By Sahi Padmanabhan

Fake news, media bias and out-of-touch reporting; with the increasingly divisive political climate shaking up the way we cover politics, ethical debates about covering elections and political bias are more relevant than ever.

Many hard-nosed political reporters don’t vote; some, like Peter Baker of the New York Times have openly said that they don’t vote, don’t belong to non-journalism organizations, don’t belong to political parties and don’t even voice opinions on political issues in private.

For New York Times reporter Astead Herndon, the debate is much more nuanced than just a blanket ban.

“I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule for folks,” Herndon said. “I think that you should do the things that you feel comfortable with and not think that things like voting in a political election makes you less biased, more biased, unless it does.”

It’s a matter of introspection. Without the understanding of what makes one biased personally, it is irrelevant to talk about issues of voting or not voting, he noted.

“I think that the question of voting is small potatoes,” Herndon said. “There’s a more important thing which is about maintaining a journalism that is more than just performatively objective, but fair.”

Herndon has spent much of last year covering the presidential election and will continue to do so until the general election this November. Much of his coverage has discussed black voters, and he hopes to give black voters more well-rounded coverage moving forward.

“I try to take it as, ‘if you’re just writing about the group writ large, you’re probably not showing the necessary nuance between them,” Herndon said. “It shouldn’t be a story about black voters by itself, but generational differences or ideological differences between them.”

Political journalism has always been flawed, Herndon says, and all election coverage has good and bad sides. He says that the only way to provide fair coverage is to actually talk to voters.

“I think that all presidential elections involve good and bad journalism,” Herndon said. “I think that one of the things that we’ve tried to make the priority here is to get out on the road and to make sure that we’re not just embedded with the campaigns themselves, but also (in) the kind of communities which decide our elections.”

One major criticism of political journalism is that it focuses too much on the politicians and not enough on the other stakeholders in our political climate. According to Jonathan Stray in a Medium article, many people who grew up with the internet—people who are now considered a part of the group vaguely termed “young voters”—have become disillusioned with the horse-race style of covering politics, and want to see more of the community and society as a whole reflected in political coverage.

Stray brings up the example of the push for gay marriage, which largely took place in the courts between community activists and stakeholders. Political coverage that focuses entirely on politicians would have missed most, if not all, of that story.

Herndon agrees that political coverage, especially in elections, could benefit from more focus on the people who aren’t in the public eye to better understand the political climate as a whole, rather than just the piecemeal understanding that comes from being a part of a campaign.

“[Reporters should] reflect the kind of diversity of the electorate,” Herndon said. “It has been a real priority for not just dealing with the kind of same constituencies that we’re used to, but making sure that the breadth of, in this primary, the Democratic voters that are electing our representatives. That includes black voters, Latino voters, old and young and kind of the nuance between them.”

This point of view reflects the ever-changing political discourse around voting, voter turnout and issues like voter suppression. Without information from the community, it is difficult to say with any certainty what is actually happening at the ground-level. On top of this, readers are no longer getting their information in the same way they did 20 years ago; and those pathways are constantly shifting and merging.

“I think you have to be comfortable with change,” Herndon said. “I think you have to understand the ways in which people get their information has changed. And you have to understand that voters aren’t necessarily coming from things from the same lens in which you are.”

In the end, Herndon’s coverage is about making sure that he is talking to people on the ground, understanding where they’re coming from and where they’re going, fully immersing himself in a community and reflecting how their getting their information and how they’re using it.

“I should know kind of the different media ecosystems in which Democratic voters are [getting information],” Herndon said. “I should know the regional differences between the communities and try to reflect that. That’s just how the job should be done.”

For Herndon, however, this doesn’t mean fundamentally changing our reporting, just the tools journalists use to cover politics.

“I think that the same tenets of the profession hold true,” Herndon said. “It’s just the tools that you’d have to use to be able to execute [good journalism] change.”

 

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