Election coverage, part 2: Ready for prime time?!
n.b.: This is the followup to my previous post—my own sounding of the alarm about the potential pitfalls the media might fall into covering this election. I kept reading and researching as I wrote it, and while my recommendations remain the same, I thought it important to point to evidence that they’re already being undertaken. No need to spend our panic budget where it isn’t needed, right? This draft grew from the other, and I present them both here to try to comprehensively share my learning & understanding.
Sam Feist, Washington Bureau Chief and Senior Vice President, CNN, speaking in “Behind the Decision Desk”
I am less afraid of the election now than I was a few weeks ago. Besides grave concerns about actual issues like voter disenfranchisement and the RNC’s nefarious strategy playbook, I was worried that the media were going to totally blow it for democracy. But this week, a “Behind the Decision Desk” panel hosted by PEN America gave the public a peek behind the curtain of TV’s election coverage planning, and there was much to reassure a nervous citizen.
During the first presidential debate with Chris Wallace, I’d felt a familiar terror: the reckless president is doing reckless things, and nobody in the room seemed to know how to stop it. Surely, after the media’s various fumbles in covering the 2016 race, a wizened industry would give us better reporting on this debate? Alas: I saw too much commentary and coverage along the lines of “Candidates Traded Insults,” equating Biden’s one or two piques of anger to the bullying, outrageous behavior that prompted those outbursts. A worrying sign.
Then came Barton Gellman’s deeply informative but terrifying cover story for the Atlantic, “The Election that could break America.” He posited that the period between November 3rd and Inauguration Day were ripe for Trump to sow chaos in an effort to undermine both the process and the results. The president’s behavior at the first debate only made Gellman’s words seem more prophetic. How would the media, the public’s primary source of information during this time, handle such a moment? The media execs who spoke to Ben Smith, a NYT media reporter, seemed to be feeling too comfortable. With so much at stake, could they be trusted? Were they studying the important work of the Transition Integrity Project and the recommendations of the National Task Force on Election Crises behind the scenes, or ignoring it?
Anyhow who has read the work of the aforementioned groups and journalists could see that we desperately needed an overhaul of the cliches of election-night television coverage—the breathless counting down to poll closures, counting “precincts reporting” percentages, and racing to be the first to “call” each state. Covering this election as if it were any other would be a massive mistake, because the facts simply show that it’s not: The number of people voting early or by mail may grow to over half the electorate; voting by mail and voting at the polls looks like it might skew heavily along party lines; the Republican Party is no longer legally restrained in its voter suppression tactics, and the president is actively spreading misinformation.
What I learned after watching “Behind the Decision Desk,” Wednesday’s forum, hosted by PEN America, with representatives from CNN, the AP, and the Fox Decision Desk (an institution-within-the-institution of Fox), however, is that they are on it! In addition to whatever moral weight they feel, they’re even aware that news consumers want more from them this year. As David Scott, Deputy Managing Editor at the AP said, "They want to know how the call was made. What went into our thinking process? Why was that moment the moment that could make a race call? And what went into it?”
The race to call the election as quickly as possible seemed, in this unprecedented eleciton, like a grave risk, and inevitable corporate competitiveness an unavoidable enhancer of that risk. But Sam Feist, Washington Bureau Chief and Senior Vice President CNN, said that in this era, “We’re not racing each other [to call a race first]. We are not competing.” Arnon Mushkin, Decision Desk Director at Fox News, agreed and added, “we’re all competitive animals, and there is a competition in terms of being able to tell the story … as accurately as possible.”
So what about that story? If TV networks use the classic “precincts reporting” percentages for each state, that could create the “red mirage”—the appearance of a Republican lead simply because the in-person voting would trend red where mail-in votes would trend blue. Would their dazzling holographic maps steal the spotlight from important contextual information? Would that give Trump a screenshot to tweet with a claim to victory?
Well, Blanton revealed that they’re already at work on new graphics at Fox to help depict the brave new world that is 2020. Fox, CNN, and the AP all agreed that “precincts reporting” was a thing of the past. Mishkin's Decision Desk will instead report the percentage of the expected vote. His team is even placing bets on “how often during the night we’re going to have to increase the expected vote in the state because the turnout is going to be so high.” While Feist says we can expect CNN to show us “John King at the magic wall that has been an icon of our election coverage for many years,” they’ll not only discuss geography but also “talk about what we know about the today voters and what we know about the mail-in voters.”
There’s reason to believe that they’ll have a lot of strong, reliable reporting to share with us too: Sally Buzbee, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor at The Associated Press, spoke about how the AP has been working on both internal education for their team and explanatory journalism for their audiences. Her colleague Scott explained that the AP's election research division is a full-time, permanent operation, “not something that we spin up once every four years."
Of course, reality has never constrained the president before. Any coverage that repeats his claims can allow him to change or shape the story. David Scott brushed aside this concern, asserting that no matter what anybody tweets, “two plus two will always equal four.” Here, I felt the tingle of fear again. The math may be unchangeable, but the narrative seems to be the track our nation’s wheels are affixed to. I’m not convinced that, if the president tweets that he’s won and takes to the podium to make a victory speech, that all cameras and coverage won’t swing to follow. And if it’s covered, it already seems more real—this is one of the challenges already plaguing journalists in an era of misinformation and disinformation.
Buzbee has considered this possibility. In such an event, “We’re going to stand by our journalism. … We’re going to be very aggressive with that journalism. We’re going to say, “Here’s what the vote count shows, and anyone who claims differently is not speaking accurately, according to the facts.” They’ll remind viewers “We’re not here at the end, we’re here in the middle.” That might be less gratifying that certainty or fast answers if we do find ourselves in the middle of a contested election result, but it might keep us from flying off the rails.
