How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong
We may
not know the results for days, and maybe weeks. So it’s time to rethink
“election night.”
By Ben Smith
·
Aug. 2, 2020
Picture this Thanksgiving: turkey,
football (maybe), tenser-than-usual interactions with relatives. And perhaps a
new tradition: finding out who actually won the presidential election.
The coronavirus crisis means that
states like Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots for weeks, while President Trump
tweets false allegations about fraud. And the last barriers between American
democracy and a deep political crisis may be television news and some version
of that maddening needle on The New York Times website.
I spoke last week to executives, TV
hosts and election analysts across leading American newsrooms, and I was struck
by the blithe confidence among some top managers and hosts, who generally said
they’ve handled complicated elections before and can do so again. And I was
alarmed by the near panic among some of the people paying the closest attention
— the analysts and producers trying, and often failing, to get answers
from state election officials about how and when they will count the ballots
and report results.
“The nerds are
freaking out,” said Brandon Finnigan, the founder of Decision Desk HQ, which
delivers election results to media outlets. “I don’t think it’s penetrated
enough in the average viewer’s mind that there’s not going to be an election
night. The usual razzmatazz of a panel sitting around discussing election
results — that’s dead,” he said.
The changes the media faces are
profound, with technical and political dimensions.
First, there’s already a shift underway
from a single-day, in-person election. In the 2018 midterms, only 60 percent of the
votes were cast in person on Election Day. More votes will
probably be sent in this year by mail or cast in September and October. That
risks coverage misfires: In 2018, cable news commentators spent election night suggesting that the “blue wave” hadn’t arrived.
But they were simply impatient: The Democratic surge showed up when the final
California races were called weeks later. If the 2016 election had been
conducted amid the expected surge in mail-in voting because of the coronavirus
crisis, the Pennsylvania results might not have been counted until
Thanksgiving.
Then, there’s the continuing Trump-era
political crisis, often driven on Twitter and Facebook. President Trump last
Thursday again sought to call mail-in voting into question
with false claims about fraud. If you want a glimpse of how this could play out
in November, look to 2018, when Mr. Trump tweeted the suggestion,
“Call for a new election?” when the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona
fell behind as mail ballots were counted.
These are hard challenges. The media
specializes in fighting the last war, and has done a decent job this cycle of
avoiding the mistakes of 2016. Reporters are calling out Mr. Trump’s
falsehoods, showing skepticism about polls and avoiding turning politics into a
sport.
But the American media plays a
bizarrely outsize role in American elections, occupying the place of most
countries’ national election commissions.
Here, the media
actually assembles the results from 50 states, tabulates them and declares a
victor. And — we can’t really help ourselves — the media establishes the
narrative to explain what happened. That task was most memorably mishandled in
2000, when inaccurate calls that George W. Bush had won Florida led to a wild
retraction by Vice President Al Gore of the concession he had offered to Mr.
Bush earlier that evening, followed by weeks of uncertainty.
The flashy graphics and sober,
confident hosts embody a long tradition of television flimflam. When CBS
invented the election night tradition of dramatic vote projections and official
calls in 1952, it outfitted its set with a blinking, Remington Rand Univac
computer. The blinking device made for a good show. But the computer was a
prop, a fake, as the historian Jill Lepore noted in her podcast, The
Last Archive.
The TV presentation is always slick,
but the underpinnings of county-by-county electoral systems are baroque and antiquated.
And the pandemic means more people will vote by mail this year, in states with
little experience processing those votes.
“There’s a lot of planning for the
whiz-bang graphics, and not enough planning for avoiding undermining trust in
the American electoral system,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political
scientist and one of the authors of an April report on
how to run a fair election during the pandemic. “It’s not going to be great TV,
it might not be viral content, but it’s the truth.”
Some particularly wonky journalists are
trying to lay the groundwork. NBC’s Chuck Todd said in June that he has been
having “major nightmares” about the election, and his First Read newsletter has
been referring to
“election week” instead of Election Day.
But at the highest levels of most news
organizations and the big social media platforms, executives and insiders told
me that it simply hasn’t sunk in how different this year is going to be — and
how to prepare audiences for it.
Though the hosts and news executives I
talked to all take preparations seriously, many seemed to be preparing for this
election as they have for others in the past, and some waved off my alarmism.
“We don’t want to
create a self-fulfilling prophecy of chaos and confusion or suggest somehow
that that’s a preordained outcome,” said the president of NBC News, Noah
Oppenheim.
Mr. Oppenheim’s optimism is a bit hard
to justify. The April report on running a fair election offers two
recommendations for the media, which it’s mostly been ignoring. First,
undertake an intense campaign to explain to voters how the process will actually
work this year. And second, teach the public patience.
That’s not the media’s instinct. CNN
did the opposite this February, when the Iowa caucuses were slow to report
results and the network put on a “count-up” clock, impatiently tapping its foot
for a result and signaling that there’s something wrong with a slow, careful
count.
Another, smaller but important change
that many political types suggest: Get rid of the misleading “percent of
precincts reporting” measure. In states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, it
would be easy to have 100 percent of precincts reporting their Election Day
results — but have mail-in votes piled up in a warehouse, uncounted.
There are some encouraging signs. CNN
and The Associated Press, among others, have devoted far more reporting
resources than usual to informing audiences just how elections work and to
lowering their expectations of quick results. Mr. Oppenheim says NBC is
doubling the size of the team that covers election security and misinformation.
“It’s always an unfair standard to
expect that kind of movie-like experience on election night,” said David Scott,
deputy managing editor at the AP.
And CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Sam
Feist, and the CBS News elections and surveys director, Anthony Salvanto, both
told me they’ve moved away from using the percent of precincts reporting
measure.
A top Times editor,
Steve Duenes, said The Times was considering alternatives to the single,
predictive needle that offered readers false confidence in 2016, and is looking
at a “range of tools.”
But what the moment calls for, most of
all, is patience. And good luck with that.
Nobody I talked to had any real idea
how cable talkers or Twitter take-mongers would fill hours, days and, possibly,
weeks of counting or how to apply a sober, careful lens to the wild allegations
— rigged voting machines, mysterious buses of outsiders turning up at poll
sites — that surface every election night, only to dissolve in the light of
day.
Facebook’s chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg, told me in a brief interview on Saturday that he’s planning to
brace his audience for the postelection period. He said the site planned a
round of education aimed at “getting people ready for the fact that there’s a
high likelihood that it takes days or weeks to count this — and there’s nothing
wrong or illegitimate about that.” And he said that Facebook is considering new
rules regarding premature claims of victory or other statements about the
results. He added that the company’s election center will rely on wire services
for definitive results.
It’s possible, of course, that Joe
Biden will win by a margin so large that Florida will be called for him early.
Barring that, it’s tempting to say responsible voices should keep their mouths
shut and switch over for a few days to Floor Is Lava, and give the nice local volunteers time
to count the votes. That, however, would just cede the conversation to the
least responsible, and conspiratorial, voices.
The Republican secretary of state of
Ohio, Frank LaRose, said he hoped that the time spent waiting for results could
become a kind of civics lesson, with footage of volunteers feeding ballots into
machines. Alex Padilla, the Democratic California secretary of state, suggested
that television companies look to a Hollywood model: “You can’t think of
Election Day as a single movie — you have to treat it as maybe a trilogy,” he
said.
He didn’t say which movie.
But conveniently, a group of former top
government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four
possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a
big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably
reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania. For their war game,
they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the
role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just
as Mrs. Clinton had.
But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden,
shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede.
Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and
Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College.
In that scenario,
California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United
States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden
president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in
the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to
see what the military would do.
Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined
The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed
News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News,
The New York Observer and The New York Sun. Email: ben.smith@nytimes.com @benyt
