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New Rules for an Old Game: How the 2016 U.S. Election Caught the Press Off Guard

Fri, May 25, 9:30 to 10:45, Hilton Prague, Floor: L, Berlin

Abstract

In Western democracies news coverage is often homogeneous because of the working routines and news values that constitute a set of “rules” that are shared by journalists across the board. Also during the 2016 US presidential campaign, the news media followed this standard set of rules that had proved more or less successful in covering previous campaigns. Yet these rules, we argue, proved inadequate to the task of covering the 2016 campaign. Based on interviews with 24 journalists and political consultants involved in covering the 2016 campaign, we show that journalists felt ill prepared for the particular phenomenon that was the 2016 election. In short, they were caught off guard. Our conclusion is not that the old rules did not apply, but rather that the campaign context was so exceptional that it pushed some of these old rules to the extreme, leaving the press scrambling to adapt.

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