Remember when The New York Times published more cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails than it did about all policy issues combined in the run-up to the 2016 election? (Whether the same hysteria will be applied to Ivanka Trump’s email remains to be seen.) Or, during the recent midterm elections, when many news organizations tweeted that “a woman” had flipped the much-talked-about congressional seat in Georgia’s Sixth District but failed to even mention that woman—Lucy McBath—by name? Whether or not you realize it, much of the news you’re watching and reading is controlled by male executives to appeal to a male audience, and it’s hard not to see the result as, well, sexist.
Veteran reporter Jessica Yellin is blowing the whistle on the media’s not-so-secret bro culture. “From my earliest days, I was told to cover the news like ESPN,” Yellin, formerly CNN’s chief White House correspondent and a reporter at ABC News and MSNBC told Vogue. “It’s about competition, jargon, who’s up, who’s down, who’s winning, who’s losing, zero-sum game, high octane, outrage. And there’s a lot of testosterone in that.”
Covering Washington and politics with the machismo of an MMA fight—packed with explosive graphics, booming “breaking news” chyrons, and outsized focus on “showdowns” and “face-offs,” especially during Trump’s reality show presidency—is an effort by outlets, Yellin says, to cater to the demographic she was told is TV news’s target audience: 18- to 35-year-old men. But treating the news like the Super Bowl of politics never sat well with her.
“My instinct was that it was leaving a lot of women out of the conversation,” Yellin said. She began to conduct her own research, including some in conjunction with a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and found that while historically the majority of the news audience is female, a large percentage of women are avoiding the news—both because of the male-driven content and its tone. “Every [major TV] news president except one [Fox News] is a guy,” Yellin said. “There’s something inherently broken about our news culture . . . and women have not been in charge. I’ll put it that way.”
Not that the news on steroids was—or, ahem, still is—an informative or helpful way to communicate with viewers or readers of any gender. In the midst of blockbuster plays for ratings, Yellin found that people outside the media bubble didn’t seem to understand the issues that the news was sensationalizing. Friends asked her for breakdowns, in laymen’s terms, about Iran or health care; they balked at convoluted cable news lingo.
“I always felt that the way we do the news . . . was like you just walked into a conversation 10 minutes after it started,” she said. But when she pitched explainers, management shot her down: “In general, the response was, ‘Jessica, don’t be difficult’; ‘Jessica, no one wants to hear that.’ ”And so a frustrated Yellin left CNN in 2013. She got to work on a novel—Savage News, to be published next year. (Incidentally, it’s about a young woman reporter assigned to a sex scandal story . . . only to realize “something much more significant is happening in the world but she can’t cover it because management thinks it won’t rate.”)
And, this past July, she began to deliver the news, on her own, in the way she’d always wanted to—the way male brass at her past jobs wouldn’t quite let her. Instead of presenting the news as a battle royal, Yellin started breaking it down in a real, relatable, informative way that actually acknowledged women readers and listeners—on, of all places, Instagram, “because the audience is so heavily female,” Yellin said.
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There are posts, often with palatable, pastel-hued illustrations, explaining cable news jargon—from “super PACs” to “gerrymandering” to who, exactly, is Saudi leader “MbS.” But it’s not to be confused with The Skimm’s sometimes-far-too-cutesy condescending condensations. (“What to say when your friend asks what time you can get drinks after work . . . ‘I’ll be free earlier than expected. Just like Chelsea Manning.’ ”) Instead of assuming her followers were bored by or didn’t know about an issue, she asked them which oft-used political phrases they wanted primers on—and responded to demand. Her tagline on her Instagram also echoes the URL of her website: “Newsnotnoise.org.” Jeff Sessions’s firing? News. But the soap operatic, palace-intrigue pieces about how he was fired? Noise. (Or, as Yellin says, “the Us Weekly of news.”) In the videos in her Instagram grid and in her Stories, Yellin does impromptu versions of the live shots she used to do on TV—but they are more off the cuff and conversational.
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Her goal, she says, is to let followers know what really doesn’t matter and what important stuff—like families separated at the border who have still not been reunited—is getting buried. “People are getting a fire hose of information coming at them,” Yellin said. “Omarosa is covered with the same seriousness as, I don’t know, Iran.”
News overload, Yellin has theorized, is a particular problem for women who are maxed out on work and still shouldering a majority of childcare. She has also found in her research that the volume of disturbing news takes a toll on women’s psyches: “If you show the same kind of material to a man and a woman . . . the man can walk away and it’s gone. For the woman, it stays with her . . . like an anxiety hangover,” Yellin said. This doesn’t mean women aren’t tough and only want to hear shiny, happy news, she said. But it’s worth asking the reigning cable news giants: “How are you framing it? And is it framed to create maximum anxiety?” Yellin said.
Being untethered from big news and acting as an outlet unto herself means Yellin is now free to present stories in a thoughtful way that takes women and their experiences into account. Take the Brett Kavanaugh story, for example—one that left many women weeping at their TVs and laptops (while alternately raging at the patriarchy). On Instagram, Yellin said, “I know this is upsetting coverage for people if you’ve been a survivor of sexual assault,” and shared contact info for RAINN, urging followers: “Call them, it doesn’t matter how long ago it happened—they’re there to talk to you.” In the aftermath of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, she shared a post titled “OK. Breathe,” writing, “Everyone is telling everyone how upset they’re feeling. You’re worried about the future. Concerned your voice can’t move our elected officials”—insert sad face emoji. “Let’s zoom out.”
“To acknowledge the human aspect of this is something that I can do in a way I couldn’t when I was inside the system,” Yellin said. She says commenters and readers used to the media horse race have written her to say, “Thank you for taking the toxicity out of the news.”
In this, Yellin is definitely on to something. She now has more than 90,000 followers and counting, and Amy Schumer, a fan, recently drove her followers to @jessicayellin, to announce her pregnancy. And she has become the rare woman in total control of the news she’s sharing with the world. Covering the recent midterm elections on her own, “I had a little panic,” Yellin said. “ ‘How do I do this?’ And my friend who used to be my producer at CNN was like, ‘Dude, you’re not CNN. Cover what you want.’ ”