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U.S. news organizations are ramping up efforts to counter the barrage of misinformation expected during next week’s election, with former President Donald Trump trying to offset unsubstantiated accusations of voter fraud, including Thousands of staff members are dispatched to broadcast from Japan.
The Associated Press, which has been counting votes in U.S. elections since 1848, was “prepared for misinformation about campaign calls,” said Washington bureau chief Anna Johnson. To counter this, the Associated Press was planning “more explanatory work.”
“Ten years ago, or more, when the Associated Press made a race call, it was accepted that it was a race call. And there weren’t many questions about it,” she said. Ta. “There certainly wasn’t as much misinformation as there is now.”
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the United States, has invested in technology to sharpen graphics so viewers can visualize how close different poll numbers are.
In 2020, Fox became the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden, a move that infuriated Trump supporters.
Arnon Mishkin, who heads FOX News’ decision desk, said he supports the decision and doesn’t feel any extra pressure as a result of the controversy. “Obviously, we want to be right. That’s the main pressure,” he said in an interview. “With any election, there is a possibility that there will be some controversy afterward.”
But he said Fox had taken steps that night to ensure its anchors were not caught off guard by the decision-making desk’s calls. “One of the guys on the air said, ‘Wait a minute, did you just call Arizona or something?'” he reflected on 2020. “We have taken steps to prevent that from happening.”
News organizations play an important role in U.S. elections. As voting takes place across the country, Americans rely on private news companies to “call” each state’s races based on a combination of proprietary polling data and that night’s vote count. The process is complex because procedures and technology vary from state to state and even between counties within the same state.
Trump continues to sow doubts about the U.S. election process, even though his objections to the 2020 election results are not supported by evidence. Republicans plan to deploy thousands of volunteers to monitor for potential fraud on election night. Meanwhile, trust in mass media has hit an all-time low, according to a Gallup poll this month.
This mix of factors has put American news organizations on the defensive, pouring resources into transparency efforts.
“The best antidote to misinformation and disinformation is actual information,” said CNN Political Director David Charian. CNN plans to send a “powerful team” of reporters to battleground states to track the vote. “Obviously, we can’t control the bad guys who inject bad information, but we can control the delivery of good, relevant, and contextual information to our audiences.”
ABC has similarly beefed up its “vote monitoring team” to monitor vote counts across the United States. “We’re expected to say quite often, this is what we know, this is what we don’t know. Not that there’s a problem,” ABC Politics Director Rick Klein said.
“Some of the problems that occur on Election Day are just part of an inherently messy process and are not necessarily a sign of something wrong,” he added.
US news groups are preparing for an election night in which there may not be a clear winner. In 2020, it took four days for the media to announce that Biden had won over Trump, leaving Americans anxious as they waited for votes to be counted in Pennsylvania.
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Mishkin predicted that the “over-under” results would be known Saturday morning.
“If you look at the map of the country, it would be difficult for either candidate to win 270 electoral votes without Pennsylvania,” he said. “So while I think Pennsylvania is doing a better job and counting faster, they’re still counting through the same process, so I’m going to stick with that estimate. So it could be Friday.” No.”
Klein said that time could be extended in a close race. “If the difference is a few thousand votes, it’s going to take a long time to know who won.”
