ELECTION
ELECTION
2020 Assistant Professor BENJAMIN TOFF and John & Elizabeth Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality DANIELLE KILGO both signed on to Media for Democracy’s RECOMMENDATIONS FOR MEDIA COVERING THE 2020 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. The report offered suggestions from scholarly experts in politics and media, who drew on research from their fields to offer practical, nonpartisan, evidence-based recommendations to journalists covering the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Recommendations, advice and tips included: Deny a platform to anyone making unfounded claims; put voters and election administrators at the center of elections; develop and use state- and local-level expertise to provide locally-relevant information; distinguish between legitimate, evidence-based challenges to vote counts and illegitimate ones that are intended to delay or call into question accepted procedures; uphold democratic norms, and more. Find the report, plus an update on insurrection and unrest, at mediafordemocracy.org
Associate Professor SID BEDINGFIELD wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post days after the election. The piece, titled “PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT ELECTION FRAUD ARE DANGEROUS,” compared President Trump’s fraud claims to elections of the past. Bedingfield wrote, “Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the vote—and the way it has been amplified by media allies and spread across social media—has a familiar ring. It evokes an egregious example of election fraud in the 1890s, when White Democrats in the Deep South complained bitterly of Black voting fraud to cover up their own election rigging.” 10
MURPHY REPORTER ❙ Winter 2021
How Hubbard School faculty members contributed to the discourse.
In JOUR 4790: POLITICAL ADVERTISING taught by Assistant Professor CHRISTOPHER TERRY, 20 undergraduate students worked collectively to track advertising (as a real-time exercise) on Minnesota TV and radio stations from Sept. 1, 2020, to Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020. Using the FCC Public File Database, students actively monitored public filings and disclosures about election related advertising, tracking the data related to federal elections this year. The course (last offered in the fall of 2018) gave students an opportunity to collect and analyze large quantities of advertising data and to interact with a range of election professionals in a real-world environment as a way to develop the type of analytical skills employers are looking for. Students used the collected data to produce a professional-style ad analysis or a multimedia-style reporting project to include in their professional portfolio after graduation. Combined with the data collected in the 2018 course, students have tracked more than $200 million spent on political advertising over the last two election cycles. As in 2018, data from the project this year was shared in a partnership with MinnPost, and appeared in their reporting during the election cycle. In 2020, the students tracked 152,867 ads for $77,309,942 in total spending on broadcast TV and radio for the 10 federal races. The spending equaled $13.61 for every man, woman and child in the state, and at 30 seconds per ad it equaled nearly 1,274 hours (more than 53 full days) of advertising time.
