The 2020 elections will feel momentous for U.S. journalists. Reporting on such a pivotal event calls not just for accurate facts but also for compelling stories that can make those facts meaningful. What overarching narratives will journalists use to frame the heart of the 2020 contest?
For much of the conservative media, the fundamental narrative for 2020 will echo a longstanding motif: pitting Donald Trump, a pugnacious representative of embattled conservatives, up against elite, condescending liberals and leftists. In this story, liberal forces are driven by a contempt for ordinary conservatives and their communities, who they see as so irredeemably flawed that they are unfit to participate in civic life. Critics of conservative media often don’t take this frame seriously, dismissing conservative victimization as only a rhetorical maneuver. But this is a story that resonates on a deeply emotional level for many. Conservative media constantly remind their audiences of liberals and leftists who they say want to shame and humiliate them. Agitating this kind of identity threat can activate a polarizing lens for how they view politics.
Meanwhie, left-of-center news media will be a bit more fractured in their overarching framing. How the protagonist of this story is characterized will depend on the Democratic candidate and her or his campaign. Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that much of progressive media will stage 2020 as a battle against reactionary forces. In a country with changing demographics and rising tides of social justice activism, these reactionaries will be depicted as increasingly desperate as they try to protect entrenched hierarchies of power along the lines of race, gender, religion, and other axes.
So what will be the frame deployed by the many journalists who try to eschew an ideological stance? They will also want something dramatic and captivating — but also something that might play with various audiences. A popular and readymade frame will be the battle of “red vs. blue.” But now that we’ve crawled into what some call a post-truth age, with looming constitutional crises, reducing the race to color-soaked electoral maps won’t cut it. The red-state/blue-state trope will likely be intensified and transformed into something grander — something closer to a “clash of political civilizations” narrative. Two political identities will be portrayed as not just holding different policy preferences or values, but tied to fundamentally irreconcilable ways of life — and of understanding reality itself.
That sort of a framing could be harmful. The overarching stories journalism tells aren’t just descriptive. Like any popular mythology, the reoccurring elements in journalists’ stories help craft the very categories of identity that people use to comprehend themselves and others. The red vs. blue tale is compellingly simple, and it makes these two positions appear fixed and natural.
There will also be a growing current of journalism that undercuts this narrative by probing the contingencies that hold these potentially fractious coalitions and political identities together. You could call it the political sociology beat. During and after the 2016 cycle, some journalists intensified their search for new ways of grasping what seemed like a rapidly changing, unpredictable, and unstable political reality. They started to make use of insights from emerging political and social theory — from scholars like Lilliana Mason and Leonie Huddy — to examine diverse social processes that create, maintain, and sometimes transform how people think about their political identity.
In 2020, political sociology reporting will get better. It will be able to tell more complex stories that grapple with challenging puzzles of political identity formation. Unfortunately, as journalism itself divides further into market-segmented niches, this kind of reporting is likely to be found primarily in outlets that target only certain well-educated audiences.
Anthony Nadler is an associate professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus College and author of Making the News Popular.
The 2020 elections will feel momentous for U.S. journalists. Reporting on such a pivotal event calls not just for accurate facts but also for compelling stories that can make those facts meaningful. What overarching narratives will journalists use to frame the heart of the 2020 contest?
For much of the conservative media, the fundamental narrative for 2020 will echo a longstanding motif: pitting Donald Trump, a pugnacious representative of embattled conservatives, up against elite, condescending liberals and leftists. In this story, liberal forces are driven by a contempt for ordinary conservatives and their communities, who they see as so irredeemably flawed that they are unfit to participate in civic life. Critics of conservative media often don’t take this frame seriously, dismissing conservative victimization as only a rhetorical maneuver. But this is a story that resonates on a deeply emotional level for many. Conservative media constantly remind their audiences of liberals and leftists who they say want to shame and humiliate them. Agitating this kind of identity threat can activate a polarizing lens for how they view politics.
Meanwhie, left-of-center news media will be a bit more fractured in their overarching framing. How the protagonist of this story is characterized will depend on the Democratic candidate and her or his campaign. Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that much of progressive media will stage 2020 as a battle against reactionary forces. In a country with changing demographics and rising tides of social justice activism, these reactionaries will be depicted as increasingly desperate as they try to protect entrenched hierarchies of power along the lines of race, gender, religion, and other axes.
So what will be the frame deployed by the many journalists who try to eschew an ideological stance? They will also want something dramatic and captivating — but also something that might play with various audiences. A popular and readymade frame will be the battle of “red vs. blue.” But now that we’ve crawled into what some call a post-truth age, with looming constitutional crises, reducing the race to color-soaked electoral maps won’t cut it. The red-state/blue-state trope will likely be intensified and transformed into something grander — something closer to a “clash of political civilizations” narrative. Two political identities will be portrayed as not just holding different policy preferences or values, but tied to fundamentally irreconcilable ways of life — and of understanding reality itself.
That sort of a framing could be harmful. The overarching stories journalism tells aren’t just descriptive. Like any popular mythology, the reoccurring elements in journalists’ stories help craft the very categories of identity that people use to comprehend themselves and others. The red vs. blue tale is compellingly simple, and it makes these two positions appear fixed and natural.
There will also be a growing current of journalism that undercuts this narrative by probing the contingencies that hold these potentially fractious coalitions and political identities together. You could call it the political sociology beat. During and after the 2016 cycle, some journalists intensified their search for new ways of grasping what seemed like a rapidly changing, unpredictable, and unstable political reality. They started to make use of insights from emerging political and social theory — from scholars like Lilliana Mason and Leonie Huddy — to examine diverse social processes that create, maintain, and sometimes transform how people think about their political identity.
In 2020, political sociology reporting will get better. It will be able to tell more complex stories that grapple with challenging puzzles of political identity formation. Unfortunately, as journalism itself divides further into market-segmented niches, this kind of reporting is likely to be found primarily in outlets that target only certain well-educated audiences.
Anthony Nadler is an associate professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus College and author of Making the News Popular.
Alana Levinson Brand-backed media gets another look
S. Mitra Kalita The race to 2021
Logan Jaffe You don’t need fancy tools to listen
Jake Shapiro Podcasting gets listener relationship management
M. Scott Havens First-party data becomes media’s most important currency
Jeff Kofman Speed through technology
Tamar Charney From broadcast to bespoke
Linda Solomon Wood Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal
Julia B. Chan We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏
Alexandra Borchardt Get out of the office and talk to people
Kathleen Searles Pay more attention to attention
Sarah Alvarez I’m ready for post-news
A.J. Bauer A fork in the road for conservative media
Jonas Kaiser Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists
Brian Moritz The end of “stick to sports”
Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young The promise of nonprofit journalism
Margarita Noriega The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms
Felix Salmon Spotify launches a news channel
Jakob Moll A slow-moving tech backlash among young people
Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz News coverage gets geo-fragmented
Dan Shanoff Sports media enters the Bronny era
Pablo Boczkowski The day after November 4
Kristen Muller The year we operationalize community engagement
Ernie Smith The death of the industry fad
Matt DeRienzo Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers
Whitney Phillips A time to question core beliefs
Carrie Brown-Smith Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening
Mario García Think small (screen)
Geneva Overholser Death to bothsidesism
Imaeyen Ibanga Let’s take it slow
Candis Callison Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change
Joni Deutsch Podcasting unsilences the silent
Laura E. Davis Know the context your journalism is operating within
Christa Scharfenberg It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women
Talia Stroud The work of reconnecting starts November 4
Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper Power to the people (on your audience team)
Heather Bryant Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving
Rachel Schallom The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates
Doris Truong The year of radical salary transparency
Cristina Kim Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”
Beena Raghavendran The year of the local engagement reporter
Catalina Albeanu Rebuilding journalism, together
Eric Nuzum Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show
Hossein Derakhshan AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris
Juleyka Lantigua A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions
Stefanie Murray Charitable giving goes collaborative
Monique Judge The year to organize, unionize, and fight
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline
Francesco Zaffarano TikTok without generational prejudice
Kourtney Bitterly Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation
AX Mina The Forum we wanted, the forum we got
J. Siguru Wahutu Western journalists, learn from your African peers
Jasmine McNealy A call for context
Nico Gendron Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z
Meredith Artley Stronger solidarity among news organizations
Sarah Stonbely More people start caring about news inequality
Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor Think twice before turning to Twitter
Tom Glaisyer Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful
Errin Haines Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story
Kerri Hoffman Opening closed systems
Lucas Graves A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters
Josh Schwartz Publishers move beyond the metered paywall
Sarah Schmalbach Journalist, quantify thyself
Barbara Gray Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement
Irving Washington Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job
Nicholas Jackson What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support
Rick Berke Incoming fire from both left and right
Gordon Crovitz Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms
Jennifer Brandel A love letter from the year 2073
Greg Emerson News apps fall further behind
Ståle Grut OSINT journalism goes mainstream
Bill Adair A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song
Anthony Nadler Clash of Clans: Election Edition
Matthew Pressman News consumers divide into haves and have-nots
Michael W. Wagner Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative
Emily Withrow The year we kill the news article
Joanne McNeil A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)
Mike Caulfield Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd
Nathalie Malinarich Betting on loyalty
Sara K. Baranowski A big year for little newspapers
Bill Grueskin Our ethics codes get an overhaul
Cory Haik We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it
Ben Werdmuller Use the tools of journalism to save it
Joe Amditis Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table
Masuma Ahuja Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful
Raney Aronson-Rath News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions
Monica Drake A renewed focus on misinformation
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks
Heidi Tworek The year of positive pushback
Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech
Jim Brady We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own
Rachel Davis Mersey The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide
Helen Havlak Platforms shine a light on original reporting
Alice Antheaume Trade “politics” for “power”
Carl Bialik Journalists will try running the whole shop
Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage
Dannagal G. Young Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart
Brenda P. Salinas Treating MP3 files like text
Fiona Spruill The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves
Joshua P. Darr All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse
John Garrett It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization
Steve Henn The dawning audio web
Cindy Royal Prepare media students for skills, not job titles
Mira Lowe The year of student-powered journalism
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The business we want, not the business we had
Richard Tofel A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges
Peter Bale Lies get further normalized
Craig Newmark Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation
Don Day Respect the non-paying audience
Victor Pickard We reclaim a public good
Elizabeth Dunbar Frank talk, and then action
Lauren Duca The rise of the journalistic influencer
Kevin D. Grant The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth
Tonya Mosley The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends
Sarah Marshall The year to learn about news moments
Sue Robinson Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments
John Keefe Journalism gets hacked
Seth C. Lewis 20 questions for 2020
Tanya Cordrey Saying no to more good ideas
Knight Foundation Five generations of journalists, learning from each other
Simon Galperin Journalism becomes more democratic
Zizi Papacharissi A president leads, the press follows, reality fades
Sonali Prasad Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional
Colleen Shalby Journalists become media literacy teachers
Annie Rudd The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph
Meg Marco Everything happens somewhere
Mariana Moura Santos The future of journalism is collaborative