One of the biggest goals for the U.S. journalism industry in covering the 2020 election is to not repeat its mistakes from the 2016 election. So what steps are journalists taking to fulfill that? The industry of 2019 is different … Read more
The U.S. presidential election may be a year and a half away, but polls are already ranking—and rankling—the still-developing field of 2020 candidates, prompting familiar, biennial pleadings for journalists to resist the siren call of horse-race journalism and keep their … Read more
Two days after the election, one of our reporters spoke to teenagers at Topeka High School who said they were bullied and threatened with Donald Trump-inspired sexual assault. The story angered Diane Smith, a reader who fired off an email to … Read more
There was a whole lot that went right in 2016 campaign coverage. If you were reading Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, PRRI’s Robert Jones, or New America’s Lee Drutman, you understood how race, identity, and our changing culture were deeply shaping this … Read more
I watched election-night coverage on television with acquaintances from Europe, who seemed flummoxed by what was unfolding on the screen. I spent a lot of time explaining the Electoral College and unpacking why I thought that Donald Trump was getting … Read more
I’ve seen this bad movie before—in fact, far too many times: strongmen, whether vicious kingpins or populist leaders bullying reporters in either my native Mexico or across Latin America, authorities threatening reporters by cutting off state advertising money, muzzling them … Read more
Donald Trump’s precedent-breaking refusal to allow a small pool of journalists to cover his travels as president-elect has revealed some common ground in our otherwise fractured republic. Good, Trump supporters tell me. The press deserves to be treated badly after … Read more
In covering the local election season in Dare County, North Carolina–best known as the home of the Outer Banks–journalists can’t be accused of paying too much attention to an unending parade of polls. For starters, there were no publicly released … Read more
“Election polling is in near crisis,” the political scientist Cliff Zukin wrote in The New York Times in June of 2015, a year and a half before the Dewey-Defeats-Truman of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton. Zukin is a … Read more
One thing I worry about is the seeming expectation that the press should have been able to predict the outcome of the election. And that “we got it wrong.” Clairvoyance is the stuff of fortune tellers; journalists report on the world. Read more
