In the weeks after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the American media went through deep soul searching. Most news outlets had been taken by surprise by Trump’s victory, had failed to see the rise of the electorate that would put him in the White House, and had been led by the clickbait of his tweets. Then there was Hillary Clinton’s emails and an arguable failure to appreciate the importance of misinformation and Russian interference in the election.

This time the press has pledged to do better. Yet, with less than a year to go before Americans go to the polls again, there are already signs that mistakes of the magnitude of 2016 may be repeated or new challenges arise.

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The Guardian and the Columbia Journalism Review have partnered to interview 30 top media figures and commentators, asking how ready they think we are for the 2020 presidential election.

‘The media got the country wrong’

The stakes could not be higher. With the 2020 presidential election upon us, leading media practitioners and commentators are in anxious and reflective mood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Journalists file information inside phone booths at the public impeachment hearings on 19 November 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post: The press is under assault and democracy is under assault right now, and these two things are related. One of the things we didn’t do well covering the presidential election last time was that we failed to distinguish between the serious and not so serious – the term false equivalency comes to mind. So Trump and his sexual assault claims, business record, history of racism – all those things were made equal to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Today we’re calling it a little better. When things are “racist” we’re willing sometimes to use that word. We’re willing to use the word “lie”. We’ve come a ways in that sense, but I’m still not particularly positive about how we’re going to deal with 2020.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times: In 2016 I think the media got the country wrong. I don’t think we got Trump. We didn’t understand how much the country was angry at elites, upset about the fallout from the economic crisis. And I don’t think we understood quite how much the country just wanted to shake things up. We covered it as usual, the way we always cover elections, as a clash of two ideologies, and I think it was much, much deeper.

Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News: The media has this incredible quadrennial habit of learning all the lessons of four years ago and applying them when the medium has already moved on. So I think the media is totally prepared not to repeat the mistakes of the last cycle, like giving Trump endless livestreams and letting him use provocative tweets to dominate the conversation. But I’m sure we will fuck it up in some new way we aren’t expecting.

In 2020 there will be 32 million Latinos eligible to vote and I’m concerned the story might repeat: Latinos stay home. Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor

Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor of Teen Vogue: People are worried and we don’t have an answer. The US president is openly attacking journalists. He has convinced a third of the country that the New York Times is fake news. We can criticize the Times all we want for substantive reasons, but it’s not fake news. We have to have some general understanding: outlets like the Guardian, the New Yorker, these are not fake news!

Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor: In 2016 there were 27 million Latinos eligible to vote and 13 million of them decided to stay home – more than 50%. In 2020 there will be 32 million Latinos eligible to vote and I’m very concerned that the story might repeat itself again: that Latinos decide to stay home because they don’t like President Trump but don’t trust the Democrats either. That would be terrible for Latinos.

Daniel Arnall, executive editor of MSNBC: So one of the things that we are doing differently than in the last cycle is focusing more on issues, and coverage of issues that folks across the country are interested in. That is going to be driving our coverage. We’re going to be substantially less interested in taking like live candidate events, I think, and dealing with all of that.

Trump tweet coverage is low-hanging fruit. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor of Teen Vogue

Charlie Sykes, editor-in-chief at the Bulwark: Going back to 2016, when I was part of what you’d consider to be the conservative media, it’s difficult to remember that there was still a lot of diversity of opinion. There were a lot of conservative commentators and talk show hosts who were very critical of Donald Trump. What’s really changed is how increasingly tribalized the media has become.

Kara Swisher, tech journalist and founder of Recode: What happened in 2016 should not come as a surprise for anyone who has been paying attention to the tech companies. Tech moguls collect all the money and pay none of the price.

Trump and his tweets

In 2016 Trump regularly set the 24-hour news agenda with his early morning clickbait tweets. Will the same Trump-obsession dominate again?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One at the White House in Washington on 2 December 2019. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times: We’ve learned that if you write a story about the ridiculousness of Trump’s latest tweet it gets a lot more traffic than an analysis of Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan. Trump understands what news catches people’s interest, he has a very acute sense of what people will click on. So I’m concerned that we are going to end up giving Trump more than the lion’s share of media time all the way up to election night.

Mukhopadhyay, Teen Vogue: We are living amid constant cutbacks. Outlets are shrinking. I worry the story continues to be driven by what is performing, by KPIs (key performance indicators). That’s where a lot of the Trump tweet coverage comes from – it’s low-hanging fruit.

Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today: I make no apology for the amount of coverage we give President Trump. He’s the president. If he says something that’s incredibly provocative or does something that has far-reaching ramifications, we have an obligation to report it.

Ramos, Univision: When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 and when he ejected me from a press conference, we told everyone, listen, this is someone who’s making racist remarks, he’s attacking the press, yet very few people pay attention. Today I believe it’s a completely different story. Journalists are being much more aggressive than they were in 2016.

Smith, BuzzFeed: This is a totally different moment to 2016 – it’s an election that will be a referendum on Trump’s presidency. The challenge will be covering his presidency and not what he says about it.

Olivia Nuzzi, Washington correspondent for New York magazine: Trump is sort of blowing everything up. And the way he has done that has provided more opportunity for reporters to be creative. In the Trump White House, nothing works like it’s supposed to.

Just one Trump speech will have 60 false and misleading claims … It’s incredibly depressing. Glenn Kessler, editor of The Fact Checker, Washington Post

Baquet, the New York Times: When you cover a theatrical politician you must try not to get caught up in the theatre. Having said that, I’m one of those people who thinks theatrics are still worth covering – they are part of the way he leads the country.

Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University: During the first Gulf war, the Washington bureaus of major news organizations – spearheaded by Harper’s together with the networks and a number of major news organizations – said: “We’re not going to go along with the ‘minders’ scheme.” Such collective action is not beyond the bounds of the imagination for 2020.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist: I think there is some debate in certain quarters about whether the media should be taking one side or another – stand in opposition to Trump. And that’s in part what is feeding the sense of polarisation and people living in two entirely ecosystems in the US.

Lies, damn lies and factchecks

Since Trump took office, the Washington Post has counted 13,435 of his false and misleading claims. This extraordinary splurge of untruths poses huge challenges for the media as we go into 2020.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kellyanne Conway speaks to reporters after Donald Trump terminated James Comey. Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Glenn Kessler, editor of the Fact Checker, Washington Post: The database of Trump’s false claims is a very depressing duty. It just drags you down to have to go through it, like reading one of the president’s rally speeches. Just one speech will have 60 false and misleading claims, most of which you’ve already factchecked and said were false. It’s incredibly depressing.

Page, USA Today: There is much more impressive factchecking than there was in 2016. One of the things that we’ve seen happen is not to let something that we know is inaccurate stand unchallenged.

We can talk about it and help voters identify what is true and what is not. Nicholas Johnston, editor in chief of Axios

Ramos, Univision: I’ve covered Latin America for many decades and I think that has prepared me for what I’m seeing right here in the US. To have someone leading the country who is an authoritarian, who is not telling the truth, who’s constantly lying in a country that is completely divided.

Bruni, the New York Times: You can only say the same thing so many times before people become numb and deaf to it. If the public is not listening, I don’t know how that becomes our fault.

Nicholas Johnston, editor-in-chief of Axios: What makes me somewhat optimistic is that four or six years ago we didn’t even have the vocabulary to talk about deepfake, fake video and audio, misinformation, the manipulation of social media, the end of truth. Now we know that these are things, we can talk about it and help voters identify what is true and what is not.

Kessler, the Washington Post: I’ve covered just about every presidential administration since Reagan and this administration has the least fidelity to truth and honesty of any I’ve encountered.

All of us in the media were just so convinced Trump couldn’t win. Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times

Sullivan, the Washington Post: The Sunday TV talkshows will bring on people like Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counsel, who is just an inveterate liar. By having her on, she is allowed to say things that aren’t true and although she can be challenged it’s still a very strong message having her on air. My feeling is, don’t have her on, you know she’s going to lie her way through every broadcast. That’s not censorship. Censorship is government action that disallows things being said, but judgments made by editors and producers are not censorship.

Swisher, Recode: If you’re not scared when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says it’s okay for politicians to lie, especially in the context of a system that is so viral compared to any other media, you should be afraid.

Polls

Most opinion polls in 2016 predicted that Hillary Clinton would win. On election day the New York Times gave Clinton an “85% chance to win” through its forecasting model. There’s been a lot of soul-searching since then. Have we learned the lessons?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 2016 election night watch party at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Arnall, MSNBC: I am still hesitant on polling, and I think there’s been a real reluctance by a lot of major organizations to really come to terms with the failures of that through the last cycle. I think that’s a potential weak point that a lot of people should be pushing their organizations on. I’m still like, “What are we doing differently this time?”

Larry Sabato, pollster and director of University of Virginia Center for Politics: All of us pollsters got to eat a large, bitter humble pie after election night in 2016, which came as a tremendous shock. We’d all expected Hillary Clinton to win by three points or so, giving her over 300 electoral college votes. When Trump won we were forced to relearn that polling is not the word of God or handed down on the Mount to Moses.

Baquet, the New York Times: All of us in the media were just so convinced Trump couldn’t win. But he was outside of the paint-by-numbers game we have developed.

Discussions about whether Elizabeth Warren is likeable enough reflects inherent sexism we haven’t dealt with. Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post

Sabato, pollster: The polling industry has tried to correct itself after it was so badly caught off-guard. We used not to weight by educational level and it turned out that if we had done so we might have been more accurate in 2016. So now everybody is weighting by education. We also had our fingers burned over the electoral college. The polls got the popular vote more or less correct, with Clinton winning the popular vote by two percentage points, but we should have thought more about the profound electoral college impact that gave Trump his victory.

Page, USA Today: You have to rely both on quantitative and qualitative interviews. Polling is really valuable, but it doesn’t tell you everything. You want some quantitative data that enables you to say, “Hey, Pete Buttigieg is doing really well among older voters,” which is one thing we’ve just noticed in recent polling, then go out and talk to older voters.

Sabato, pollster: As for forecasting models, they need to be dropped entirely. Most readers didn’t understand what probability really means. It just confuses people, and to do it again next year would be to plant a bomb that could explode in your face.

‘Horserace coverage is dead’

2016 provoked soul searching about whether Clinton was held to different media standards than Trump, both in the extent and type of coverage. Is the same happening again within the traditional media obsession with the horserace?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Trump rally in Sunrise, Florida on 26 November 2019. Photograph: Jayme Gershen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bruni, the New York Times: Here’s one specific way I think we will be able to judge whether we’ve done our jobs well at the end of the 2020 election: we will not have gone to the Democratic finalists in the primary stage or to the ultimate Democratic nominee, whoever that person is, every time Trump hurls an insult and accusation at them. We will not have made that the main news story of the day: “Candidates traded volleys in a war of words.” We do that all the time.

Sullivan, the Washington Post: I see sexism in the coverage of women candidates. It’s improved since Hillary Clinton ran but it’s still not great. The disappearance of Kamala Harris has some of that wrapped into it, and the constant discussions about whether Elizabeth Warren is likable enough to be elected reflects inherent sexism that we haven’t really dealt with.

Page, USA Today: On the day that Donald Trump announced, my assumption was that he was not going to be nominated for president. And it took a while for me to realize what voters were saying, which was that he would be. So that is a lesson that I think we tried to apply this time, by looking at the Democratic field … It’s not up to us. It’s up to voters.

Mukhopadhyay, Teen Vogue: One thing we’re seeing with young people is that they are having trouble following the deep nuances between candidates. It’s kind of boring to really point out some of these policy differences because they’re not really that different.

Smith, BuzzFeed: Horserace coverage is dead. Our audience actively hates it. We have to think about a way to replace it in a way that is compelling and that cares about the personalities and the policies while always keeping in mind that there are real things at stake. Now it’s kids in cages. I mean, who cares that somebody fires his political consultants.

Hire people who actually live in the midwest. Sarah Kendzior, St Louis, Missouri-based journalist

Beddoes, the Economist: We are beefing up our data department, which we’ll combine with traditional shoe-leather reporting. We plan to put those together with the outsider perspective we bring, and the ability to stand back from the tick-tock of the horserace minute-by-minute, to give rigorous fair-minded analysis.

Smith, BuzzFeed: For our audience nobody thinks that politics is a game or that it’s fun or a sport. The kind of coverage that treats it as though it’s entertainment is repellant to people. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to know who’s going to win or that they don’t care about polling, but just that everybody has a sense of what the stakes are. That’s the brand for our coverage: the stakes 2020.

Fly-over country

Trump’s unexpected victory four years ago led to questions about whether media organisations, in their coastal bubbles, had failed to hear the frustration of voters in the heartlands. How is it playing for 2020?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Voters fill out ballots in Janesville, Wisconsin, on 14 August 2018. Photograph: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Baquet, the New York Times: We have to get out in the country more. We have to talk to more people, which we’ve started to do.

Sarah Kendzior, St Louis, Missouri-based journalist and author of The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America: National media is making the same mistakes as in 2016. The midwest has become the sort of stand-in region for what the national media think of as the “forgotten voter”. What a lot of these coastal outlets are doing is parachuting in here with the narrative pre-written trying to find people who fit their preconceptions of what people in the midwest are like. Honestly the best way they could fix this problem would be to hire people who actually live in these states.

Al Cross, director of the University of Kentucky Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues: It’s not just boots on the ground. You can’t have a parachute mentality. You have to have some appreciation of rural sensibility. The best reporters know how to do that.

Sykes, the Bulwark: I’m in Wisconsin and I do a lot of work on the coast as well. I’ll be on an MSNBC show, and people on the panels start talking about Wisconsin voters as these strange throwback figures, “nostalgic for a time when men were able to slap women around”. And it was like, “Wait, no.” First of all, understand that these are people who have their own values, their own communities, and every time you talk about them in this way, you deepen this red, blue divide, this thing. You need to not treat them as these … deplorable troglodytes.

Caitlin Byrd, political reporter for the Charleston Post and Courier: Growing up in the south, you see the same descriptors used to talk about places where I was from: backwoods, dirt road, small town, quiet. The same tropes over and over. But this cycle is it seems that more national reporters in particular are realizing that the south is more complicated.

None of the presidential candidates have a very well-fleshed-out strategy for Gen Z. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor of Teen Vogue

Gitlin, Columbia University: There was a sense after 2016 that we weren’t listening to enough people in diners in Ohio. That wasn’t so much misguided as it was inflated. The average Trump voter has above-average income! News media went from not noticing people whose life chances are impacted by the rustification of the midwest to thinking that they are now the central story. It’s an absurd overcompensation.

Kendzior, journalist and author: I meet a lot of people who have some regret about voting for Trump, who are reluctant at times to admit that regret on record. Some are embarrassed about having made this regrettable decision … The base is still there, they’re very frenetic … But I do think that base is much smaller than the media portrays it.

The need to reach young voters

Only 46% of 18-29 year olds voted in 2016. Was the failure of media to address young people’s interests partly to blame, and if so how to fix it?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton takes a selfie during a 2016 rally in Des Moines, Iowa. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Mukhopadhyay, Teen Vogue: The way the media talks about the youth vote is as social media Snapchat-obsessed young people, who don’t care about politics and are not engaged because it’s above their head and they are so selfish and that’s why they don’t vote. If I was Gen Z that kind of narrative would turn me off too. When you do have outlets that speak to their interests you notice that they do become engaged.

Swisher, Recode: When I started my podcast, someone said to me: “You know, Kara, millennials like snackable content.” And I was like: “I don’t want to write for people who want snacks. Everyone who’s substantive wants substance.” They said: “Millennials are twitchy. They can’t focus on anything long.” And what’s interesting about it is, they were dead wrong.

Many news organisations have started calling Trump a racist – that’s something that didn’t happen in 2016. Jorge Ramos, Univision news anchor

Mukhopadhyay, Teen Vogue: None of the presidential candidates have a very well-fleshed-out strategy for Gen Z. Nobody really knows how the 18-year-old who is in St Louis who works in a fast-food place, we have no idea what they want. We don’t know how they’re going to vote. At Teen Vogue we see it as an opportunity for a generation that has not had somebody actually speak to their needs: climate change, immigration, juvenile justice, student debt.

Race in the race

Diversity in media – both in terms of the internal makeup of news teams and the way those teams cover Trump’s stoking of racial fears – will be a running theme in 2020.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An attendee at a rally for Kamala Harris in Oakland, California. Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Errin Haines Whack, national writer on race and ethnicity for the Associated Press: As we head into 2020, I am still on the campaign trail quite frequently the only black woman in a room. Sometimes the only black person. The reality is that two thirds of the people who cover political journalism are white men. Yet we have the most diverse field in the history of Democratic politics in the upcoming primary: a record number of women, a record number of people of color. Responding to that diversity in newsrooms seems to be a journalistic imperative.

Dwight Watkins, Salon editor and bestselling author: I’ve been seeing the same people … get out there and basically tell similar stories and make assumptions about whole groups of people. They talk about the black vote as if it’s just one thing. So I think when you utilize the same players and the same people, they take their biases and they apply these biases to our whole group. And this is just not fair.

Ramos, Univision: Many news organisations have started calling Trump a racist – that’s something that didn’t happen in 2016. When Trump said in June 2015 that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, that was a racist statement but many people were not comfortable calling him out on that. Since then he’s made many other racist remarks and reporters and news media feel more comfortable now in calling Trump a racist.

Baquet, the New York Times: People who think that Trump only won because 40% of America is racist are not looking closely at the numbers, and do not have a fully empathetic understanding of America. I’m not saying he didn’t stoke racism and get votes from racists. But that’s a very easy answer. I don’t think that journalists should deal with easy answers.

Delete your Twitter account and don’t use that as your window on the world. Nicholas Johnston, editor in chief of Axios

Mukhopadhyay, Teen Vogue: I felt a lot of the conversations after 2016 were “Oh no! we focused so much on getting all these women in the newsroom we alienated all these white men”. After the election, editors felt they needed less diverse newsrooms because they were concerned they had gone “too far left” or had incorporated identity politics too much and were alienating this white base that was all riled up for Trump.

Ramos, Univision: The numbers of Latinos represented in the US – whether in newsrooms or in Congress – are abysmal. We don’t have enough Latinos on the air or reporting. I do see changes. The first presidential debate among Democratic candidates was organised by NBC and Telemundo, and José Diaz-Balart was one of the moderators. That alone meant that Spanish was spoken in that debate, immigration was addressed and Hispanic issues were talked about. I was one of the moderators in the second debate, and for the first time not only did we talk about Latino issues and immigration but I brought in Latin American issues.

Escape the Twitter bubble

Where will 2020 election news come from? The other 500 journalists pontificating in a journalist’s Twitter feed?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Campaign signs sit on chairs ahead of an event with Donald Trump in Racine, Wisconsin. Photograph: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Johnston, Axios: My social media policy for the newsroom would be: delete your Twitter account and don’t use that as your window on the world, it’s a journalists’ echo chamber. OK, that’s a joke – we are not going to un-invent the internet. But I do think it’s important in newsrooms to talk about the impact that it has. We tell our reporters to call people on the telephone, get out of the house, go wander the halls of Congress, fly someplace and talk to people.

Mukhopadhyay, Teen Vogue: If you looked at Twitter after the recent Democratic presidential debate, my entire timeline was filled with criticism of Pete Buttigieg. Meanwhile he’s polling really well. That discrepancy reminds me of that we thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016 because we all hated him and thought he was a joke. That to me indicates that we haven’t learned anything.

Nuzzi, New York magazine: I try to remind myself that the entire electorate is not represented in these couple hundred Twitter accounts.

Reporting team: Ed Pilkington, Adam Gabbatt and Jim Waterson from the Guardian; Akintunde Ahmad, Lauren Harris and Savannah Jacobson from the Columbia Journalism Review

