Reading the avalanche of news stories and commentary this past week about the next U.S. Presidential election, “Not the odds, but the stakes” jumped out at me. It came in an article quoting noted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.
Rosen has been publicly imploring news media for months to stop treating the 2024 election like a horse race and instead focus on what might happen in our nation in less than a year, depending on the victor.
He is not alone in his urging.
Objections to horse-race-style reporting is a familiar plaint heard about national elections. Media often run with a “Who’s ahead-who’s behind?” rubric for campaign news coverage, basing stories almost exclusively on opinion polls.
Why?
Polling results are simple to summarize and regurgitate in a news story. Plus, they can seem exciting, like any contest.
A thousand people might be polled to see if they prefer Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis to be the GOP nominee for president. The results of that poll could be easily turned into a story or column about the relative standing of either candidate to capture the GOP presidential nomination — based on simple statistics.
But just reporting simple statistics, without giving substantive information about the merits of the candidates or their positions, is not that helpful to readers. All media consumers get from this kind of “horse-race” story is that one candidate led the other numerically in a particular poll, at a particular moment in time.
As Ted Lasso might opine, “Big whoop.”
Polls certainly have a place in the election universe. They are good at bumping less-likely to be elected candidates, based on low poll numbers.
But Rosen is adamant that this election year media need to report on what a second term for former President Donald J. Trump might look like, particularly examining what Trump is making abundantly clear he plans to do if he retakes the White House.
A few of those publicly stated — and breathtaking — plans include invoking the federal Insurrection Act, which allows for use of the military as a national police force to quell disturbances, directing the U.S. Justice Department to punish a plethora of his perceived enemies (including President Joe Biden and some former Trump associates and appointees) and most recently creating massive detention camps to confine undocumented immigrants while they await deportation — 10 million people, GOP sources say.
These few examples might sound like swell ideas to you. They don’t to me.
The public needs to know about these and other Trumpian notions to make an informed choice and not just hear that the some poll puts Trump ahead of Biden or vice versa. Other GOP presidential candidates still in the running need to be queried specifically about their opinions of the creation of deportation camps, using any federal government agency for revenge, or invoking the Insurrection Act. Good reporting should include asking incumbent GOP Congress members their stances, too, as they face reelection right along with the presidential candidates. After all, members of the House will be the ones asked to fund these endeavors.
This reporting and research is considerably more complicated to compile and write than simply pulling numbers from a spreadsheet of poll results. But as Rosen states so succinctly, it’s not the odds, but the stakes.
By the way, there are 346 days until Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. There’s plenty of time to closely examine what’s at stake.
Fitzgerald has worked at six newspapers as a writer and editor as well as a correspondent for two news services. He splits his time between Valois, NY and the Pacific Northwest. You can email him at Michael.Fitzgeraldfltcolumnist@gmail.com and visit his website at michaeljfitzgerald.blogspot.com
WRITE ON: It’s not the odds, but the stakes
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25.11.2023
Reading the avalanche of news stories and commentary this past week about the next U.S. Presidential election, “Not the odds, but the stakes” jumped out at me. It came in an article quoting noted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.
Rosen has been publicly imploring news media for months to stop treating the 2024 election like a horse race and instead focus on what might happen in our nation in less than a year, depending on the victor.
He is not alone in his urging.
Objections to horse-race-style reporting is a familiar plaint heard about national elections. Media often run with a “Who’s ahead-who’s behind?” rubric for campaign news coverage, basing stories almost exclusively on opinion polls.
Why?
Polling results are simple to summarize and regurgitate in a news story. Plus, they can seem exciting, like any contest.
A thousand people might be polled to see if they prefer Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis to be........
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