The Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as CDC director on August 5 in a 51-44 vote. Schwartz became the first black woman to lead the agency in its history. The country’s biggest news outlets treated it as a footnote or left this fact out entirely.
Fox News ran the confirmation as a straight political story (by smearing her with diarrhea) and ran the same bio piece across Fox’s entire local affiliate network, from Fox 5 New York to Fox 32 Chicago to Fox 5 Atlanta. None of these mention that Schwartz made history. CNN didn’t put it in their headline but reported the story, and CBS, NBC News, ABC News, PBS NewsHour, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all left the milestone out.
Compare that to how the same outlets covered Karine Jean-Pierre’s appointment as White House press secretary in 2022. You would have to have been deaf, dumb, and blind to not know she was both black and a lesbian. NPR’s headline read “Karine Jean-Pierre Named as the White House’s first Black press secretary.” CBS New York opened its coverage by declaring “Karine Jean-Pierre makes history.” Newsweek and AOL touted “first Black” and “first openly gay” in their headlines. The GLAAD advocacy organization issued its own press release celebrating the appointment. Profile pieces kept returning to the “historic” framing for months.
The CDC is an agency that shapes public health policy for 340 million Americans. The White House press secretary reads talking points at a podium. Schwartz’s blackness and femaleness went unreported because the president who nominated her was Donald Trump and her last name is Schwartz, a name that could read as white or Jewish.
A handful of outlets did cover Schwartz’s history prominently. The 19th News built an entire feature around the milestone. Capital B News and The Atlanta Voice covered it too. The 19th is a nonprofit newsroom whose newsletter reaches just 50,000 subscribers, and Capital B, a four-year-old startup with a staff of about 25 people, has no publicly tracked audience numbers to speak of.
Fox News Digital averaged 187 million unique visitors a month in the first quarter of 2026, more than CNN and the New York Times combined. NBC, ABC, and the Washington Post each add tens of millions more visitors on top of that. The 19th’s entire lifetime readership doesn’t equal what Fox pulls in a single day.
Newsrooms are deliberate about what goes in a headline. Editors at these organizations decided a black woman’s historic ascension to a major federal post wasn’t a story worth telling when a Republican president named Donald Trump made the appointment.
Schwartz’s last name made that decision easier to hide from people not paying attention. Schwartz is her married name. Nothing in her background points to German or Jewish ancestry. Her father served as a career Navy master chief petty officer. Anyone scrolling past a headline with no photo attached would assume she is white or Jewish.
Imagine the coverage if a nominee with an identifiably black surname, from Barack Obama’s CDC or Joe Biden’s HHS, had made the same appointment. The news would have been trumpeted from the highest mountains, blasted across every news network, and printed across every newspaper. It would have been unavoidable. What we just witnessed is major media malpractice and hypocrisy at its finest.
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