News executives and editors are anxious to make sure they give every would-be president a fair look, including lesser-known candidates like Marianne Williamson. | Eric Charbonneau/Invision for YWCA/AP Images 2020 Elections Media tries to avoid 2016 mistakes with massive 2020 field ‘I feel compelled to give everybody a chance to prove that they’re worthy of coverage,’ said Chuck Todd, NBC’s political director.

Marianne Williamson is a spiritual author whose most high-profile previous foray into politics was an unsuccessful run for Congress as an independent. In a field of nearly two-dozen Democratic presidential candidates, she wouldn’t normally warrant much press attention.

But Williamson’s campaign says she’s hit the 65,000-donor threshold to qualify for the upcoming primary debates. And after 2016 — when the media was accused of anointing winners too early and missing the rise of Donald Trump — news executives and editors are anxious to make sure they give every would-be president a fair look.


“I feel compelled to give everybody a chance to prove that they’re worthy of coverage,” said Chuck Todd, who hosts NBC’s “Meet the Press” and serves as political director.

“I don’t even want to sit here and say, ‘Yeah, we’ll never have an embed on Marianne Williamson,’” Todd said. “How do I know that? She may get on that debate stage and suddenly have a following, and there we will be.”

The 2016 campaign featured a total of 17 Republican candidates and a much slower ramp-up — Trump wasn’t even in the race by this point four years ago. This year, newsrooms are hiring bigger teams, sending reporters to more places and thinking of new ways to cover the massive field.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is leading national and key-state polls, already has something resembling a traditional press corps, with news organizations such as the New York Times, Associated Press and NBC News assigning beat reporters to cover him exclusively, and he has formed a press pool to cover his fundraisers.

But most newsrooms can’t afford — or don’t want — to assign a reporter to every candidate. That’s prompting some creativity in how to cover the 2020 race.

CNN is offering every candidate who wants one a chance to participate in a televised town hall, even though the events aren’t always ratings hits. Williamson has done one this year, as have 13 other Democratic candidates, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke has one scheduled for Tuesday. The network also has announced plans for events with Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, and California Rep. Eric Swalwell.

CNN Washington bureau chief Sam Feist said he expects the network to spend “more money than we ever have in the past” on this election cycle, including staging and producing the town halls and sending reporters out into the field.

“To cover all the candidates, to cover the policy, the big picture, and the stories that involve multiple candidates in any one day — and to cover all the events — it takes an army,” Feist said. “So, we’ve deployed an army to cover this election.”

Other newsrooms are expanding for 2020. The Washington Post has about 10 reporters who travel regularly with candidates, plus a bigger political investigations team and more editors than in 2016, Washington Post national editor Steve Ginsberg said. The Post has also added a seven-days-a-week breaking news desk dedicated solely to covering politics.

Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel has interviewed or attended events with more than 20 Democratic presidential candidates this election cycle, a feat that took him from Washington to Montana, California and Iowa in the last week alone.

“I woke up before 4 a.m. three days in a row in three different time zones,” he said, adding that his "electorate first" approach is focusing on taking the pulse of Democratic voters rather than zeroing in on individual candidates.

“We don’t have a reporter on all 23 candidates, but we have by far the biggest team the Post has ever had covering an election, and we’re able to be out with quite a lot of people at any given time,” Ginsberg said.

Wall Street Journal political editor Ben Pershing also said his paper is fielding a “much bigger” campaign team in 2020. He added three political reporters earlier this month and is still hiring. Still, Pershing isn't planning to assign candidates to beat reporters any time soon, saying the paper's focus is on "broad and thematic stories" that cut across the field.

New York Times political editor Patrick Healy said writing daily about every Democratic candidate “just risks being a blur” for readers. So, while the paper has assigned reporters to closely track many in the field, the team is focusing more on “stories that illuminate who the candidates are and what they stand for and help readers think about the policy issues and political dynamics at stake,” Healy said.

Healy, who has been engaging with readers on Twitter about the Times’ early 2020 coverage, said he’s heard requests for “more on policy, more on issues.”

Julie Pace, the AP’s Washington bureau chief, sees going beyond Washington as one of her outlet’s core strengths. The AP’s politics team has reporters focused on the race from Washington, New York, Chicago, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado and Georgia, and a political editor is planning to move from Washington to Minnesota. Plus, the broader wire service has reporters in all 50 states.

“The advantage there is we don’t have to parachute people in to take the pulse of the Midwest or get the vibe of women in the South,” Pace said. “We have reporters that live there. They raise their families there. They go to church. They send their kids to school with voters there. And so we’ve tried to make that core to our coverage.”

Pace noted that “one of the lessons from 2016 is that news organizations didn’t pay enough attention to what voters outside of the coasts are saying.” But “our team lives outside of the coasts, and we’re in all these states and in these communities,” she said, adding that these assignments “will really resonate in our coverage of the election.”

None of the newsroom executives was bemoaning the size of the field, which is brimming with stories for reporters to tell. Still, Pace admitted, “I wouldn’t be looking forward to covering a 40-person field.”

