Carol Leonnig says the pressure on women journalists covering Donald Trump has moved beyond the usual hostility and into something darker. In an interview published by Fortune, Leonnig, Jen Psaki, Symone Sanders Townsend and Ali Vitali described a media climate in which female reporters are absorbing insults, threats and public attacks while still pressing the White House for answers.
The four women are among the most recognizable faces at MS NOW, the rebranded network that took its new name in November after parent company Versant split from Comcast and NBC News. The network is barely five months old, yet it posted double-digit ratings growth in the first quarter of this year, has added hundreds of jobs while many newsrooms have cut staff, and says its YouTube channel has more views than ABC, CBS and NBC News combined.
Leonnig, a five-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent more than two decades at The Washington Post before joining MS NOW, said the environment facing women reporters has become harder to ignore. “This administration is taking it to a new level,” she said. She added that “so many of our amazing female anchors are being bullied right by this administration, one way or the other, and hate mail or stuff from Trump administration aids is coming at them so publicly and so personally.”
Psaki made the same point in plainer terms. “They are doing their jobs and they are pressing the administration for answers, and they’re not backing off,” she said. Sanders Townsend said the moment is larger than any one network or anchor. “This is a moment where women all across the media apparatus are navigating through the sexism and rising to the occasion,” she said.
The discussion lands in the middle of a broader fight between Trump and the press. He has called female reporters “piggy,” “ugly” and “stupid,” while his administration has filed billions in lawsuits against news organizations and the FCC has opened investigations into multiple outlets. In February, Kaitlan Collins asked Trump what he would say to Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors, and he called her “the worst reporter,” told her that as a “young woman” she should smile more, and was met with her reply that smiling is not appropriate when discussing a sex trafficker’s victims.
That exchange became the kind of test case Leonnig and Psaki were pointing to when they highlighted Collins, Mary Bruce and Laura Barrón-López as reporters who have not backed down. Their message was not that women in the newsroom are merely enduring the moment. It was that they are defining it, and that the question now is whether the industry around them will match that resistance when the next attack comes.