Virginia Tomorrow

Here’s a first for this year’s Governor’s race.

The four major political reporters for The Washington Post covering Virginia this year are all women.

Rosalind Helderman and Anita Kumar in Richmond. Amy Gardner and Sandhya Somashekhar in NOVA.

Does gender matter?

Do female and male reporters cover politics similarly?

Do political campaigns treat and spin male and female reporters the same way?

You can be certain that the campaigns are asking themselves these very questions.

It is relatively easy to make a case that the Post’s political coverage in Virginia isn’t really gender driven.

I’ve looked at the stories written by the four reporters during the past few months and would not say that either the themes or the approach exhibit an obvious “gender” sensibility.

For example, Anita Kumar’s effort to compel the Kaine administration to be more forthcoming about the Governor’s DNC-related travels has been a model of persistence, but it is the kind of reportorial tenaciousness that we expect  from a great newspaper.

Not very different from the doggedness Peter Baker exhibited during his time in Richmond.

Moreover, the two major changes that I have observed in the Post’s coverage of Virginia politics do not necessarily have a gender component either.

First, the Post’s Virginia politics blog has become an important real time source of information and commentary.

Roz Helderman has capitalized on the opportunity this vehicle provides to develop a unique voice that has rapidly gained a large following.

Yet Robert Melton had done much the same with the weekly Virginia Political Notebook before blogs had even been invented.

Second, the Post is doing a far better job, I think, in illuminating the impact that decisions in Richmond have on the quality of life in NOVA and, conversely, exploring how trends that start in NOVA are reshaping the entire Commonwealth.

Somashekhar has written about the importance of union money to Democratic candidates in Fairfax and what this might mean for the party’s statewide priorities. 

Amy Gardner has been a  capital reporter in both Richmond and Raleigh and does an excellent job of explaining NOVA issues in a broader Virginia context.

Yet this trend also has almost nothing to do with the gender of the reporter, but an institutional decision by the Post to integrate its state capital coverage with its NOVA story lines.

Still, it may be early to say that gender won’t have any impact on campaign coverage in 2009.

What happens in campaigns is often wildly unpredictable, even more so today.

The blogosphere regularly generates themes, issues, and accusations of scandal that extend well beyond what the candidates had originally considered to be the crux of the campaign.

And how the mainstream media decides to cover what Barnie Day has called the “meterorites” from outer space can be crucially important.

In my next post, I am going to write about how a candidate for Governor who was hit by one of these meteorites contended that the paucity of women in the capital press corps gave credibility to a wild accusation that ultimately doomed the campaign.