Margaret Sullivan writes:

You might think that 2000 would have adequately prepared the media — and the American public — for the complete unpredictability of what may happen in November 2020 as a nation votes in the midst of a pandemic with a sitting president who is busy creating mistrust in the system and threatening not to accept a defeat.

But there’s not much reason for confidence. Recall the 2018 midterms when some media figures rushed to judgment again.

“It’s not going to be a wave election,” Democratic strategist James Carville sadly intoned early in MSNBC’s election coverage that night. CNN’s liberal commentator, Van Jones, called the results “heartbreaking” and informed his viewers: “It’s not a blue wave.”

Except, of course, it turned out to be just that for the House of Representatives, which decisively flipped from red to blue.

Then there was the utter mess of the Iowa caucuses, which caused embarrassment even for CNN’s seen-it-all veteran Wolf Blitzer.

“When the results failed to materialize on schedule . . . the normally unflappable Blitzer grew increasingly impatient, even slightly agitated, as if channeling the state of mind of a dozen campaign staffs and the millions watching at home,” my colleague Paul Farhi reported. The embarrassing culmination came with Blitzer attempting to listen in — live — on a phone call between a precinct secretary and a Democratic Party official, which ended in an on-air hang-up.

This time, with the stakes of the election so high, news organizations need to get it right. They need to do two things, primarily, and do them extraordinarily well.

First, in every way possible, they must prepare the public for uncertainty, and start doing this now. Granted, the audience doesn’t really show up in force until election night itself, but news reports, pundit panels and special programming can help plow the ground for public understanding of the unpredictability — or even chaos — to come.

Second, on election night and in the days (weeks? months?) to follow, news organizations will need to do the near-impossible: reject their ingrained instincts to find a clear narrative — including the answer to the question “who won?” — and stay with the uncertainty, if that’s indeed what’s happening. [Continue reading…]