Gradient World Press Freedom Day-02
When Isthmus was a weekly, publishing every Thursday, our printer deadline was Wednesday at 4 p.m. That made including Tuesday night election results a scramble, but, with little sleep, we got it done.
Now that we publish monthly, our deadline is a day earlier — Tuesday, late afternoon. Given the stakes of the April 4 election, we tried to push that back so that we could include race results. But for various reasons that was a no-go.
So instead please visit isthmus.com/election2023 for our election coverage, with stories on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Madison mayor’s race, city council races and more. In the weeks leading up to the election we also published a voter guide. While we’ve often published articles with voting information prior to elections, we opted for more of a handbook-style approach, hoping to answer the questions people have about what kinds of identification they need to vote, where they can vote and what will be on the ballot. We also published the guide in Spanish.
Both guides were an intentional attempt to cut through the confusion created over the last few years due to dizzying changes in voting rules. Like many other publications, we feel an urgency to address concerns about the integrity of our elections system and the damage that lack of trust does to our democracy. News organizations are increasingly dedicating considerable resources to this kind of coverage and being very deliberate in its labeling: “democracy” and “disinformation” beats are now trending in journalism.
In July 2022, editors at the Washington Post announced their “new Democracy team,” consisting of journalists in Washington and across the country “who are documenting battles over voting rules and access to the polls, efforts to sow doubt about elections and erosion of trust in the democratic process.”
Members of the team, they continued, “are collaborating with journalists across the newsroom to provide our readers with incisive and revelatory stories about the people and forces working to erode that trust, as well as those fighting to restore it.”
One of the members of that team is Patrick Marley, who for 18 years covered the state Capitol for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel before being tapped by the Post. His territory includes Wisconsin, Michigan and other parts of the Upper Midwest.
Around the same time, National Public Radio launched its four-person “disinformation reporting team.” In announcing the team to staff, NPR editors noted that “the viral spread of mis- and disinformation has emerged as one of the great civic challenges of our time.”
Locally, the Cap Times and the nonprofit Wisconsin Watch are hiring misinformation reporters with funding help from a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded to a team of researchers at UW-Madison who are developing a tool, Course Correct, to detect misinformation online. A reporter from Snopes, a fact-checking site, will also be part of the project, says Mike Wagner, professor at the UW journalism school and a principal investigator on the project; that will allow a local newsroom, statewide outlet, and national publication to test how well Course Correct works in the field.
Wagner, who is an Isthmus board member, says the journalists will be trained on how to use the tool. “Our goal is to help journalists identify low-quality information online and understand how big the networks are that are sharing that information,” he says. “That might signal to them, ‘hey, we should be covering some stories about this.’ Then we’ll help them place their stories in these networks on social media and hopefully contribute to improving the overall information environment.”
Katy Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at UW-Madison, says she’s generally a fan of specialized reporting that focuses on the state and health of our democracy. “We can’t say that journalism is essential to democracy and then not have journalism that’s focused on democracy. Ultimately journalism’s greatest responsibility is to citizens and helping them make decisions in their lives.”
While the reporting topics are not new, these dedicated beats and teams do reflect “an important change in how newsrooms are looking at their responses to misinformation and disinformation,” Culver says.
“We’re in a world where journalism is in competition with a lot of other things, from cat videos to foreign government’s interference,” she adds. Starting around the time of the 2020 election, Culver says she started to have many conversations with journalists wondering how to respond to online disinformation: “Do we actually cover that and debunk it or does that give new oxygen to the disinformation?”
She sounds one cautionary note. That is, people still need a local news outlet where they learn about the local softball league, a new business in town and upcoming events — that’s what creates community. Those who live in news deserts don’t get those stories and must rely on national political coverage, which leads to more polarization.
“News outlets that have democracy coverage, great. But we also need the kind of coverage that makes us realize, well, maybe we have different views on the abortion issue but we’re all living in the same community, and we all go to the softball game, and we’re concerned about jobs and health and why are we losing our rural hospital.
“You don’t have democracy without community,” adds Culver. “When we’re all polarized and distrustful of each other, what is the way forward?”
