Election 2020

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2020 How Hubbard School faculty members contributed to the discourse.

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.” 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.

Assistant Professor BENJAMIN TOFF, Associate Professor MATT CARLSON and Assistant Professor VALERIE BELAIR-GAGNON contributed to “U.S.

ELECTION ANALYSIS 2020: MEDIA, VOTERS AND THE

CAMPAIGN,” a report featuring 91 contributions from more than 115 leading academics. The publication captured the immediate thoughts, reflections and early research insights on the 2020 U.S. presidential election from the best of media and politics research. The three were featured in sections of the report that covered news, journalism and social media.

In his contribution, “Forecasting the future of election forecasting,” Toff writes, “I don’t fault [pollsters] for emphasizing how uncertain their predictions actually are. But there is something deeply unsatisfying about this form of prognosticating punditry, which simultaneously claims superior decimal-point precision while humbly insisting that its declarations should only ever be treated impressionistically.”

In the piece, “When journalism’s relevance is also on the ballot,” with co-authors Seth Lewis and Sue Robinson, Carlson writes, “Even if traditional journalistic practices remain more-or-less intact, the overall media environment has changed radically in recent times. This is true of the supply of media content, particularly through the right-wing media machine of Fox News, talk radio, and digital news sites like Breitbart and the Daily Wire, but also in the distribution of information generally through social media platforms that operate wholly outside traditional news channels.”

In one of her pieces, “Collaboration, connections, and continuity in media innovation,” Belair-Gagnon writes, “When it comes to the 2020 United States Elections, newsrooms will likely see that there is a fine line between news innovation for the election and how the industry is pivoting during the pandemic. With the shift to digital and a shattering of silos across different types of media (e.g., web analytics tools and even products like podcasts to their offering or toolkits), news organizations have been tinkering, developing one-off types of innovation and rethinking how to best position themselves in the media market.” For more, visit electionanalysis.ws/us/ Associate Professor STACEY KANIHAN, PATRICK MEIRICK (Ph.D. ’02) and Assistant Professor CLAIRE SEGIJN published the article “THINKING, KNOWING, OR

THINKING YOU KNOW: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

MULTISCREENING AND POLITICAL LEARNING” in September 2020 in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. The study, a national survey of the 2016 election campaign, showed multiscreening (using a device like a smartphone while watching TV) may have both beneficial and detrimental consequences for an informed electorate. The results indicate that multiscreening during political TV news and debates is positively related both to thinking about the campaign, and to the confidence people have in their knowledge of the election. However, the research also found that multiscreening was negatively related to learning about political candidates and the campaign. The authors suggest that multiscreening may create a feeling of overconfidence—that people who multiscreen think they know more about politics that they actually do. They conclude by saying that multiscreening is a distraction from the intense cognitive activity of learning, and may be contributing to a less-informed electorate. They suggest that citizens pay increased attention to high-quality election news sources.

Immediately following the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law Director and Professor JANE KIRTLEY, Postdoctoral Scholar SCOTT MEMMEL, and Program Assistant ELAINE HARGROVE compiled an exhaustive report on the incidents during and following that day. “EVENTS SURROUNDING THE U.S. CAPITOL INSUR-

RECTION RAISE SIGNIFICANT MEDIA LAW ISSUES AND

QUESTIONS” covers Trump’s anti-press rhetoric and possible incitement; journalist arrests and violence faced; and the actions of social media companies and platforms. The report in its entirety can be found at silha.umn.edu