Podcast Archives – It's All Journalism

437. Objectivity, racism, and the crisis of credibility

Objectivity is a core journalism value, but some have questioned whether it’s a privilege reserved only for white journalists.

When Pacinthe Mattar, then a reporter for CBC Radio in Toronto, went to Baltimore in 2015 to cover the uprising following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, her first stop was Gray’s neighborhood in the northern part of the city. She happened to arrive the same day charges were announced against six officers involved in his death.

After spending hours talking to people and as she was packing up to go back to her hotel, a young man approached Mattar. He asked who she worked for and they struck up a conversation. As their interview began, another man joined them.

*The Walrus* recently published Pacinthe Mattar’s story “Objectivity is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists.”

Mattar began the common practice of spelling the man’s name to him to make sure she had it right and he corrected her — Jarrod Jones, not Jared.

After returning to Toronto and telling her executive producer about the striking similarities in what the two men told her about their own experiences — men who didn’t know each other at all and had never met prior to running into Mattar — and how Baltimore police ended up chasing Mattar and Jones out of an intersection after the city’s curfew started because they were still outside, something odd happened.

“My executive producer didn’t want to run it,” Mattar says. “She asked me, almost defensively, did you corroborate this with police? I had contacted the Baltimore Police Department multiple times and I reached out to their union. Neither responded. I told her I did. The next question, which solidified the position (of mistrust), was ‘How do you know these men gave you their real names?’”

Mattar recently wrote an article about this experience and others in which reporters of color and those from racialized backgrounds are held to different standards and have to work harder to “prove” their stories are accurate. This is true also when these reporters are covering racialized stories, she says in the piece, “Objectivity is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists,” recently published in The Walrus.

She believes there is a crisis in credibility: “There is a degree of mistrust toward racialized people’s accounts of racism when you go to cover them,” Mattar says. “There’s the mistrust of people we’re trying to cover, predominantly Black, indigenous, and other racialized people who have experiences of racism. And then there’s the mistrust of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized journalists when they’re trying to cover stories about racism.”

It was only after another colleague, an older white man, spoke with the executive producer about the situation and offered support for Mattar’s journalistic professionalism and the validity of her research, that the executive producer relented and the interview aired.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Pacinthe Mattar, a broadcast producer in Toronto, who recently wrote a piece for The Walrus titled “Objectivity is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists.” They discuss her belief that there is a two-fold crisis in credibility when it comes to journalists of color covering racialized topics.

405. Former public radio journalist pushes back on ‘objectivity’

436. Investigative journalism that’s heavy on context

In the two years that Madison Carter has been an investigative journalist for WKBW, the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, New York, she’s never quite seen a moment like this past summer.

On May 30, she was part of her newsroom’s team covering a protest at City Hall, during the height of the Black Lives Matter rallies following the death of George Floyd. It was during one of these protests a few days later that Buffalo found a moment of notoriety after Buffalo Police Department officers were taped pushing an older man, later identified as Martin Gugino. He was seen lying on his back with what appeared to be blood coming from his ear.

Madison Carter is an investigative journalist with WKBW in Buffalo.

“That was a major event that people were mesmerized by,” Carter says. “People in our community were frustrated because they were like, wait a minute, violence against an older white gentleman is getting this crazy reaction but not when it happens to a person of color? It put Buffalo in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. I think it made things a lot more tense.”

In her investigative reporting during the protests, and as a general personal rule, Cater says she likes to focus on not just what’s happening, but the context around it.

She also credits her approach to covering protests, and providing that context, from time spent in Charlottesville, Virginia following the Unite the Right rally in 2018.

“Charlottesville was my training grounds,” she says. “People who have been around protests typically have been very local, everyone knows who’s leading it, everyone knows what the issues are. Charlottesville was the genesis of outside agitators. Now people think, ‘We can go to someone else’s city and mess things up.’ I don’t want to give people the attention they don’t deserve. Let’s talk about what’s happening.”

When people are being interviewed to discuss what’s happening, however, they often like to deflect and try to point blame in other directions. Take, for example, Carter’s investigative reporting into the actions of the chief of police for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, charged with providing security on Buffalo’s mass transit system and at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

There were stories going around the community that the chief of that force, George Gast, had been seen on security cameras “doing things that didn’t represent police, either an extreme use of force or an abuse of his position,” Carter says. She later learned that rumors of his actions being caught on tape had been circulating for a number of years and that members of local news organizations had been trying to obtain those tapes without luck.

Someone within the organization leaked the footage to Carter. One video showed him “take a plastic bag and swinging it toward this guy who’s drunk and handcuffed already,” she says. Another shows Gast “walking into a room and there’s a handcuffed guy talking to an officer. (Gast) tells the rookie to take the handcuffs off the guy … and told him to put his hands on (Gast). People said this was inappropriate and not OK.”

The NFTA tried to convince Carter not to pursue the story, eventually allowing her to come to the agency’s offices and review the tape herself. She wanted to use the footage to allow viewers to decide whether the conduct of this particular officer was acceptable, especially after learning complaints had been filed and an internal investigation of Gast’s actions ended without any action taken against him.

“I wanted to lay out all the details,” she says. “My reporting is showing people — to me, it’s shocking, but showing how much is legal, how much is allowed in a government agency or police agency. I just wanted to present it to the viewer to let them decide.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Madison Carter, an investigative journalist for the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, WKBW. They discuss her coverage of Black Lives Matter protests in the city this summer and how she tries to incorporate context in all her reporting.

433. Movement journalism: A way to report on injustice

435. Sports columnist Jerry Izenberg subject of new book

Sportswriter Ed Odeven might be living on the other side of the world, but for his new book, he reached out to a hometown hero.

Odeven is a sports columnist for Japan Forward, a national website based in Japan. “Fifty percent of the audience is in Japan and there is a growing audience overseas,” he says. “Some of the stories I’ve written have helped increase the overseas audience in North America, but there’s a large audience in the Philippines and India and Taiwan.”

Ed Odeven is a sportswriter with Japan Forward and author of the new book, *Going 15 Rounds With Jerry Izenberg: A Collection Of Interviews With The Legendary Columnist*

Odeven has been in Japan for more than a decade now, first writing for the Japan Times as a basketball beat reporter just as that country launched its Basketball Japan League in 2005 and 2006, coinciding with the World Basketball Championship tournament.

“Japan has five national sports newspapers in Japanese,” he says. “They’ve been around for decades. There’s a very robust sports media in Japan, along with national newspapers. There’s a lot of information out there. People get the paper in the morning and another in the evening, especially the older generation. People are taking the train and there’s more time to read.”

Odeven, however, is a New York/New Jersey guy at heart. He lived in that area until he moved to Arizona just before his sophomore year of high school. He remembered reading the columns of Jerry Izenberg from the Newark Star-Ledger from childhood and also in the pieces his uncle would mail him from time to time.

“With the advent of the internet, I read him whenever there was a big fight or a Super Bowl or Triple Crown race,” Odeven says. “He’s a great storyteller, really good and interesting and a different approach from the guys screaming on talk radio. He had a nuanced argument in his columns.”

Izenberg is one of two columnists to attend nearly every Super Bowl, breaking his streak only this year, and instead, he watched the game from a casino near his home in Henderson, Nevada.

When Odeven started a website a few years ago, he reached out to people for interviews and conversations. His new book, Going 15 Rounds With Jerry Izenberg: A Collection Of Interviews With The Legendary Columnist, is the result of five years’ worth of conversations and research with Izenberg and other notable figures in the sports writing world.

“Jerry agreed to interview with me in late 2014. Six months passed and we spoke for almost three hours. The basis of that conversation is the bulk of part one of the book. We also did follow-up short interviews and emails over the next few years that really fleshed out some topics and enhanced some of the questions I had,” Odeven says.

Izenberg has a fantastic memory of sports, going back to the end of Babe Ruth’s career, and credits his father, an immigrant from the Russian/Poland border, for his love of baseball.

In turn, Odeven has a deep respect for Izenberg, who still writes and works despite just passing his 90th birthday.

“I admire the sustained excellence of his career and desire to keep working,” Odeven says. “He just wrote his first novel.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Ed Odeven, a sportswriter for Japan Forward, about being an international sports journalist and his new book, Going 15 Rounds with Jerry Izenberg: A Collection of Interviews with the Legendary Columnist.

431. Statistics and sports: Telling stories with numbers

What were the highs and lows of your election coverage?

Like many of you, I had a long election day, even though I didn’t have to clock in until 12 noon. In fact, I actually started my day two hours earlier so that I could visit voting centers in Washington, D.C., to get quotes from voters exiting the polls.

First, I stopped at the Colombia Heights Rec Center, which had been one of the busiest polling stations for the District’s early voting plan. Very quickly I discovered there were no lines and most of the people outside the center were there to hand out campaign literature.

***Two women watch the election returns on a large screen in McPherson Square Park in Washington, DC.***

I waited for 15 minutes and grabbed the first person to exit the polls and asked a few questions. He was quite happy to talk, but then I learned he was a European photographer who was there to cover the election. He did mention that the polling officials were very helpful, so I went inside and interviewed the person in charge.

That turned out to be a smart move, as I got a lot of good information about how the day’s slow and steady pace was outstripped by the number of people who showed up during the early voting period. This gave me a very different angle to cover the election.

I then went to Capital One Arena, which had been set up as a high-traffic polling center. Just like the Columbia Heights polls, there weren’t a lot of people waiting to vote. Instead, the sidewalk was filled with TV journalists, who were interviewing a trio of professional basketball players about why it was important to vote. I snuck in and interviewed each of them. I also talked to one of the representatives from World Central Kitchen, which was handing out food to hungry voters.

My next move was to head back home to Fairfax, Virginia, to write up a story from my notes, by I got diverted at the entrance to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and had to take an alternate route home. I later found out that police had closed the bridge to allow President Trump’s motorcade through so he could visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington.

Back home, I wrote up my first election story of the day, before heading off to Fairfax High School to interview voters coming out of the precinct there.

***Not a lot is going on at the polling center in Columbia Heights Tuesday morning.***

Fairfax City is usually not part of my beat, but the three Patch reporters who cover Northern Virginia divided up the coverage so that we can grab some quotes at the polls close to our homes. Mark Hand, who covers Fairfax City for Patch, had already visited some precincts in Arlington County, where he lives, to get quotes for my local coverage.

After a quick stop at home to post the Fairfax City material, I drove up to Reston and Herndon to talk to voters. I got my last quote about an hour before the polls closed, headed home to update my election coverage for those communities with fresh quotes, and grabbed some dinner.

**Metropolitan Police Department officers form a line with their bikes to separate protesters near Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C.**

In the evening, my son and I traveled into the District for the DC Watch Party at McPherson Square. Crowds had shown up to watch election returns on a jumbotron TV, dance to music, and get their photo taken in front of a large inflatable chicken with Donald Trump’s hair. It being D.C., where marijuana is legal, the air was filled with the skunkiest weed smell you could imagine.

Once I’d grabbed some quotes and taken a bunch of photos, my son and I wandered over to Black Lives Matter Plaza a block away to see what was going on there. Before we arrived, though, about 20 Metropolitan Police Department officers swept past us on bicycles and descended on a crowd of protesters. Someone was causing a disturbance.

A throng of protesters with their cellphones out circled the police, who were shouting at them to move back. I pulled my phone out as well and began taking photos from within the crowd. But there were too many people shoving against each other to get a clear shot or sense of what was going on.

I dropped back and found my son taking photos nearby. As I turned around, I discovered about 30 other police officers had formed up about 10 yards behind us.

“Holy shit,” I said, realizing we were standing between them and the crowd. “We should move.”

**Metropolitan Police Department officers apprehend a man causing a disturbance at Black Lives Matter Plaza, while a crowd of protesters shout at them and use their phones to record the incident.**

My son and I walked over behind a concrete barricade where several TV news crews had set up their cameras. Everybody looked anxious. Above, a helicopter had started circling the block, shining a beam of light onto the street. The police eventually dragged a man away, as the crowd berated them.

I took a few more photos, including one of the White House seen through the crowds and police. We left, taking a Metro train out to the station where my son had parked his car.

Back home, I filed my final story of the day and went to bed around 1:15 a.m. with a wicked headache.

What was your election day like? Let us know. We may feature your story in an upcoming episode of It’s All Journalism. Send your story to: editor@itsalljournalism.com. This article first appeared as a feature in the It’s All Journalism newsletter. Signup here to subscribe to our weekly email newsletter.

434. Put community at the center of your journalism

Community-centered journalism needs to be like communities themselves: based on the priorities and interests of the people who live there, no two exactly the same.

It “centers both the needs of the community and its assets and has the goal of improving the communication health of the community,” says Andrea Wenzel, an assistant professor at Klein College of Media and Communication and Temple University. She’s also the author of a new book on the subject of community-centered journalism from the University of Illinois Press.

Andrea Wenzel is the author of Community-Centered Journalism, a new book from the University of Illinois Press

The book isn’t necessarily a how-to guide or an outline that should be read as the end-all, be-all meant to save journalism, but it can help both communities and newsrooms prioritize the needs of the people who live there.

“I hope the two can be related, through this process of community-centered journalism,” she says. “It can repair a lot of the problems of journalism and the way we’ve traditionally been practicing it.”

As the concept’s name suggests, community-centered journalism needs to start with the people in the municipality or region covered by a publication or other outlet.

“You start out by trying to find out what information needs the community has and also what assets they have,” Wenzel says. “There may already be things that are helpful and valuable in a community. There might be lots of strong community organizations or really vibrant social media pages. There might be things that already exist and you can collaborate. The first step is to get a sense of what the needs and assets are.”

Newsrooms traditionally see themselves as the point of origin for something like this, but that doesn’t have to be the case, she adds. “Some projects might start with community members and work with newsrooms, but have the core in the community. The basic idea is, if you think about communication health for the community, it’ll end up benefiting everybody. It’s a different motivation from what newsrooms have done.”

Each community might have a different set of priorities: People in one location might want more high school and college sports coverage; another might want more information on local government and politics. But it isn’t until that information is sought and collected that a newsroom or organization can know for sure.

Community-centered journalism is “not going to generate a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s a process that can be applied in different places,” Wenzel says.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks a friend of the podcast, Andrea Wenzel, assistant professor at Klein College of Media and Communication and Temple University, about her new book on community-centered journalism. They discuss the importance of learning a community’s priorities and information needs as a way to improve coverage and create better and more tailored solutions.

419. Now is the time to focus on audience engagement

433. Movement journalism: A way to report on injustice

Tina Vasquez’s journey toward movement journalism grew from her background and family, who she sees as direct influences on how she does her work.

Vasquez, a senior reporter with Prism, has been covering immigration issues, specifically the treatment of undocumented immigrants and the abuse and mistreatment they suffer, for most of her career. But it’s only recently that she’s learned the language to accurately identify the type of work she does: movement journalism, a topic for which she recently wrote a piece for Nieman Reports.

Tina Vasquez is a senior reporter at Prism.

Put simply, movement journalism is “journalism in service of liberation and it seeks to meet the needs of the community directly affected by injustice,” she says. “As an extension, as I do journalism, I don’t see myself reporting on communities but alongside them. I end up working very closely with people who are sources but trying to respond to their information needs, whether that has anything to do with reporting; just using the skills I have and the power I have to get them the information they need for their communities.”

She doesn’t see herself as an advocate, necessarily.

“I don’t purport to be a mouthpiece for movements,” Vasquez says. “I try hard to shift narratives. I do center advocates in my reporting a lot. They come from directly affected communities. I write really uncomfortable stories and don’t adhere to a tidy narrative. Sometimes that doesn’t gel with organizations.”

For example, Vasquez recently uncovered the name of the doctor who is believed to have carried out forced operations on women in ICE facilities in Georgia. She spoke directly with women who had been subjected to these procedures, some of whom spoke out against the whistleblower and saying the woman who brought the story to light was complicit in the actions.

Vasquez knows personal the hardships facing undocumented immigrants — her father came to the U.S. from Mexico without “authorization,” she says — and Vasquez feels that makes her better prepared and knowledgeable about the nuances of challenges facing that community of people.

It also makes her keenly aware of who’s missing from most stories about immigration.

“When I look at mainstream reporting about immigration or immigration reporting from legacy outlets, there are no undocumented people quoted, pretty regularly,” she says. “If you are reading reporting about this horrible new policy that brutalizes immigrants in the U.S., there will be Trump quotes and Stephen Miller quotes and ICE and DHS, but nowhere will you find people most impacted by this policy.”

She’s also had people make assumptions about her own citizenship. “Based on my reporting and my name, people have threatened to call ICE on me and threatened to report me. They think I must be undocumented. It’s so strange.”

If her fellow reporters take issue with her work, or want to question her ability to cover these issues objectively?

“I’ve never had a lot of concern about how other journalists view my work,” Vasquez says. “I know what things are important to me and how building trust is important to me and how keeping people safe is important to me. If that doesn’t gel with mainstream journalism, I’m totally fine with that.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Tina Vasquez, a reporter with Prism and author of a new piece in Nieman Reports titled “Is Movement Journalism What Is Needed During This Reckoning Over Race and Inequality?” They discuss movement journalism and how people who practice it aren’t necessarily advocates but are better equipped to present stories from marginalized and underserved communities.

423. Covering Black communities with nuance and purpose

432. Overdose crisis, harm reduction, and the Rust Belt

What’s driving Jack Shuler these days, and what’s at the heart of his new book, is a quest for empathy and rethinking America’s War on Drugs during the current overdose crisis.

As an associate professor of English at Denison University, Shuler teaches students about narrative journalism, the ability to tell longer, character-driven stories to a broad audience using some of the same skills fiction writers use to build their worlds.

Shuler’s book, This Is Ohio: The Overdose Crisis and the Front Lines of a New America, examines the way in which Americans from Rust Belt cities are struggling to get clean and the people who are trying to incorporate harm reduction practices into a social justice issue that many people overlook.

Jack Shuler is the author of *This Is Ohio: The Overdose Crisis and the Front Lines of a New America*,

Shuler began hanging out at a diner in Newark where activists and organizers would meet with people. The diner itself was started by a man who wanted to help provide job experiences for people who might not otherwise be able to get hired — people with felony convictions or substance abuse issues. From those conversations, he became interested in the issue of homelessness and, more importantly, how people became homeless.

“At the time I was working on a pitch about how people experience election night living in motels,” he says. “I wasn’t hearing about either candidate running for office about the growing inequality in income gaps and homelessness and the Rust Belt. As I talked to folks, this idea of deaths of despair, of overdose, that’s what most people were talking about. All these pressures leading to homelessness, leading to camps, were combining in a really awful way in overdoses.”

As he continued to research and talk with people in Lincoln County, Ohio, and other rural areas, he “was very conscious of the fact that the national narrative around the overdose crisis was that Ohio and West Virginia were on their knees and their morgues were filling up. All of that is true, but the part I wasn’t seeing, I was seeing all these people fighting back and trying to save lives.”

The harm reduction movement includes concepts like needle exchanges in order to help people who are addicted to injected drugs have access to clean needles, which helps cut down on certain transmissible diseases.

“It’s a public health approach to addressing the harms that can come from using drugs, especially IV drug use,” Shuler says. “It’s also a social justice movement. There are lots of harms that come from drug use and some of those harms are larger harms, like racism. Racism and the drug war that affects people who use drugs. We can’t help people who use drugs if we don’t address larger systemic issues.”

Harm reduction as a social movement is one that can be difficult for some people to grasp because of the limited understanding and conversations about drug abuse and overdose in general.

“We’re not thinking enough about social determinants of health,” he says. “We’re treating this as a health crisis instead of a criminal justice crisis, but we’re still treating it as a criminal justice crisis. People don’t know enough about harm reduction. People still think addiction is a moral failing. People use drugs because drugs make them feel better. The next question should be, why do people feel bad? Those are big, huge questions and they require a lot of money to address. I don’t know if we have the will. If people aren’t even willing to wear masks, or don’t have the will collectively to address this, we’ll still be here when the pandemic subsides.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Jack Shuler, an associate professor at Denison University and author of a new book, This Is Ohio: The Overdose Crisis and the Front Lines of a New America. They discuss the drug overdose crisis in Ohio and how harm reduction practices can help save lives and communities.

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

Better News: How to use events to grow a diverse audience

Even in the times of COVID-19, events — done virtually — can still be a useful method for newsrooms looking to build their audiences and promote brand loyalty.

Cierra Hinton

Cierra Hinton is the executive director-publisher for Scalawag, a nonprofit media organization launched in 2015 and based in Durham, North Carolina. Recently, she and Alysia Harris wrote an article for the American Press Institute‘s Better News initiative on how Scalawag was using events to diversify its audience and grow membership. Read the full report here.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole.Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

431. Statistics and sports: Telling stories with numbers

Possibly more than other sports played in public for adoring fans, baseball is a game of strategy and thought. It’s one where storylines exist and can change at any time, leading to memorable games that are discussed for generations.

Mark Simon has built his career telling stories about the game, adding data journalism with narrative skills to expand the drama beyond the diamond.

Mark Simon is the host of two podcasts, The Sports Info Solutions Baseball Podcast and The Journalism Salute.

In 2016, Simon was working for a baseball publication and asked if he could do a player profile on pitcher Ryan Merritt.

“He was like the 15th or 16th or 17th guy on the staff. Due to a series of injuries deep in the playoffs, he was thrown in to pitch what was the Indians’ biggest game of the year, to try and win the pennant against the Blue Jays,” Simon recalls. The idea for the story was to dig into Merritt’s background and see if there were any parallels in his younger days that lined up with his moment in the spotlight.

“I reached out to people from his hometown and eventually got the best man at his wedding and his high school baseball coach. When Ryan was a kid, they used to throw rocks at trees. He could hit any spot he wanted on the tree,” Simon says. “In the game that day, Ryan Merritt pitched pretty well. He was able to put his pitches in exactly the right spot.”

The company where Simon works today, Sports Info Solutions, has a tool that allows researchers to pull data like that, showing the accuracy of a pitcher based on how many times his pitch meets the catcher’s glove.

“He rated in the 80th or 90th percentile for that,” something called pitch framing, Simon said. “That’s a piece of information, a piece of data, I wouldn’t have been able to get as Joe Ordinary Human Interest Reporter. I was able to combine the human interest aspect of the story with the numerical part of the story and combine it into something that, in the end, the baseball editor was pretty pleased with how it turned out.”

Simon spent 16 years at ESPN, including a stint co-hosting the Baseball Today. He’s also the author of The Yankees Index, Every Number Tells A Story.

Now Simon is the host of the Sports InfoSolutions Baseball Podcast, a clearly and simply named show that delivers what it promises by featuring baseball writers, broadcasters and players talking about the game they love.

“We try to have intelligent baseball conversations,” he says. “The other area we delve into with players is how do you do what you do on the defensive side. How are you able to make this catch that nobody else can make, how are you able to field this ball that nobody else can field? How are you able to do that pitch framing thing I talked about? Players are open and willing to talk shop like that because it plays to their strengths.”

This week, It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Mark Simon, a statistics reporter for Sports Info Solutions and host of the platform’s baseball podcast. In addition, Simon just launched a media-focused podcast: The Journalism Salute.

417. Can’t find women who know sports? Try harder

430. Don’t expect any answers on Election Night

The best advice for young reporters this election night is to be patient.

While some national networks might want to start making calls and announcing winners in state, local, and, of course, the presidential election early on the night of Nov. 3, it’s probably much smarter to resist that urge, says Ryan Whalen, a Buffalo-based reporter with Spectrum News and the network’s Capital Tonight nightly political show.

“The worst thing you can do as a journalist is say something definitively that ends up not being true,” Whalen says. “Election Night, you tend to want to make those calls. Even if someone is saying they won an election, you might want to hedge that. Know the scenario. This election is going to be so much different than anyone’s dealt with before. If you plan on saying something definitive on election night, you’re probably wrong.”

It’s anticipated that more people will be voting by mail, given the concerns about COVID-19 and the long lines likely at polling locations. Votes cast by mail won’t be counted in time to be verified and factored in for the general election, meaning it is very unlikely we’ll know with any certainty who will win the presidential race on Election Day.

“I think this will be the strangest election night of my lifetime,” Whalen says. “Generally, we’re sitting there, hoping that the ballots will come in quick enough that we’re not there until 1 a.m. We’re going in knowing that’s not going to be the case this year.”

This week, It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Spectrum News reporter Ryan Whalen to discuss the wild lead-up to this year’s election and why smart reporters should resist calling races on Election Night.

#369 How journalists can avoid rising to the bait in covering Trump

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