Even without a global pandemic, the 2020 presidential election would have been strange, but with it, political reporters at major news outlets are facing a year they never could have conceived.
“It’s so hard to get your finger on the pulse sometimes when you can’t be out on the road all the time,” added Maeve Reston, national political reporter at CNN. When there is, officially, a victor, there’s still further uncertainly that the result will be accepted by citizens. Margaret Brennan of CBS and “Face the Nation” said the idea that people will refuse to believe whomever won the election actually won is “one of the things that worries me the most.”“For nearly the past year, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are suddenly talking about their fears of a civil war,” she said.
Have you been doing much on-the-ground reporting around the election or mainly virtual, or by phone and text? Has it had a significant impact on your ability to report? After election night 2000, I flew the next morning to Florida and stayed for weeks covering the recount. Thanksgiving came and went. We added Christmas decorations to our makeshift workspace and we stayed on the story until mid-December, when the race was finally resolved. Election Day may not be the final destination this year. No one on our team has made November vacation plans.
But I did a voter focus group and it turned out to be a fascinating conversation. Maybe we’re just at a point in the pandemic where we’re just past the fourth wall. People were pretty conversational. I was thinking it would be an inhibition and it wasn’t.At CBS we’re preparing for this to take a while. But we also know that we will have plenty of detailed information we’ll be sharing on Election Day and into the night.
Have you been doing much on-the-ground reporting around the election or mainly virtual, or by phone and text? Has it had a significant impact on your ability to report? The main difference is the pandemic making it impossible to travel for a while. I didn’t travel for six months after Super Tuesday and covered the entire campaign from home, all the way through early September. I think I’ve figured how to do it safely now. But it absolutely inhibits the reporting.
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