People in the journalism educational community have been asking a variety of questions related to their students and the outcome of the 2024 election. Although they vary in tone, concern and topic, they basically boil down to these types of questions:
- What should I be telling my students about the outcome of the election?
- What should journalism for them look like now that Trump is president again?
- What should they do, as journalists, in this current environment?
I’m often accused of being reductive in cases like this, but I believe that we overthink the heck out of stuff like this.
For example, my answer to the first one would be pretty basic:
- Trump won the election, both the electoral college and the popular vote. If you like that, fine. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, too. However, facts are facts and people need to learn how to accept them.
- You live in a country where people get to choose a leader, and sometimes people make choices you don’t like or can’t understand. That’s the risk of living in a society like ours, but it is how things work.
- If you don’t like what happened this time, you can easily use the skills you garnered in any journalism class to be part of a political campaign and try to move the needle in the direction you prefer. If you like what happened this time, you can use those same skills to maintain this new status quo. However, you can’t do these things and be a news journalist at the same time.
I can already think of at least six people who are furiously writing a five-page email to me, condemning that simplicity. So, if you hated that, you’re really going to hate the rest of this.
Journalism is a lot of things, but at its most basic, it’s about finding out what’s going on, making sense of that and then telling it to people who need to know this stuff in a way that makes sense to them. It requires you to keep the door of objectivity open, at least a crack, when you talk to people and to do your best to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what it means to your audience.
So, with that as the backdrop, here are three basic things I would tell students about doing the job in this current state of being:
Stick to the facts in your reporting: When I said this to a few Harris supporters, I got the expected response: “This is stupid! Trump and his followers never accepted facts!”
First of all, Trump secured nearly 76 million votes, so to assume that every one of his followers won’t accept a fact is problematic and stereotypical. I can’t get four faculty members with the same level of education, same Midwestern roots, same area of study and same views on child rearing to all think the same way about where we should go to lunch half the time, so to assume 76 million people are exactly alike in a pretty problematic way is relatively stupid.
Second, the goal of journalism isn’t a race to the bottom or fighting stupid with stupid. You do things the way you’re brought up to do them, like finding facts, interviewing key sources, telling stories and so forth in this field. Even if you do all that, there will be people who don’t believe you, whether it’s about the Jan. 6 riot or that you know someone who has six toes.
As I used to tell Zoe when some kid was trying to set fire to the McDonald’s Playland or throwing a tantrum in the middle of Walmart, “I’m not that kid’s parent. I’m your parent. This is not how you behave.”
If you signed up to do a job, you do the job the way it needs to be done. As far as journalism is concerned, that’s relying on facts and presenting perspectives. You aren’t a superhero, set out to right wrongs or showcase what you “feel people should think.” Doing that has led to some of the biggest disasters in our field.
Understand your audience and work for those people: If you are working for a traditional media outlet, you will likely have a mix of people who voted in the past election. Those people might consider politics the only thing that matters, or they might be low-involvement voters who have a little more than a passing interest on elections. Some of each may have voted for Trump and Harris for one of a dozen reasons.
To assume that the audience thinks exactly as you do is to doom yourself to failure, so instead of doing that, go actually interact with people in your readership area and figure out what matters most to them.
This can be things that have very little to do with the major elections, or they might be tied directly to them. Where people live, what types of jobs they hold and what challenges they face can be crucial to keeping your eye on the ball when picking stories to write.
For example, the issue of tariffs came up multiple times in the election. The talking heads on various national news programs have come up with a variety of reasons why these are good or bad or whatever. Instead of looking at a large national story, look at things that your local community needs and how specific changes to financial policies have impacted them.
If you are covering a rural community, see how things like the costs of fertilizer, feed, veterinary medication and so forth have changed before, during and after tariffs are imposed. If countries are reciprocating by taxing incoming products, see how the things the farms produce that traditionally get exported are impacted. If all politics is truly local, so is the impact of political decisions.
Beyond that, look at the things that people are actually saying impact their lives and see what can be done about that. Not everything is Watergate, but everything we do can reach people in an important and effective fashion.
I often go back to the story a student wrote for me decades ago at the Columbia Missourian. She found out from a wheelchair user that this person had to ride in the road and risk getting hit by cars because the sidewalks were so lousy. The student wrote the story and caught hell from the city manager, who demanded she retract the story. She kind of freaked out and asked what we should do.
“You hit a nerve,” I told her. “Keep going.”
Later that day, a large group of wheelchair users were gathering for a “Wheelie Rally” in the park to discuss this issue. The student reported on that, further ticking off the city manager. Still, she kept going on this story, covering the events and making people aware of the issue.
About six months later, the city manager stood up at a city council meeting and said he wanted to reopen the budget to deal with the condition of the city’s sidewalks. It was just something he’d been thinking about, he explained, so now seemed like a good time. He never once mentioned the student or her reporting, but every time I saw a chunk of sidewalk being repaired anywhere I went in life, I thought of this kid.
Get reacquainted with the attribution verb “said”: This one is going to be crucial going forward, because we have long seen what happens when the wind changes politically and people have made statements. I think half of the late-night comedy shows after the election were of Republicans denouncing Trump in 2021, juxtaposed with their unwavering support for him now.
I don’t know what Donald Trump (or any other politician for that matter) believes, knows, thinks, assumes, understands or feels. What I do know is that he opens his mouth from time to time and words fall out of it. The word for that is “said” (or says if you’re in broadcast).
He said he would let RFK Jr. “go wild” on the health system in the United States.
Do I know that any of those things will happen? No. Do I know exactly what it means for the future? No. What I do know is that he said them, so I’m going to tell people that and then follow the breadcrumbs along the trail to see where “said” becomes “does” and go from there.
Even if you aren’t directly covering Trump, it bears repeating that people often say one thing and do something different. Report what they say and also what they do and go from there.
Also, record the hell out of everything.
