The marketing lessons from failed election coverage

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The marketing lessons from failed election coverage

Why Black journalists could see what was coming in 2016 and the rest of us couldn't

James Breiner

May 9

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You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter, which I send every other Thursday. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.

If journalists learn one lesson from the past few elections, it comes down to the fundamental law of marketing: know your audience. Listen to them. Find out what their pain points are. What’s really important to them.

The reason that pollsters and spin doctors and other Washington-based experts could not imagine Donald Trump being elected in 2016 was that they weren’t listening to voters.

Errin Haines saw it coming. She heard it from Black voters. She had covered race issues for the Associated Press.

“There were so many Black journalists who saw exactly what was coming in 2016,” she said during a panel discussion at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas.

“I remember after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the conversation was about the myth that we were finally post-racial in this country, which I knew could not have been further from the truth. A lot of Black people in this country, a lot of Black journalists, understood that, if anything, we were about to be hyper-racial.”

In other words, white voters were going to express their dissatisfaction with having a Black president by choosing his opposite.

“If you know anything about the history of race in this country, there is no racial progress without racial backlash; 2016 was the logical destination after a Barack Obama presidency. A lot of Black journalists saw it coming.”

Lessons learned

Evan Smith, co-founder of the Texas Tribune, moderated the panel of journalists that included Haines. And they took turns confessing their sins and describing what they have learned about election coverage, polling, fund-raising, spin doctors, and the navel-gazing Washington press corps.

Shawna Thomas, executive producer for CBS News’s “CBS Mornings,” was senior producer of NBC’s “Meet the Press” during the 2016 election. Election coverage should be about “listening to the people,” she said. “I don’t think we did that well in 2016.”

Her message to reporters for 2024 is to get out in the field and talk to people, ask what they think. She sent reporters to Michigan, one of six or seven battleground states in the upcoming election, to interview Arab-Americans about Israel and Gaza. Michigan is the state with the largest number and percentage of Arab-Americans.

What the reporters found was dissatisfaction with Biden’s policies regarding Israel and Gaza. “And small problems in swing states are big problems in an election,” Thomas said.

Don’t watch ‘The Show’

Charlie Sykes, a conservative contributor and columnist for MSNBC, is from Wisconsin, another of the half-dozen swing states. He worries that the press corps will succumb to Trump’s talent for making the election campaign into a reality TV show in which he is the star.

Sykes criticized the media for not making a bigger issue of the fact that Trump suggested President Biden was high on cocaine during his State of the Union address. “There’s a tendency on the part of the media to mute the crazy,” he said, referring to some of Trump’s more outrageous claims and conspiracy theories.

Beyond that, Sykes said, traditional news media are weak and less relevant. “There’s been an epic, massive wave of the destruction of print media, of the splintering and shattering and fragmentation of the rest of the media.” And, given the growing distrust of the media, he said:

“We’re going to see some of the best journalism of our lives this year, but given the state of journalism and the audience, many of the people who most need that journalism will not see it and will not believe it.” — Charlie Sykes

The danger

Trump is portraying himself as the hero who will pardon the convicted insurrectionists — he calls them “hostages” — from the Jan. 6, 2020, riot at the Capitol.

Abby Livingston, senior congressional reporter for Puck, said the Jan. 6 riot “was the most significant thing that happened to me in my lifetime, in my career.” She had friends and colleagues among the journalists in the Capitol that day who were in fear for their lives.

Livingston was Washington bureau chief for the Texas Tribune at that time and blames herself for a “failure of imagination” in not believing Trump had a chance of winning that election.

She saw again how out of touch the Washington press corps was in 2018 when Democrat Beto O’Rourke came close to upsetting Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate race in Texas. The journalists in D.C. were convinced that O’Rourke, a U.S. congressman, had no chance against Cruz, based on polls and fundraising. But Livingston, on trips back to Austin, was hearing from Texans on the ground that Cruz was vulnerable. O’Rourke lost by only 2.6% of the vote.

Livingston and other panelists believe Biden is making a mistake by not holding more press conferences. The White House press office keeps the president in a bubble. A politician needs to engage in that rough-and-tumble of skeptical questioning by the press to stay sharp, Livingston believes. Otherwise, they will not look good in a live setting like a presidential debate.

Final thoughts

The message of all the panelists was that media organizations can’t rely on polls, spin doctors, political analysts, fund-raisers, and other so-called experts to understand the public in general and their own audiences.

Local media, which are having their own financial crisis, are better positioned to understand the wants, needs, and problems — the pain points — of their audiences.

Beyond this particular panel, a major theme of the symposium was that media are out of touch with their audiences. They have focused too much attention on their advertisers. But now that their advertising revenue is plummeting, these media are turning to their audiences for financial support. Many of the journalist panels focused on tactics and strategies to understand their audiences better. That’s basic marketing.

Some of the other panel topics:

I would like to close with a comment from Errin Haines, whose publication, The 19th, has as its goal is “to empower women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those from underrepresented communities.”

“This is not a status quo election,” Haines said. “We need to know who the voters are who are still on board with Trump and the threat he poses to our democracy. We have to ask his voters, are you still on board with him? After all he’s said and done?

“This is an election about whether we want to have a democracy, about whether we will have any more elections.”

Also: Charlie Sykes comments on Media that try to appease bullying politicians

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