyard pretty quickly.”

Carole Simpson will sign her memoir Newslady at Cousen Rose Gallery in Oak Bluffs on July 9 and again August 13. Both events will be held from 7 to 9 p.m.