Before CNN reporters left for the campaign trail this cycle, the network?s Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, gave each of them a copy of Timothy Crouse?s account of his romp across the country with the all-male 1972 press corps, ?The Boys on the Bus.?
Half of those books went to women.
Continue ReadingForty years later, some of the gender imbalances in the campaign press corps have shifted. While the senior ranks of the political media is still largely dominated by men, young women ? typically under the age of 30 ? now do a large share of the grunt work necessary to make campaign coverage hum during the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news cycle.
As campaign ?embeds,? they are the ones riding the candidates? buses from state-to-state, event-to-event, recording every word out of the candidates? mouths ? good or gaffe ? and filing endless daily stories about incremental developments.
It?s not exactly glamorous work. Embeds for the cable and television networks lug 40-pound equipment, plus their cameras, a tripod and a laptop, on-and-off the bus at every campaign stop to allow their stations to go live at any moment. But the drudgery could lead to a bigger, and better job, in the next election cycle.
?This was about ?boys on the bus,? this was the path ? whether it was TV network or print publication ? this was the path to a big career,? ABC News political director Amy Walter told POLITICO. ?Now you have a generation of women who are coming out and know what they want ? and they?re going to go get it, they?re not going to ask for somebody to give them what they want.?
?If you wanted to be a television correspondent, if you wanted to be an anchor, if you wanted to have a byline on the front page ? it went through the campaign trail,? she added. ?Everybody had to take their time ? do their time ? on the campaign trail.?
This cycle, CNN has as many female embeds covering the campaigns as it does men. Likewise, NBC has four female embeds to match its four male ones. Female embeds outnumber men on Fox News, ABC and CBS, the last two of which have five female embeds apiece covering the GOP field.
Some of the fresh female faces include CBS?s Sarah Boxer, Sarah Huisenga and Lindsey Boerma, and NBC?s Jo Ling Kent and Alex Moe. Over on ABC, Elicia Dover and Emily Friedman are holding down the fort, while on CNN, Rachel Streitfeld and Shawna Shepherd are telling the inside story of the GOP campaigns.
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