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.
05/21/2019 05:04 AM EDT
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.
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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.”
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