On Tuesday, August 3, Daisy Veerasingham, Associated Press (AP) executive vice president and chief operating officer, was named AP’s president and CEO.   Veerasingham joins other females and other women of color to head major national news organizations. 

It’s about time.

Of 11 major national news organizations (ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, AP, Reuters, the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal), half are headed by women: AP, CBS News (co-president), Fox News, MSNBC, AP, Reuters and the Washington Post.  Of the six women, two, Rashida Jones of MSNBC and Daisy Veerasingham are a woman of color.

Six of the major national news organizations are headed by men: ABC News, CBS News (co-president), NBC News, CNN, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal.  Of the six men, one of them, Dean Baquet of the NY Times, is Black.

Two large metropolitan daily newspapers have recently hired Black women as Editor-in-Chief,  Hearst’s Houston Chronicle (Maria Douglas Reeve) and A. H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News (Katrina Hardy).

I looked at the dominant newspapers in 11 cities (Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, San Francisco and Boston) and found that men headed nine and women headed two.

What will it mean in the future that more and more women and women of color are heading news organizations?  Will the news coverage and agendas change?  If Kamala Harris is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024 or 2028, will editorial endorsements change?

In terms of news coverage, I think news coverage, especially local news coverage, will change.  More coverage of issues such as the child tax credit, evictions and the affordable housing crisis will increase in news organizations headed by women, and we’re likely to see less horse-race political coverage.

For example, Jon Allsop writes in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) that:

Writing for The Hill, Daniel Schneider and Peter Tufano, academics at Harvard and Oxford universities, respectively, assessed the recent conversation around the implementation of the child tax credit.  “Politicians, policy analysts, commentators, pundits and journalists have reported widely on the structure of the program—and their opinions of it,” Schneider and Tufano argue, but the voices of parents themselves have been less audible, a problem the academics set out to resolve by conducting a national survey.  The debate around extending the credit, they write, must be informed by both evidence parents’ voices.

I think women editors might be more empathetic to “parents’ voices” than to “the structure of the program.”

Also, Jon Allsop writes in the CJR about evictions:

In November, CJR’s Savannah Jacobson spoke with Matthew Desmond, a sociologist and founder of Princeton’s Eviction Lab, about Evicted, his book on the eviction crisis, and the media’s wider coverage of the issue. “I think where we could be better is really to tell the story about who owns our cities—the real business dynamics on the ground,” Desmond told Jacobson.  “If you ask me, What’s the best data that explains eviction, then I could explain, Race matters, if you live with kids that increases your odds, gender matters.  But are people evicting themselves?”

Women editors could well be more empathetic to people being evicted and provide information on what to do about it.

The question of what will happen if Kamala Harris runs for president is more complicated.  There are three issues involved: 1) news coverage, 2) opinion and 3) editorial endorsements.

I don’t think news coverage will change much.  ABC News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, AP and Reuters play it pretty straight (that’s my view, but right-wingers will disagree).  They do news, not opinion, and they don’t endorse candidates.

We know what Fox News and MSNBC will do.   They are virtually all opinion.  Fox News will do what the Murdochs want and be a propaganda outlet for Republican candidates.  MSNBC will be a propaganda outlet for Democratic candidates.

The idea of the Murdochs hiring a Black or a woman editor for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is an absurd longshot; nevertheless, news coverage will still be pretty straight and unbiased.  The opinion section and editorial endorsements will stay the same – right-wing.

The NY Times and the Washington Post also have opinion sections and endorse candidates.  Their liberal positions will not change.  Both papers will run an occasional conservative opinion piece to give a weak impression of balance, but these papers’ readers know where the editors’ hearts and minds are.

In terms of editorial endorsements, the Times and the Post will endorse liberal, Democratic candidates as they have in the past.  What many people forget is that editorials are very specifically the voice of management, which, in the case of the Times, means the Sulzberger family.

For example, even though the Times has an editorial board of 13 editors (six women), their votes can be overridden by the Sulzbergers.  For example, I heard from a reliable source that for the 2008 New York state Democratic presidential primary the editorial board voted to endorse Obama, but A. G Sulzberger, Sr., then publisher, overruled the editorial board because he thought Clinton would be better for Israel.  I do not know if this story is true or not, but it is certainly possible – the opinion of the owners is what counts.

From everything that I read, the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, leaves editorial decisions up to the Post’s editorial board and does not get involved, which is as it should be.

Be that as it may, you can bet your last dollar that the Times and the Post will endorse the Democratic candidate for president.

But, do newspaper editorial endorsements have any effect on national elections?  No.  No effect.  On local elections?  Yes.  The Times’ endorsement of Katherine Garcia in the recent Democratic mayoral primary vaulted Garcia into an extremely close second place (49.5 percent of the final vote as tabulated in a rank-order ballot).

So, I for one, hope this trend of women heading newsrooms continues and that news coverage of issues close to the hearts and pocketbooks of the underserved and underinformed 90 percent of the population get highlighted and covered. 

It’s about time.