‘It’s not up to him’: how media outlets plan to
sidestep any Trump ‘victory’ news
With reports that the president intends to make a
premature speech, newsrooms across the US are bracing for misinformation
Ed
Pilkington
@edpilkington
Tue 3 Nov
2020 07.30 GMTLast modified on Tue 3 Nov 2020 10.56 GMT
Newsrooms
across the United States are bracing for a potentially volatile election night,
after reports suggested that Donald Trump is planning to declare “victory” on
Tuesday even before results from critical battleground states have been
determined.
The
president’s reported intention to make a premature – and potentially false –
victory speech by the end of Tuesday night, with large numbers of mail-in
ballots yet to be counted, has provoked intense journalistic debate. TV
channels would be under pressure to air such an event on grounds that it is
“news”, while aware that it amounted to dangerous misinformation that could
stir violence across the nation and undermine the democratic process.
Such a
clash of responsibilities would amount to a heady climax in the American
media’s extremely vexed relationship with Trump over the past four years.
Were Trump
to try to stage such a “victory” stunt it would chime with the relentless doubt
that he has sown for months around the election, with repeated false claims
that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. His comments suggest that his aim is
to create the illusion that the election is being stolen from him in states
such as Pennsylvania where early results from in-person voting might favor
Trump in a so-called “red mirage”, only for the balance to swing to Biden as
absentee ballots are counted beyond election day.
As Jake
Tapper, chief Washington correspondent for CNN, pointed out, any premature
claim of victory would be electorally meaningless, the equivalent of a football
coach bragging about having won at half-time. “That’s not how it works and it’s
not up to him,” Tapper said in a tweet.
But it
would still present media outlets with a classic Trump conundrum. How do you
cover a presidential “victory” speech that is founded upon hot air yet has the
potential to cause serious public discord?
Vivian
Schiller, a former president and CEO of National Public Radio who was also NBC
News’s chief digital officer, said that news organizations have no excuse for
being unprepared for such an eventuality. Headlines such as “Trump declares
victory”, especially on social media, could “shape public opinion and become a weapon
against truth and trust in the democratic process,” she told the Guardian.
Schiller,
who in her current role as executive director of Aspen Digital has co-written a
10-point plan for news rooms on how to cover a historically toxic election,
proposed that TV channels should actively counter any Trump gambit. One
technique would be to display a fixed on-screen banner reminding viewers that
the votes are still being counted with no winner yet declared.
“If Trump
goes on for more than a minute or two with falsehoods, cut away from the live
feed and have your reporters explain that elections are not ‘called’ by their
contestants,” she said. “Explain why such a premature declaration of victory is
both wrong and dangerous.”
Jay Rosen,
journalism professor at New York University, responded to the Axios story by
calling on newsrooms to step up and meet the challenge. A premature Trump
“victory” declaration would be the most important test yet of what he called
the “fading maxim” that whatever the US president says is news.
That maxim,
Rosen said on Twitter, was “corroded beyond repair by its abuser”.
Election
night is also likely to present the social media giants with challenges, after
they struggled to counter misinformation throughout the presidential election
cycle. Facebook has said it will block political ads on its platform after
polls close on Tuesday as its contribution towards protecting the integrity of
the ballot.
Twitter
last month said that it would not allow either Trump or Biden to claim victory
unless the result had been authoritatively called by state election officials
or at least two recognized national news outlets making their own independent
election calls.
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