How newsrooms can combat 2024 U.S. election disinformation
(Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash)
The first Republican presidential primary debate is set for next month, and the party’s Iowa Caucuses are less than six months away.
In the meantime, newsrooms are facing the increasingly daunting task of countering disinformation in what’s already becoming a presidential election mired in it.
With lightning-speed revolutions in artificial intelligence, it’s only becoming more difficult to distinguish authentic campaign materials from those created by chatbots and legitimate election coverage on Twitter from fake accounts.
By looking at how narratives of disinformation influenced voters from historically disenfranchised populations in the 2022 midterm elections, a new report from PEN America argues propaganda can be tackled on the community level by "taking local and cultural context into account."
What sets the recommendations in the report apart from other strategies to stop the spread of disinformation is that it also explores how these narratives are spread to different marginalized groups, including immigrants, those with a first language other than English, and people of color.
One of the biggest failures to combat disinformation in politics, the report says, stems from the lack of news and information about elections and democratic processes in languages other than English in a hyper-localized manner.
On top of that, journalists, advocacy groups, and governments alike need to consider the cultural contexts of immigrant and diaspora communities or risk losing their trust to less credible sources of information.
In order for newsrooms to cover the presidential election deeper than polling numbers and public perception, it’s imperative for journalists to rethink their relationships with audiences by engaging with the community we cover. Doing so not only helps make the art of journalism less transactional and more reciprocal, but it also makes storytelling better by helping newsrooms "better understand information voids and fill them with credible reporting that people trust."
Closing doors to disinformation
For PEN America’s Kate Ruane, the report reinforces the need to address the distrust of governments and elections while making credible information more accessible for public consumption.
"Much of the conversation about how to counter disinformation pays insufficient attention to how people actually experience it, and ignores the underlying issues that make people more inclined to believe falsehoods," Ruane said in a July 6 statement.
Newsrooms play a pivotal role in combating disinformation about the 2024 election. By failing to have adequate representation of underrepresented communities both in the newsroom and in news coverage, outlets risk alienating those groups, which the report warns "opens doors to disinformation."
In one of PEN America’s regional forums, which helped inform the report’s findings, one participant from the Haitian Community Center Sant La in Florida talked about how newsrooms often only cover underrepresented communities in a negative light.
"What’s glaring for us is the absence of our stories in the mainstream media, that our stories only percolate when there’s a crisis, so we are always viewed as a community in crisis," Leonie Hermantain told PEN America. "And that gets people very angry, makes people very isolated, and makes people even more vulnerable to believing the fake news and the misinformation out there."
For Wilkine Brutus, a politics and current affairs reporter for NPR’s Miami affiliate station WLRN, newsrooms need to take the alienation of audiences seriously. If not, he warns, "others will fill the gap."
"Having one-on-one conversations with constituents and community members who are in the throes of navigating misinformation and disinformation—and employing empathy along the way—can be one way to locate specific, localized narratives that often get a lot of mileage," Brutus said in a statement.
Community engagement and service journalism
The report’s lead author, Hannah Waltz, noted in a release that their findings prove combating disinformation must be done in a more holistic way that goes beyond fact-checking and debunking.
"The intent is to foster healthy, culturally aware information environments and respond to different communities’ specific and practical information needs," Waltz said.
Waltz and her team found one simple way newsrooms can revolutionize the way they engage with audiences: The nonprofit newsroom Texas Tribune sends texts to subscribers that give them the most up-to-date information about elections and voting.
"Community engagement and service journalism means getting to know the information needs of your audience, and what additional context or help they need to understand big political issues," Maria Méndez, service and engagement reporter at the Texas Tribune, said in a statement.
It’s important to remember that while the objective of disinformation is often to sway voters or lower turnout, the report underscores that it can also be weaponized to undermine trust in elections, government, the media, and ultimately, democracy.
"If people don’t understand how the system works, they don’t trust it," the report reads.
America has already seen what can happen when election-related disinformation permeates the social consciousness. Just look at Jan. 6, 2021. Election denialism from the sitting and outgoing president helped prompt a deadly insurrection on the nation’s capital.
As Sarah Kendzior, journalist and author of They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, warned in 2021, "A failed coup is a dress rehearsal."