Behind the ballot: Covering elections for 2024

2024 has been termed as the election year with close to 50% of the world voting in multiple elections. This includes key countries like the USA, India, South Africa and more casting their vote. The decisions made in polling booths this year will dictate global politics in the coming years. 

European citizens will cast their vote for the EU’s Parliamentary election. Along with this, there are multiple national elections in Croatia, Finland, Iceland, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and other countries.

Covering elections is said to be “political desk’s golden hour.” Nic Newman’s 2024 predictions also state that covering elections “will provide a temporary boost to traffic.” Yet for all the opportunities it presents, electoral coverage can easily turn into a breeding ground for polarisation and misinformation. 

Newman’s report further notes that “there is also a risk that divisive and polarised politics will further undermine trust in the news media.” The newsrooms have to bear the added responsibility of eliminating misinformation and providing facts to the readers’ political discourse. 

Type of election coverage

Researchers from the Netherlands and Portugal checked the effect of election reporting style on news engagement. They studied the effect of “game coverage” and “issue coverage”.

As the name suggests, game coverage makes elections look like a game or sport. As in any play, the focus is on who is winning or losing. Here the highlight is on the ongoing competition within the political arena and the battle on who is gaining the public’s favour. 

The researchers found that using game coverage helps increase engagement but also incivility in the comments from highly polarised readers. This type of reporting also exposes the reader to look at the political candidate’s ability to win or lose. This prompts the reader to choose a side based on their political affiliation. Thus exaggerating polarisation.  

Issue frame on the other hand focuses on the issues and policies raised by the political candidates. It discusses the candidate’s proposals and their implications. Unlike game coverage, the focus is less on the winning candidate but more on the public’s gain. 

Such reporting is filled with deliberate discussions. Commonly, it is thought that the reader is more likely to drop such reports in favour of something more stimulating. However, the researchers found that this coverage didn’t lead to a drop in readership. But, it also didn’t help increase audience engagement. 

Here is an ethical challenge that newsrooms need to face. Either increase game coverage and let incivility increase or use issue coverage and maintain the readership. 

In Newman’s report, Christoph Zimmer from Germany’s Der Spiegel says that it is better to focus on producing quality reportage. It helps “differentiate ourselves even more clearly as a quality medium, and thus even strengthen our position.”

Dimitris Xenakis from inside story, a Greek investigative platform states that “truly it is only your readership that is important, and they expect you to do ethical, smart and well produced journalism in order to keep on trusting you and rewarding you by paying.” 

A dedicated audience base is more rewarding to the newsroom in the longer run than increasing engagement through unethical steps. Hence, The Fix reached out to FactReview’s Stamos Archontis and Pagella Politica’s Giovanni Zagni to gain their advice on covering elections factually and efficiently.  

Do’s of election coverage

• Add contextual information

Archontis notes that many don’t necessarily have the background information about the unfolding events. So to help them, newsrooms should “include context information about the elections in any posts with relevant content and with a link to material from authoritative sources,” states Archontis.

• Add transparency 

Being transparent is important to gain the trust of the audience and to maintain journalistic ethics. Archontis recommends that newsrooms require to have firm disclosure practices for political ads and AI-generated content.

• Admit mistakes

Zagni highlights the difficulty in admitting mistakes but the necessity of doing it. “There is no shame in admitting a mistake and appending a good old correction to an article, if there is reason to do so. There are plenty of articles still relating debunked content out there, just for the fear of admitting to have made a mistake.”

Don’ts of election coverage

• Adding false balance

False balance or bothsideism is a reporting style where journalists add opposite and often false claims inside the story to help maintain the balance of viewpoints and to avoid being biassed. The problem with this is that readers often get exposed to wrong information.

Zagni states, “False claims are not to be repeated without specifying that they are false, even if they come by very prominent figures. It is dangerous to publish a headline limited to ‘Mr. X states Y’, if Y is a known lie.”

• Creating contrarian content

Zagni notes that to make discussions and debates more lively, newsrooms often place contrarian opinions next to each other. This is seen commonly in climate change and health issues, where the fact can be clearly reported. “False equivalences further the idea that there is a debate around issues where actually there isn’t,” he says.

• Being the first

Often in election coverage, newsrooms fight tooth and nail to be the first to break a story. This pace of creating stories often signals out fact-checking and other due diligence.“Outlets shouldn’t be afraid of arriving late on yet another piece of viral content, or even of not covering it at all, if it turns out it is something of dubious origin or even false,” says Zagni.

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/

---