So, you’re a student journalist interested in the election beat—maybe. It sounds easy enough, right?
Well, there are some things you likely need to know first.
For as long as elections have been going on in the United States, there has been someone there to report on it. But the reporting hasn’t always been pristine. Those journalism ethics that have been hammered into most reporters since their early days seemed to be something strange and foreign to journalists in the 1800s. And though journalism ethics were well established in the 2000s, reporters even faltered then.
As we approach one of the most decisive elections in history, journalists must keep in mind the sins of the past. Remember Rachel Jackson, the wife of Andrew Jackson, who had her name dragged through the mud monthly in the anti-Jackson expositor. Remember the media’s rush to the presses during the 2000 election that resulted in conflicting headlines across the nation. Remember the two innocent women, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who devoted their time to volunteering at election polls during a pandemic but were targeted by their own President and right-leaning news sources instead.
But not everything was bad. Remember the times the news got it right, too. Remember the thousands of patrons of the New-York Daily Tribune who rushed to get the daily paper after Election Day in 1860. And admire the papers’ devotion to updating stories as they developed, keeping the public informed as best as they possibly could.
Maybe just walk away with this one thing in mind—don’t sacrifice integrity and respect (your own and someone else’s) in the hopes of possibly breaking a story first.
