All the News That’s Fit to Feel

For the last century and a half the American female journalist has existed in a state of double consciousness. She could never report the news without her existence as a reporter being regarded as newsworthy, either an emblem of the profession’s progress or proof of its fall. In a gendered version of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” a woman in the newsroom was seen—and saw herself—as an exception, a trailblazer, an interloper, an erotic distraction, a “humanizing influence,” or a “soft news” airhead, but never just a reporter.

When I was a “copy girl” in the New York Times newsroom, fresh out of college in 1981, I was reminded daily of my exceptional status. By the editor putting his hand up my dress while telling me how “talented” he found me. By a bureau chief explaining to me why women make the best research assistants: “Females have to wait nine months to have a baby—biology makes them patient.” And by Betsy Wade, the lead plaintiff in the 1974 class action suit that charged the Times with sex discrimination.

I met Wade soon after I was hired. Legendary for her editing skills, she came to the Times in 1956 after being fired from the “women’s page” of the New York Herald Tribune for being pregnant. She went on to edit some of the Times’s most sensitive and prized stories, including its publication of the Pentagon Papers, and became the first female chief of the foreign news copydesk (which Times Talk, the paper’s internal newsletter, noted thusly: “Betsy’s in the slot: first dame to make it”). When, after a four-year court battle, the discrimination lawsuit was settled (with a paltry cash settlement and affirmative-action “goals” in lieu of requirements), Wade was yanked from the foreign copydesk. Eventually she took refuge in the travel section, writing a column dispensing tips to tourists. One day she pulled me aside: the current leadership, Wade said, was never going to accept women as “real” journalists. “You should leave.”

I did—for newspapers in Miami, Atlanta, and the Bay Area—but I didn’t escape. One California editor told me I was a good reporter because I came off as “the ingenue.” Another warned me not to write so many stories about women’s rights because it would “typecast” me as an “angry feminist.” Nota bene: If you don’t want to create an angry feminist, don’t make a feminist angry.

These were the sort of predations and deprecations that could greet a woman working in any job. But the predicament of the female news reporter goes beyond simple sexism. The dictates of objectivity demand that journalists disappear, become invisible in a story told without personal intrusion. They are to be the eyes, not the eye candy, of the culture. Yet a woman reporting history is a woman who is reporting history, self-consciously making history herself. Good luck disappearing.

That duality has been the subtext of many novels and memoirs (such as Christine Craft’s memorably titled Too Old, Too Ugly, and Not Deferential to Men, from 1986) and an avalanche of movies and television shows—from Platinum Blonde to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Bombshell—wherein the female journalist figures as an exotic, and invasive, species. “In two weeks you’ll be back covering the dahlia show,” the male reporter tells his female counterpart (played by Bette Davis) in the 1935 Front Page Woman. She replies, “Don’t you forget, I’m a newspaperwoman, too.” To which he retorts, “Yeah, and don’t you forget that women make rotten newspapermen.”

The most recent screen portrayal of the perils of reporting while female is the Max series The Girls on the Bus, a “light dramedy” (in the words of its cocreator Amy Chozick) about four female journalists covering a Democratic presidential primary. The primary’s front-runner, at least at the start, is a female candidate, though in the end the winner is a man, whose unlikely victory the media never saw coming. Sound familiar? Chozick is the former New York Times reporter who covered Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for the paper. The show, according to its credits, is inspired by Chasing Hillary, Chozick’s 2018 memoir of her time on the campaign trail. The show’s name is drawn from one of the book’s chapter titles, a reference to Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus (1973), the classic account of the largely male press corps covering the 1972 presidential race. (A very different creature from Chozick’s book or show, Crouse’s chronicle is a sober dissection of the “pack journalism” mechanics that prevailed before the Watergate years turned reporters into celebrities.) Nevertheless, Chozick has been keen to downplay any connection between the show’s story line and the media coverage of the Clinton campaign. “We knew we didn’t want to relive 2016 or have any real politics in it,” she told NPR. “I almost want it to be an escape.”

The result is The Wizard of Oz by way of Sex and the City: four designer-clad chicks with press credentials and turbulent personal lives thrown together on the yellow brick road to the Democratic National Convention. The heroine, Sadie (Melissa Benoist), a stand-in for Chozick, is a coltishly adorable “hot mess” and a reporter for the nation’s leading paper. Her sidekicks: Grace (Carla Gugino), an older (if wrinkle-free), sharp-elbowed political correspondent for the other national newspaper, so consumed with racking up front-page bylines that her teenage daughter has to turn to her father for feminine hygiene advice (“Dad bought me tampons,” she wails, while “you were…sitting in a fucking Greyhound writing bullshit scooplets and escaping your family”); Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore), a glamorous, conservative Black broadcast journalist so focused on fighting her way up the ladder of a right-wing TV news channel that she can barely find time to schedule her wedding; and Lola (Natasha Behnam), the Gen Z, body-positive, Iranian American, bisexual, virtue-signaling TikTok content creator—intersectionality cubed—who regards journalistic objectivity as a “white guy” construct to be dismantled.

The four women start out as cut-throat adversaries. By the last episodes (the show was canceled after one season), they are clinking cocktail glasses and having pajama-party heart-to-hearts in posh hotel rooms. Kimberlyn puts aside her pro-life views to drive Sadie across state lines to pick up abortion pills. (Sadie is pregnant after a roll in the hay with a candidate’s former flack.) Then the whole gang piles on Sadie’s hotel bed to keep her company as the mifepristone takes effect; they uncork a bottle of red wine and watch Thelma and Louise. In the sorority froth of this series, even a post-Dobbs abortion is an opportunity for light entertainment.

For all that, The Girls on the Bus—probably to Chozick’s credit, though contrary to her professed goal—fails at escapism. The show opens a painfully revealing window on our current media culture and women’s place in it.

Women have seemingly laid claim to the American media kingdom. Nearly half of all journalists in the US are now female. As of 2021 women reported more than 40 percent of the stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post and on prime-time evening news broadcasts. A 2024 Reuters Institute study found that women hold nearly 45 percent of top editorial posts in American news outlets. In the last several years women have become top editors and executives (albeit some of them briefly) at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and Fox News.

And yet to what have they ascended? Since 2005 one third of US newspapers have folded. Last year an average of 2.5 newspapers went under every week. More than half the counties in the country now have no or only one news outlet, and most of the surviving local dailies are on life support. Two thirds of newspaper journalism jobs have vanished since the Aughts, and more than 70,000 reporters have lost their positions since 2010.¹ In January of this year alone more than 500 reporters were laid off. That same month Terry Tang became the Los Angeles Times’s interim executive editor, the first female head editor in the paper’s 142-year history—just as the Times announced it would be firing nearly a quarter of its news staff.

“By the time women reporters dominated Hillary’s press corps,” Chozick notes in Chasing Hillary, digital reporting had “vastly diminished the campaign bus’s place in the media ecosystem,” and “the masters of Snapchat and Vine and Twitter and Periscope had become the new ‘heavies.’” The Girls on the Bus is not unaware of that extinction-level event—its characters bemoan the specter of “legacy newspapers devolving into chunky listicles and newsletters, just hoping to stay relevant” and of “fake news, churned out by trolls and content farms, blasted on social.” In the show’s first episode, Grace, the old-school correspondent, watches aghast as Lola, the “what’s ‘off-the-record’ mean?” social media influencer, reports via smartphone to her fan base, extolling a far-left spoiler candidate while peddling a vegan snack product. “She’s paying her way through sponsored content and an advance from Substack,” Sadie explains to Grace. “She has more Twitter followers than The Washington Post.”

The show ultimately tosses aside its apprehensions in favor of a feminized New New Journalism fantasia. “How did we get it so wrong?” Sadie asks in a voice-over after her credulous reporting has allowed a nefarious, out-of-nowhere “hot white guy” politician to ace out the supercompetent female contender. Concluding that she and her sister reporters “had become unwitting agents of the patriarchy,” Sadie organizes the four into a quasi-feminist collaborative to try to take down the about-to-be-anointed patriarch. “We became a family,” she says, “bonded together to save our democracy, or go down trying.” The sisterhood rushes to expose the hunky Manchurian candidate (to the soundtrack of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”), batting out you-go-gal texts to one another and creating a group e-mail chain to “share our reporting.” (Escapism indeed. Would Chozick, as a Times reporter, have relinquished a scoop to pool her findings with journalists at rival publications? Would any reporter? They’d be fired, even before being laid off.)

In real-world journalism, or what remains of it, the generations of journalists have yet to find a way to fuse old and new media into something remotely vital, never mind feminist. If anything, the attempts of major news organizations to serve the voracious demands of a consumerist and tech-besotted age have tossed the profession—and not just its female practitioners—back into the lifestyle precincts of the “women’s page.” Not all women have willingly complied. Sally Buzbee, who in 2021 became the first female executive editor of The Washington Post, quit abruptly this June—after the recently installed (male) publisher reassigned her to oversee a new “third newsroom” devoted solely to “service and social media,” and then tried to get her to suppress coverage of his involvement in the UK celebrity phone-hacking scandal.

The repercussions of these dynamics go beyond the status of women reporters or the press at large. Objective, unemotional, old-school news gathering was a bulwark against the excesses of emotive politics. Its debasement has enabled the resurgence of populist fervor and the success of Donald Trump.

The twenty-first-century girls on the bus, both actual and streaming, are the ghostly reprises of America’s earliest “girl reporters.” In the late 1800s a symbiotic relationship developed between the new brands and department stores wanting to advertise their products and the new mass-circulation newspapers wanting to turn a profit. The retailers needed female shoppers, and the papers needed to show retailers that they could deliver a female audience. And so Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst broke the long-standing resistance to hiring women in the newsroom, though the women they hired weren’t brought on to report serious news.

The job of the girl reporters was to showcase their supposedly feminine attributes of vulnerability and emotionality. They were objects of delectation, designed to attract a mass readership. As it turned out, they attracted readers of both sexes, albeit for different reasons. The newspapers marketed their “front-page girls” as youthful (even long past their “ingenue” years), alluring (“undoubtedly the most beautiful woman in metropolitan journalism,” one trade journal remarked of reporter Elizabeth Bisland), and wholesomely bourgeois (though many were working-class and the sole supporters of their families). And they were, of course, white, at least in the white media; the news industry was firmly segregated.

Notably, the Black press styled its female journalists differently—not as girls but as mothers. Ida B. Wells, Carrie Langston Hughes (mother of Langston), and Gertrude Bustill Mossell, to name just three prominent Black newspaperwomen of the era, posed for promotional shots in matronly buns and high-necked bodices, surrounded by their children. They avoided any hint of sexualization—well aware of its dangers—and cast themselves as “lady writers” and “mothers to the race.” If they weren’t free to be simply reporters, they at least were allowed to be adults—and, not coincidentally, to cover a wider range of serious news than their white female counterparts.

But it was the advertisement-rich newspapers of Pulitzer and Hearst that grabbed the spotlight and shaped public opinion—in no small measure through the star turns of their female reporters. The women were granted two leading roles: “stunt girl” and “sob sister.”

The clickbait of her day, the stunt girl deliberately put herself in harm’s way to report her story, stealing to be thrown in jail, fainting on the street to get inside a public hospital, wandering through parks to become a mark for mashers, or going undercover as a “white slave girl” in a box factory. The not-so-subliminal tease: Would she be molested, mauled, raped, maybe even murdered? The quest for attention drove the women to ever more outlandish pursuits: plunging to the bottom of the Boston Harbor in a rubber diving suit, climbing into lions’ cages, dangling by ropes from tall buildings, wrapping themselves in boa constrictors. One stunt girl donned a “bullet-proof cloth” and had herself shot in the chest with a Winchester rifle. (She survived.) At the same time many of them, like Elizabeth Cochrane—better known as Nellie Bly—exposed deplorable conditions in which other women lived. Bly went undercover to reveal women’s plight in asylums, sweatshops, chorus lines, prisons, and domestic service. But the media spotlight kept its beam on Bly’s kittenish qualities—her “comely” appearance, her tiny “wasp-waist,” her “scant costume”—and the threat to her maidenly virtue.

There was an alternative model. In 1907 the news barons dispatched female reporters to cover the trial of the coal-mining heir Harry Thaw for the murder of the celebrated architect Stanford White. What transformed the case into the “Trial of the Century”—and inspired the title “sob sister,” along with “pity platoon” and “sympathy squad”—was the women’s lachrymose coverage of Thaw’s young wife, the former artist’s model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, who took the stand to recount how, as a teenager, she’d been despoiled by White’s seduction. When the prosecutor grilled Nesbit on her sexual past, the women (seated at a special press table) reported how her testimony made them feel; at one point they even leaped up and, ostentatiously sobbing, ran from the courtroom. “The newspaper women,” sob sister Nixola Greeley-Smith wrote, “writhed under the sting of the prosecutor’s questions” and “bowed their heads before the hideousness from which [he] ruthlessly tore the veil.” The newspapers promoted these stories with headlines like “Thaw in Court as Seen by a Woman” and praised the “depth of womanly feeling.” Hearst’s popular advice columnist known as Beatrice Fairfax characterized the sob sisterhood, approvingly, this way: “They are women first and writers after.”²

Displaying their “feelings” won these reporters—and the many sob sisters and stunt girls to follow—an enormous following (as well as publishing, lecturing, and merchandising contracts and portrayals in a silent film serial and a Hollywood movie—titled, what else, Sob Sister). Male readers lapped up the prurient details, and female readers saw in these weepy dispatches a reflection of their own miseries and an indictment of male oppression. From 1890 to 1910 the percentage of female reporters in the US tripled; by the late 1920s women made up nearly a quarter of the press. But what was gained? They’d created for themselves their own emotive ghetto of gender solidarity. By embracing the tear-stained persona of imperiled girl reporter, the journalist Haryot Holt Cahoon wrote in 1897, they’d become “offerings upon an altar where the sacrifice avails nothing.”

The sacrifice continues. Midway through The Girls on the Bus, Sadie delivers an impassioned broadside against the long-standing sexual double standard in newsrooms and newspaper movies:

I hate when Hollywood portrays female journalists using sex to get the facts, while male journalists always use their brilliant minds and unimpeachable morality to nail the story. Because the truth is, it’s the opposite.

A diatribe that would’ve been more convincing if she weren’t delivering it while parading around her room in her panties.

Like their century-old predecessors, the girls on the bus highlight their feminine vulnerability and hawk their “womanly feeling.” Early in the season we learn that four years prior, Sadie had burst into tears after the female presidential candidate she’d been covering lost the race. (Her tears were mainly for herself: “Pick the right horse,” she says, “and you can ride that baby all the way to the White House—TV, book deals, Pulitzers.”) Her crying jag, captured on camera, became an embarrassing meme. “You live and write in a more emotional space,” her editor complains. But that emotionalism turns out to be exactly what the boss wants. When she files a just-the-facts dispatch, the editor’s eyes glaze over; only when she rewrites it to play up her personal reaction to the campaign—what she calls “my truth”—does the story win his approval. “It’s good, Sadie,” he exults. “It’s not objective, which is the one thing we asked you to do. But hell, I don’t know, maybe objectivity isn’t as important as authenticity here.”

The kind of reporter who reveals her inner tumult and trumpets “my truth” has been ascendant for decades, and she doesn’t have to be a woman. Sadie idolizes Hunter S. Thompson (throughout the series, his ghost shows up to counsel her), though not the early Thompson who wrote his best material as a rigorous beat reporter; she’s memorializing the later gonzo drama queen who trashed hotel rooms and nearly crashed motorcycles, who kept the spotlight on himself. Chozick’s show is an homage not to the actual “boys on the bus”—a pallid and dutiful crew who kept their opinions to themselves—but to the self-involved showmen who displaced them. The largely male purveyors of 1970s New Journalism adopted a dude equivalent to sob sister and stunt girl reporting. Instead of playing the hankie-clutching girl-in-jep, the bad boys played up their self-jeopardizing booze-and-drug-laced antics and showed up drunk and belligerent on The Dick Cavett Show.

The advertisements-for-myself braggadocio of New Journalism was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the self-promotion endemic to online media. Since the 1990s the performativity of our social-networked era has demanded that its chroniclers find a way to celebrate their “personalities,” which are now their brands.

In their 2004 book Women and Journalism, Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming expressed alarm over the rise of

a feminized confessional style of popular journalism…characterized as involving an intense but depoliticized exploration of emotion, so that people’s “feelings” about events become more important than the events themselves.

They were particularly troubled by the implications of that style for female reporters—and the way it distorted feminism:

This trend of transforming emotion into a spectacle within news reporting causes a serious dilemma for women journalists who have been praised precisely for playing a central role or, as some argue, even leading the way, in changing news agendas and styles and modes of documenting events by “humanizing” the news…. While radical movements such as feminism have exposed the personal as political by publicizing the power relations operating along gendered lines in the private sphere, therapy and confessional news have quite the opposite effect: a trivialization of public and private issues by avoiding discussions of power.

There are, of course, female (and male) journalists who have not fallen into the trap, who call attention to injustices—including injustices to women—without calling attention to themselves. Witness the New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s dispassionately rendered investigation of sexual predation in Hollywood, which catalyzed the Me Too movement and led to important changes in sexual harassment policy and law. Or the reporters who are assiduously documenting the post-Dobbs crisis in reproductive and maternal health. These journalists are the descendants of the few female political correspondents featured in The Boys on the Bus, who wrote the most tough-minded pieces about the Nixon campaign. “Having never been allowed to join in the cozy, clubby world of the men,” Crouse observed, “they had developed an uncompromising detachment and a bold independence of thought which often put the men to shame.”

And yet feelings-driven journalism has wormed its way even into areas of the news that wouldn’t seem to lend themselves to self-absorbed reportorial display—like, say, a presidential campaign.

At the start of the show’s second episode, Sadie finds herself in a hotel elevator with Senator Felicity Walker, whose previous bid to become the first female president began as a cakewalk and ended in a shocking loss. When Sadie tries to chat her up, the senator halts the elevator and lets loose: “You and your newspaper ruined my life. You cost me the presidency with your snark and your sarcasm disguised as wit and whimsy.”

Later Sadie scrolls through her old articles from the last race, looking for clues to Walker’s fury. Was it the story she wrote on the senator’s “favorite snacks”? The one where she called the candidate “exhausting”? How, she whimpers to her editor, did she get on the senator’s bad side? “Sadie, Sadie,” he assures her, “your style of journalism, it’s observational. You hold a mirror up to the candidate, and if they don’t like what they see, it’s not your fault.” But was that the candidate in Sadie’s mirror or the reporter herself, luxuriating in “my truth”?

The New York Times certainly contributed to the fiasco of 2016. You can read plenty of dissections in the paper of record about how James Comey, then director of the FBI, fatally damaged Hillary Clinton’s chances with his unfair handling of the investigation into her use of a private e-mail server. But try locating much self-inspection about the Times’s overblown e-mail server stories (prompting two corrections and an editor’s note), its insinuations about quid pro quo deals between Clinton Foundation donors and Secretary of State Clinton, its hyperventilations about Clinton’s speaking fees (which were in line with those of other secretaries of state), or its deal for an exclusive with the right-wing operative Peter Schweizer (whose supposedly damning revelations never panned out).

Prominent in those hyperventilations at the Times (but hardly alone) was Amy Chozick, who had been assigned to cover Clinton’s presidential bid two years before Clinton even declared. She didn’t break the e-mail server “scoop,” but she wrote or cowrote evidence-light articles attempting to link Hillary Clinton to payola from Clinton Foundation donors, churned out stories about the candidate’s supposed penchant for the “buckraking circuit,” and praised Clinton Cash, Schweizer’s shabby hit-job book financed by far-right billionaires, as “focused reporting” by a writer who “meticulously documents his sources.”

Her campaign analysis was often based on what she or others “felt” about the candidate, a method that could veer into “snark and sarcasm disguised as” substance: Clinton had “likability issues,” suffered a “trust deficit,” lacked schmoozability with reporters, exhibited only a “snippet of introspection,” felt “most at ease around millionaires, within the gilded bubble,” and needed “to work on appearing more natural and accessible.” When Clinton’s staff endeavored to make her more accessible, Chozick (under the headline “Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say”) deemed the efforts cringeworthy, asserting that “attempts to introduce Mrs. Clinton’s softer side to voters have backfired,” before quoting a GOP strategist saying that Clinton’s lack of “authenticity” was “dooming” her.

Why was Chozick so willing to join the We 🙄 Hillary pile-on? Perhaps to appeal to her employer, an institution long known for its Clinton antipathies. Or maybe, like her alter ego Sadie, she was abiding by the reigning media imperative to cover politics like a reality TV show. (“Isn’t the presidential primary just a higher-stakes version of The Bachelor?” Sadie says.) Chozick didn’t lead the charge; there was an army of reporters around her turning politics into lifestyle and emotional “authenticity” into prejudice—or, in the case of Hillary Clinton, misogyny. But another motive presents itself in Chasing Hillary, and it seems generational—and generational in a subtly gendered way.

Hillary Clinton, in so many ways and in so many publications, faced the dilemma of a mother whose every action fails in the eyes of her insatiably critical adolescent daughter, a daughter embarrassed by the maternal reflection even as she seeks approval there. In Chasing Hillary, we not only see the candidate through the reporter’s eyes; we uncannily view the reporter through the imagined eyes of the candidate.

“Hillary didn’t see me as I was—an admirer in a Rent the Runway dress chasing this luminous figure around Manhattan and hoping to prove myself on the biggest opportunity of my career,” Chozick writes. Hillary “had a gift for looking straight through me as if I were a piece of furniture.” “There was never any gray area in how Hillary saw me.” “Hillary’s and my relationship, which had early on wavered between courtship and repulsion, had been undone.” Chozick even holds Clinton responsible for her decision to postpone getting pregnant until after the election: “It was Hillary Clinton vs. my ovaries.”

At Clinton’s off-the-record cocktail hour with the traveling press corps in Manchester, Chozick is stung when the candidate doesn’t sit next to her. The next morning, “I woke up in my ground-floor room at the Holiday Inn Express feeling like a teenage girl just expelled from the pep squad.” She phones her husband in distress. “I moaned, ‘She really, really hates me…’” Then Chozick has what she presents as an epiphany:

For the first time in seven years I woke up clear-eyed and a little sad that ours was destined to be an impossible, tortured, and unrelentingly tense relationship weighted down by old grudges and fresh grievances.

That this might be a one-way relationship seems not to occur to her.

Perhaps the most striking moment in The Girls on the Bus—because it is the opposite of escapist—comes in the final episode, in a scene that seems on the verge of confessional. Senator Felicity Walker has just lost her presidential bid for the second time—thanks to Sadie’s front-page article accusing her of taking money from a billionaire sexual predator in exchange for a legislative favor. (Walker Cash, anyone?) “The allegations directly undermine Walker’s central campaign message of uplifting women,” her article declares, “casting a cloud over her candidacy.” Too late, Sadie realizes she’s been played by Walker’s enemies.

After the convention, a humiliated Walker retreats to her empty pink campaign bus—and a contrite Sadie follows to offer a ham-handed apology. Is Chozick seeking absolution for her own articles by presenting Sadie as guilt-stricken? Certainly the conflation with Hillary Clinton is explicit. Walker’s reaction is, to the word, what Clinton famously said after her crushing loss: “They were never going to let me be president.”

SADIE: More people voted for you. If it hadn’t been for that fucking dossier—…

FELICITY: If it wasn’t you, it would’ve been another journalist…. It’s not about you and me. It’s the system….

SADIE: We were harder on you because you’re a woman, because, because you’re defensive, because you’re fucking impossible…. But no candidate is perfect. And deep in my heart I always knew that you were a committed public servant. You cared about the people the media ignored. And you would’ve made a great president.

“It’s not about you….” How did the age-old conundrum of the female reporter—can I look at the world without the world looking at me?—metastasize into a crisis for our journalistic and political health? The ethos promulgated by The Girls on the Bus and Chasing Hillary and pervasive in so much of contemporary reporting—that the personal can save us from the political, that the world of objectivity will be humanized by the “authentic” feelings and sleeve-worn convictions of its chroniclers—has proved corrosive to journalism’s fundamental purpose: to examine “the system” and hold it accountable.

In the climactic exchange between Sadie and the senator, The Girls on the Bus all too accurately perceives our unraveling media landscape, perceptions that will be overlooked in the series’s raiment of chick-lit fare and its short television life. But the idea that the supposed feminine qualities that unite Sadie, Grace, Kimberlyn, and Lola as sisters will, by that sorority, “save democracy”? That premise may serve as the show’s great untruth, which its most serious scene inadvertently concedes. In a series devoted to the seductive promise of girl-power bonding, Senator Felicity Walker’s integrity resides in her refusal to bond. “I’d like to be alone now,” she tells a tearful Sadie, and tosses her off the bus.