An “uninformed voter” election post-mortem of news coverage 

Published on December 16, 2024December 17, 2024 by Nik Usher | Reading Time: 8 minutes

Nik Usher, PhD (they/them) is an associate professor in Communication at the University of San Diego. Their latest book, “Amplifying extremism: Small town politicians, media storms, and American journalism: (with Jessica Hagman) will be published this spring. The Trusting News team has learned from and leaned on Usher’s research over the years. We’re happy to share this reflection, which we hope helps keep journalists rooted in people’s real information needs.

This fall, I spent every Tuesday evening with first-time voters, most of whom confess to rarely going directly to any name-brand news sites, even via social media. They have deep knowledge about the issues they care about, from the environment and climate change, sports, fashion, music  —  just not about traditional politics.

These first-time voters are also my students — this semester, I’m teaching Introduction to Media Studies at the University of San Diego, and many of my students are not going to go on to become communication majors and don’t have an interest in journalism. They are just taking the class to fulfill a core requirement.

These are smart people who care about making the world a better place, and these are the voters and future engaged citizens that “traditional” journalism is leaving behind.

But it’s unfair and even insulting to call them “uninformed voters,” especially because most political journalism isn’t helping them decode what they want to understand. I know this because I asked them as part of a recent election-watch assignment I created to help improve their media literacy.

On election night, we crammed into a room of political science students, mooched off their pizza, and watched NBC and Fox for almost three hours. As part of their reflection papers, I asked them:

Please discuss what you wish you knew more about the news media or about media studies generally that you think would help you understand Election 2024 better, including what you watched tonight.

What these first-time voters and non-journalism normies have to tell us is instructive.

I told students and set up the assignment to be anonymized through our learning management system, so I couldn’t (and still can’t) attach names to papers. My reasoning was so that students could both feel free to talk about their politics and also feel safe disclosing what they didn’t understand without feeling like I might judge them for their lack of knowledge.

I share some of their reflections below with the hope that journalists might think about the questions that well-intentioned, smart people who vote still have about elections and journalism, and have only edited the passages you see here for length.

What they want to know is rarely answered in day-to-day media coverage of elections and politics.

Students’ questions ranged from how newsrooms cover election night itself to more general questions about how newsrooms make decisions about what to cover; how talking heads get selected and why their voices matter; how journalists check (or do not check) their own biases when covering politics — and how news consumers can tell; and other questions about the role and the efficacy of the news media in actually shaping how people make decisions.

Students knew the election was a big deal — one called it “possibly the most important election in our nation’s history.” And by and large, most of these students eligible to vote went on to do so — I should note the University of San Diego has a remarkable program, USD Votes, which registers students to vote — in 2020, over 70% of eligible voters on campus voted, winning a gold seal for excellence in student voter turnout from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.

But how they were studying up for it checks out against observations that influencers were their source rather than journalists:

“Because this was my first time voting, I wanted to be sure that I had as much data and information on both candidates and parties as possible. To do this, I also looked at the opinions of many celebrities that I normally look up to as they spoke their thoughts on the candidates.”

So these students are playing a role — and many of them felt that as first-time voters, they wish they just *knew* more, generally.

As one student explained:

“I felt like my understanding of the political landscape was still not full. I wish I had spent more time researching the positions and policies of both major parties … It became evident that the media wasn’t making this process any easier. Articles, news reports, and commentary were often laced with personal opinions, assumptions, and emotional language, making it difficult to understand what was factual and what was someone’s point of view. I wanted to find sources that delivered just statistics.”

We know that this is a common refrain from news consumers. Without understanding the different ways news outlets organize contributors, prioritize coverage and what role (and whose) opinions appear in news coverage, audiences are left worrying that they are getting biased information.

But this isn’t really a frustration with media bias itself — that’s not the trust issue. Rather, my students seem to worry that news coverage is influencing them in ways they can’t quite diagnose for themselves, and this is unsettling. The question is more: “How does the bias in news media impact what I think?”

As one student put it:

“I wish I knew more about how different news organizations approach the election, which ones are trusted the most, and the importance of AP News in the election. I would like to know more about how journalism is connected to elections. This would help me understand what I watched because the coverage was from news organizations like NBC, and I would be interested to know its bias and how a news organization’s bias affects the election, if at all.”

Over the years, I’ve realized that many students believe that news organizations have some sort of internal, structured system — the objectivity police, perhaps — that calls halt when journalists split too far into their own opinions. This year was no exception, as one student wrote:

“Another question that I had, which was the one I thought about most when watching the election broadcast, was how does the news outlet ensure that the news anchors remain unbiased and detached from the situation when the news is something of extreme importance.”

I urge journalists to consider the underlying source of this misperception, which is likely that news consumers fear that their opinions are being influenced in ways they don’t understand. Journalists need to explain that there isn’t some sort of hidden agenda in their news coverage.

This is all the more important for events that seem ritualized to journalists and news junkies — like election night — but otherwise might be the most confusing night for members of the public to tune in.

Many students were just befuddled by the whole election night coverage media event itself. Just why were journalists covering a national election so focused on swing states and even single counties students have never heard of?

A student writing a more descriptive paper pointed out the emphasis on Erie County in the evening’s reporting, and their write-up is a good reminder of how much election coverage can seem like the indistinguishable adult voice in Charlie Brown cartoons:

“For example, I noticed the coverage of Erie County in Pennsylvania. The media company of NBC was informing their audience that Erie County was an important place to be thinking about as the election results were being updated. The coverage discussed that multiple times over the past years Erie County had dictated the election results. The news company was emphasizing the fact that Kamala Hariss had to win the county in order to have an increased chance to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

News organizations may not realize the role they are playing in educating drop-by election night viewers about the electoral process more generally. The assumed knowledge and lack of explanation about the process and decisions around political reporting leaves room for distrust and confusion.

As one student put it, “I would like to know more about the processes in elections and what makes certain states so important. Although this is more of a political studies question than media studies, I still find this interesting and would like to know.”

And while journalists and regular political observers might understand how ballot machines work and how the count is tabulated, this can’t be assumed knowledge. Students already think that they may be misled without their knowledge, and there may be no better example than reporting calling elections. As one student wrote, “I wish I knew more about how media outlets decide when to make these calls and what factors they take into account.” Another student echoed this:

“Another thing I am unfamiliar with is how votes can be counted so quickly if the polls close on election day. I would like to do further research on the process of vote counting and how those results are added up and let out to major news organizations.”

Perhaps it is my fault that I had them watch two channels at once, but students observed that Fox and NBC weren’t reporting on the same numbers. As another student wrote:

“One of the most confusing and frustrating aspects of this entire election process was the inconsistent information being circulated… The discrepancy in reporting was especially evident when different news outlets presented conflicting numbers, despite reporting on the same states’ data. Since the numbers should have been based on concrete, live statistics, it left me confused.”

This isn’t a fake news/partisan problem, but literally different choices about when to report the tallies. For those who are not indoctrinated into the rituals of election night, it is reasonable to see this as a little fishy. Perhaps this was even more the case for my students, as California takes so long to count its votes and for weeks, journalists had been warning the public that we might not know the winner on election night.

I admit that after a semester of trying to explain media bias, perceptions of media bias, trust in journalism, the different types of news coverage, problems with objectivity — really busting hard to get them to have a more sophisticated understanding of media bias and selective perception — it feels like fighting against a brick wall.  For those of my students who are not interested in becoming journalists or following politics on a day-to-day basis, I can’t shake their deep-seated belief that journalists are trying to hide something from them.

But this is a reality news organizations need to keep front and center — the trust gap might just be too big for any kind of explainer prompt about how the story was reported or why certain people were quoted or other efforts at improving transparency. Perhaps newsrooms need to give up on their efforts to combat media bias, and instead try to work around the problem — assume your audience is just never going to be convinced that your journalism isn’t biased in some way. What then? Might this be a new and improved departure point for political journalism that actually works to help voters understand the political process, rather than just providing analysis that only election news super fans appreciate?

Trusting News resources to help

From the Trusting News team: Helping journalists adapt their coverage to better address their communities’ information needs is central to our work at Trusting News. As more people avoid the news and turn to sources outside of traditional media for information, the more crucial it is for journalists to continually ask themselves: Who might feel heard by our coverage, and who might feel left out? 

We’re excited to continue digging into solutions and strategies to help journalists and newsrooms approach these questions in 2025 (stay tuned for more details soon!). In the meantime, here are some resources to help get you started: 

• Our Community Interview Guide lays out steps for having conversations with low-trust community members so you can better understand their information needs and what information gaps might exist. 
• Our Election Trust Kit details how you can infuse listening and engagement into your election coverage and ensure your election coverage addresses your communities’ questions.
• Work to make your coverage more hearable across the political spectrum by using our Anti-Polarization Checklist. It helps inject a pause button in your reporting and editing so you don’t unintentionally signal bias in your coverage.  

Looking for more guidance? Sign up for our Trust Tips newsletter and each Tuesday afternoon, you’ll get a quick tip for building trust with your audience.