
Journalists cover Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s speech at a campaign rally in Lancaster, Pa., in April. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
As the newly nominated presidential candidates plunge into the last 99 days of the campaign, news organizations might pause before they do the same.
We should think of what the disembodied voice on a GPS repeats — “recalculating” — when it’s time to make a course correction.
How should the media recalculate in the months before Nov. 8, especially given the sharp divisions in the country?
We should remind ourselves of the fundamentals: Journalists’ most important role is giving Americans the information they need to cast their vote. And a lot of potential voters — about 11 percent — still haven’t decided, many of them not happy with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
“We are supposed to help citizens participate in democracy,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute and the co-author, with Bill Kovach, of “The Elements of Journalism” and “Blur.”
What journalists should not be doing, he told me, is “being part of the team,” on either side.
Whatever one thinks of the concept of journalistic objectivity — some think it’s dated and counterproductive — what’s really important is independence.
Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed, reminded his staff of that last week, after seeing some partisan tweets: “Readers are entitled to trust you less if they think you’re in the tank — if you are vitriolic about a subject, or if you are celebratory.”
But it’s easy to see where sympathies lie in many news organizations.
I noticed, over the weekend, that the lead story on the MSNBC website — about Khizr and Ghazala Khan’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention — was nowhere to be found in my search of the Fox News site. Fox had not covered the Thursday night speech by Khizr Khan, whose son died fighting in Iraq, despite its going viral. (Although Khan’s name couldn’t be found in a search of the Fox News site until Saturday afternoon, a spokes- woman for the network told me that Fox followed up on the story Friday.) Meanwhile, Fox paid little attention last week when Trump urged the Russians to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails — a huge story for most news organizations.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has been criticized for the frequent presence of a prominent Hillary Clinton ad at the top of its home page. Even if readers recognize it as an ad, its placement proclaims a preference that many see reflected in the news coverage.
Examples like these aren’t hard to find across the media spectrum. (And sometimes media efforts to find balance are just as bad — it’s downright painful, for example, to watch CNN’s insipid pro-Trump commentators, Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany. And as noted here previously, the bullying Corey Lewandowski has no place on CNN.)
Staying impartial and independent doesn’t mean news outlets have to be restricted to “just the facts.” They need to provide context, as much as possible. That includes pointing out bigotry or lies; it includes honest explorations of the candidates’ backgrounds.
In the months ahead, journalists should also work harder to understand and reflect citizens’ concerns. They can’t do that if they’ve already decided that one side or the other is elitist or idiotic or racist, Rosenstiel said.
The journalist Glenn Greenwald made a related point in a recent interview with Slate, pointing out the disconnect between many Americans and the news media: He identified “a conversation taking place” that isn’t being amplified as it should be, among people who are “socioeconomically very far removed from the New York/Washington/Los Angeles/San Francisco media circles.”
What about the much-discussed idea that fact-checking (such as that done by The Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler and his colleagues) is useless because voters don’t care who is telling the truth?
Rosenstiel challenges this: It’s not the point of fact-checking to sway voters. “The point is to allow voters to know and to let them decide for themselves,” he said.
In addition, it’s crucial for journalists to listen to voters respectfully and without preconceptions — to try to understand, for example, why a woman might have no interest in voting for Clinton or why a Muslim might support Trump. Rosenstiel calls this reporting against one’s own biases.
I talked with an African American cab driver recently who supports Trump and who laughed off his candidate’s penchant for misrepresenting reality. Far more important to this native of Cameroon was that Trump would “shake things up.”
Journalists should indeed be advocates, Rosenstiel said, but not for any candidate — rather for voters who are trying to make their decision. This means distilling information about positions and candidates in ways that work for citizens, not for journalists on the campaign trail.
For example, news organizations might well say, in effect, “We’ve found that these are the 10 issues voters care about most, but the candidates aren’t talking about five of them.” Or they might boil down the core elements from 30 campaign-trail stories into an easily digestible list or informational graphic. And they need to find these voters where they are — for example, on Facebook or Instagram.
Recalculating also means revisiting the candidates’ positions and backgrounds for people who are only now tuning in. It’s bad news — for everyone — if journalists are out of touch with the people they are supposed to serve.
“If, on Election Day, there’s a result that’s inexplicable,” Rosenstiel said, “then the press has done a bad job.”
For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan