The press should borrow a text from The Sound of Music and ask themselves: how do you solve a problem like Donald? Or, put another way, how are journalists supposed to cover Trump’s unprecedented campaign for president while being sued for attempting to overturn the election and more?

The question concerns not only Trump, but also politics and campaigns more broadly in an era of fragmented media and polarized politics. The answer requires recognizing the changing role of journalists and fulfilling it with greater care, preparation and dedication.

Many who take on the challenge of defeating Trump are concluding that, as a recent column in the Arizona Republic put it, it’s time to stop giving Trump airtime. The larger point is that the media should not publicize people they know are going to make demonstrably false claims.

The problem with the “Don’t amplify the liar” argument is twofold. First, the press is no longer the gatekeeper of what people know; it is more often an annotator of what they have already heard elsewhere. So not criticizing Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, or others in politics who say blatantly false things will not silence them. It will only make them less researched.

Second, it is a violation of the press’s obligation to ignore powerful hypocrites and liars in public life. We have a duty to explain what is false and to provide clear and convincing evidence of the truth. We need to help the public understand it.

How can the press do that? Let’s start with Kristen Welker’s much-criticized recent interview with Trump on NBC’s Meet the Press. The problem wasn’t that a reporter was interviewing Trump. The failures were in the execution.

The biggest failure was not anticipating what Trump would predictably say and being prepared to follow through. Journalists tend to exaggerate the power of the big question and too often fail to develop strategies that lead to better answers. One of the reasons why so many politicians these days have their way with reporters is that they are better prepared and better informed about interview dynamics than the people interviewing them.

This idea of ​​mapping out an interrogation strategy is Interviewing 101 for lawyers. Lawyers identify where they want to end up and work backward, developing a series of questions that will lead a dishonest witness to a place where their evasions are exposed. Journalists should plan their interviews in the same way, but too often don’t.

This strategy usually relies on specificity: asking an evasive person to provide evidence for their false claims and having evidence ready to contradict predictable falsehoods and exaggerations. Jonathan Swan, then of Axios, provided a striking example in a 2020 interview with Trump. When the then-president tried to deceive him at one point with misleading statistics, Swan responded with precision, detail and follow-through.

Oh, you’re dealing with death relative to the cases, Swan told Trump. I’m talking about death as a percentage of the population. That’s where the US is doing really bad, much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.

You can’t do that, Trump replied weakly.

Why can’t I do that? Swan replied.

When journalists lack that level of preparation, they fall into a trap they fell into. She ended up in a debate with Trump, repeatedly insisting that wasn’t true, but she had nothing to prove it.

Ultimately, such meetings between journalists and politicians almost never get a subject who admits they are wrong. But a well-prepared interview strategy, with a series of questions that point in a clear direction and are supported by evidence, offers the audience three tangible benefits: it creates clarity rather than confusion, reveals more about the politician, and makes it harder to lie.

Even if the press doesn’t interview Trump or another politician like the governor of Florida.

Ron

DeSantis, who is too scared to face reporters one

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This strategy of having hard evidence at hand and using it well has become essential for reporting on their statements and campaigns. Again, we are annotators now.

How should the press in general cover a modern campaign? The answers here are not new or complicated. But they do require more discipline and enterprise than chasing the parade, a habit that journalists all too easily fall into.

The press should drastically limit the time it spends following candidates and attending rallies, under the assumption that the way politicians run their campaigns is a benchmark for how they would govern. This conventional approach inevitably leads to…

stories

on

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horse racing tactics and reporting. Most voters don’t care. The press does it because it’s easy.

The 2024 race will be nothing like what journalists have encountered in previous elections. They would serve the public better if they changed their habits

shifted their resources to four other dimensions of the campaign.

Biographies of the candidates: The campaign biography should be a full-time story, not a one-day story. Reporters should focus on covering who the candidates are, what they’ve done, how they’ve led, the impact of their choices, how they treat other people and more. And modern narrative forms can present this information more effectively and accessibly than the classic candidate biography.

The problems of the nations: The reporting about the campaign must focus more on the biggest issues facing the country, from inflation to climate change to the resilience of our democracy, and tell us what the candidates have done and can be expected of them. But these should not be outdated compilations of shorthand policy positions that mean little and falsely suggest that each candidate is equally prepared for each challenge. If a candidate doesn’t really have any familiarity with a topic or much insight or interest in it, reporters should make that clear.

Better fact checking: Fact-checking must become a less haphazard and more ruthless part of political reporting. Traditional journalistic fact-checking is often too subjective: journalists look for questionable statements to check, raising suspicions about bias. In addition to this traditional approach, fact-checkers should also borrow from the social sciences by testing and measuring the veracity of random samples of statements, which would give voters more insight into the veracity of candidates. Because research shows that voters resist fact-checking their favorite candidates, fact-checkers should organize their work by issue as well as by politician, which would be more informative to more people.

The electorate: The press is supposed to operate on behalf of the people, but all too often its work reduces the public to a spectator. It should be a topic. Journalists should go beyond the usual polls and interviews with Midwestern diners to report more deeply and consistently on what people across the country are feeling and thinking.

In essence, elections are moments of the public itself

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reflection. They tell us what we, the people, think about the country and our future. If the outcome on election day seems inexplicable, that is a failure of journalism.

Tom Rosenstiel is a professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and a former media writer for the Los Angeles Times.