The US media is facing daunting decisions as it enters the 2020 presidential election year including whether to amplify or muffle Donald Trump’s “digital bully pulpit” and his relentless stream of untruths as it seeks to avoid the calamitous mistakes of 2016, leading figures from the industry say.

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The Guardian and the Columbia Journalism Review talked to 30 top editors, reporters, TV executives and commentators across the US. With the first poll of the Democratic nomination contest in Iowa just four weeks away, the issue of Trump’s domination of the 24-hour news cycle continues to disturb many media figures.

In the wake of Trump’s victory in November 2016, many commentators pointed to disproportionate and exhaustive coverage of his extreme comments and tweets as an important factor that skewed both the Republican primaries and the general election against Hillary Clinton. If anything, that pattern has intensified since then.

As Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, remarked last month, “I’ve said to many of my friends in the press, ‘You’re accomplices, whether you want to be or not’.”

Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist who has written extensively on the dilemmas facing the media in 2020, told the Guardian/CJR project: “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. 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.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders speaks to reporters in Concord, New Hampshire. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

The picture painted of the media landscape as we go into an epic election year is mixed. The 30 top editors, executives and reporters reveal that:

* Opinion polls. Big changes are likely this year in the wake of the disastrous election night in 2016 when Trump’s victory took most pollsters by surprise. Fewer outlets will make use of forecast models, which give probabilities of each candidate winning. The technique spread confusion, not least when the New York Times opened election day in November 2016 by forecasting that Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of winning.

* Horserace coverage. Several editors said that they thought the horserace, where the election is covered by talking about who is up and who is down, had outlived its welcome. “Horserace coverage is dead,” said Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed News.

* Trump’s untruths. Uncertainty still reigns over how to treat a president who appears to have no attachment to the truth. By the Washington Post’s count, Trump has made more than 13,000 false or misleading claims since he came to office. Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, said that the media has learned to be much more sophisticated in fact-checking Trump.

But Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post, pointed out that members of the president’s inner circle, such as White House counsel Kellyanne Conway, who have repeatedly made false claims are still being booked for the Sunday political TV shows.

“The press is under assault and democracy is under assault right now, and these two things are related. We’ve come a ways, but I’m still not particularly positive about how we’re going to deal with 2020,” Sullivan said.

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As BuzzFeed’s branding for its election coverage – “the Stakes 2020” – indicates, much is riding on how the year unfolds. It’s not just that the outcome of the election is seen as profoundly important for the future of a searingly divided nation.

For the media itself – denounced as “fake news” by conservative politicians and greeted with chants of “CNN sucks!” at Trump rallies – nothing less than public trust in fact-based journalism is in the balance. “I am very concerned that the truth is disappearing, that facts don’t matter anymore, that lies have such an important weight in our political life,” said Jorge Ramos, anchor for the Spanish-language TV channel Univision.

With about 86,000 people employed in newsrooms across print, online, radio and TV according to Pew Research, the US has one of the largest and most sophisticated news medias in the world. But it is under intense stress, with 25% of its workforce shed in the past decade, mainly in newspapers.

Other people worry about a repeat of the perceived failure in 2016 to report the views of millions of Americans living in the US heartlands. One of the mysteries of Trump is how this real estate developer, whose home is a glitzy apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, has managed to present himself as the champion of “forgotten voters” ignored by coastal media elites.

His charge that the media veers towards the coast is founded on truth. Pew Research shows that one in five newsroom employees live in just three cities – New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Sarah Kendzior, a midwest-based journalist and author, was widely hailed for her coverage of the 2016 election. She was one of few who successfully gauged the discontent of those who would go on to vote for Trump.

Kendzior warned the Guardian/CJR that news organizations were sleepwalking into the same trap. “I think the 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.”

She added: “What a lot of these coastal outlets are doing is basically parachuting in here with the narrative pre-written and trying to find people who fit their preconceptions of what people in the midwest are like.”

Many other faultlines were raised in the Guardian/CJR project. Facebook continues to be awash with misinformation, including in political advertisements. Young and Latino voters continue to be poorly served by the news media prompting fears of repeated low turnouts among those groups.

All told, US newsrooms are braced for a bumpy ride this year. As Smith put it: “The media is totally prepared not to repeat the mistakes of the last cycle. But I’m sure we’ll fuck it up in some new way we aren’t expecting.”

• Read the interviews in full