Voting ends tonight in the U.S. midterms. Here are a few tips from Poynter senior faculty Al Tompkins for covering a historic election:
🔎 Provide attribution, seek context and avoid subjective adjectives.
📸 Recognize the power of your images and video. When you show long lines, explain why those lines are long. Explain that people in line will be allowed to vote, at whatever hour that might be. Is this a method of voter suppression or is it an expression of interest in this election?
On Election Day, it is more useful to put your emphasis on voter rights and on why people are willing to wait than on the actual wait times. Make sure you encourage — not discourage — voting with the images and interviews you choose.
🗓️ Know when to expect winners to be called in different races. In the 2020 primaries, 23 states took an average of four days to report nearly complete results.
❌ Refute premature claims of victory. There is a psychological effect called “the cognitive bias of primacy” that explains why we tend to remember the first thing we hear more than what we hear later — even if what we hear later is more solid information.
If a candidate who first claims victory later loses the race, the public may find it more difficult to believe than if nobody claimed premature victory. If somebody claims a victory not backed up by data, then front-load the sentence when reporting on it with something like, “There is not enough data to support any candidate claiming victory, but Candidate X is making the claim anyway,” rather than reporting, “Candidate X is claiming victory even though the votes are still being counted.”
May the facts be with you. Go out and be excellent.
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