Women Gaining Prominence in Campaign Press Corps

Women, who barely had a presence on the press buses covering presidential campaigns 40 years ago, now have a growing role. While the highest-profile jobs of the campaign media are mostly staffed by men, plenty of women are getting in on the ground floor, Politico reports.

Women, generally under 30, do much of the unheralded work that facilitates wall-to-wall campaign coverage. As campaign “embeds,” they ride candidate buses from state to state, event to event, recording comments and cranking out stories about the minutiae of the campaigns.

The work isn’t easy. Embeds for TV networks carry 40-pound pieces of equipment, plus cameras, a tripod and a laptop on and off the bus at every campaign stop to allow their stations to broadcast campaign events.

The grunt work could help these women climb the corporate ladder. It used to be men doing that work, hoping it was a springboard to something better, says ABC News Political Director Amy Walter.

“Now you have a generation of women who are coming out and know what they want,” she told Politico. “And they’re going to go get it. They’re not going to ask for somebody to give them what they want.”