In 2020, Nieman Lab ran a prediction from investigative editor Andrew Donohue that forecasted the “rise of the democracy beat.”
“We’ll need an entire corps of reporters with skill and support to be the early warning system for the next big threats to the foundation of our democracy,” Donohue wrote.
The prediction was a prescient one, with the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection underscoring the threats to democracy not long after. National newsrooms including The Washington Post started hiring reporters focused on democracy.
As the United States heads into its first presidential election since national newsrooms formally rolled out dedicated democracy beats, what does that coverage look like now? Kira Lerner, democracy editor at the Guardian US, sat down with Poynter for a Q&A about the state of the beat.
Lerner, who first moved to Washington, D.C., to cover politics in 2014 and is now approaching a decade covering voting rights, said democracy beat coverage has had to adapt since 2020.
“We’ve had to think more broadly about what the democracy beat entails,” she said. “It’s not just Donald Trump himself being a threat to democracy, it’s the whole web and network of election deniers and people who don’t have faith in our system that has emerged as a result of his rhetoric.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Annie Aguiar: What drew you to this coverage area specifically?
Kira Lerner: I think it’s a fascinating beat. I’m interested in politics, but I’m not a horse race type of thinker. I don’t care about who’s up or who’s down, I’m not reading polls. I care more about policy and who’s impacted. The right to vote is the most fundamental right in our democracy. It’s really at the basis of every other political issue.
And covering elections is really fun! Everything builds up to one day and people feel really strongly in this country about the right to vote, as they should. It’s fun to cover people who are fighting the good fight, to make sure that everyone has access to the ballot. Unfortunately, over the course of American history but especially since 2013, there have been major threats to voting rights in this country. I feel as reporters, it’s critical that we stay on top of it.
Aguiar: These beats started emerging in newsrooms after the 2020 election. How have you seen the beat change in that time?
Lerner: The threat was very, very real and tangible in 2020, and I think it’s only gotten more real and tangible since then. I think we’ve learned a lot, from the 2020 election, from Jan. 6, from the midterm election in 2022, about what shape the threat to democracy can take.
It can take a lot of forms. It can be political violence, like we saw on Jan. 6. It can be election deniers running for statewide office like we saw across the country in 2022. And it can be quieter. It can be election clerks taking over election offices in small municipalities across the country, who are there to subvert elections and subvert democracy.
We’ve had to think more broadly about what the democracy beat entails. It’s not just Donald Trump himself being a threat to democracy, it’s the whole web and network of election deniers and people who don’t have faith in our system that has emerged as a result of his rhetoric.
Aguiar: How do you go about breaking that into stories to assign and report?
Lerner: We are lucky that we have really good reporters spread out across the country in swing states and critical cities, keeping an ear to the ground and doing the kind of bootstrap reporting to find out what’s going on in the communities.
We have a reporter based in Madison, Wisconsin, who frequently covers issues with the election office in Milwaukee and travels to Michigan to go to smaller towns where people who are critical of elections have kind of taken over local clerks offices. We have a reporter based in Atlanta, who has covered the Trump trial in Fulton County and is an expert on that and knows a lot about rural southern politics. We have an expert in Arizona, which will be an incredibly important hot spot for democracy in November. We really rely on our reporters to help prioritize story ideas.
There are some themes that we are always mindful to report on. One project we’re doing is called the election office. We have reporters across the country embedded in different local election offices focused on what it actually looks like to administer an election. A lot of that is to dispel misinformation. Election officials have become the targets of a lot of misinformation since 2020, and part of our reporting is to just cut through that.
We are doing a lot of reporting on what the next insurrection could look like. We want to be more prepared than newsrooms were going into 2020. Whether it takes the form of political violence or whether it takes the form of local Republican activists pushing for hand counts in a small county that you’ve probably never heard of, we are keeping a close eye on all of that.
Aguiar: Is there anything you’ve learned to stay away from or lean into in democracy coverage?
Lerner: I’ve learned a lot about not playing up small errors and issues with elections, because they’re not always evidence of malfeasance or anything wrong with the election system. I think when I was new to the voting rights beat, there would be a polling place that had a four-hour line, and maybe it ran out of ballots. At that point in my career, I would maybe publish a story with an explosive headline about how horrible this is. But I’ve learned a lot since then, and I know that small mistakes and errors in elections that are people-run endeavors are not examples of corruption. Sometimes they are and that’s worth reporting, but not always.
American elections are really complicated, and they can be really wonky. I really love to tell the stories of elections and democracy through a focus on the people impacted. The Guardian has done some amazing reporting on people who have been prosecuted for voter fraud, and what that’s like on them and their families and in their lives.
Whenever there’s a suppressive voting bill, passed by a state legislature, we really try to zoom in on the types of people that are going to be most impacted by that. Can we talk to them? Can we paint the picture of what it’s gonna look like for them? Leaning into giving a voice to communities that aren’t often represented in political reporting is a really big part of the democracy beat.
Aguiar: How do you operate when it seems like the alarm is going off 24/7?
Lerner: This week, I’m at the Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Media. I’ve learned that one of my leadership strategies is that I can remain calm in the chaos, and I guess that lends itself well to this beat. So many alarms have been going off on the voting rights and democracy beat since I came onto it in 2014 that, for better or for worse, it doesn’t bother me as much.
That’s not to say there aren’t huge existential threats that I feel and that our whole country feels going into 2024, but I feel good knowing that our team is doing as much as we can to inform our audience.
Aguiar: It feels like every political fundraising email says “everything is going to burn tomorrow.” If people are saying the sky is falling every day, how do you as an editor differentiate if the sky is actually falling?
Lerner: Everything on the democracy beat is really high stakes. I don’t want to be the one that’s getting people alarmed over things that are not necessarily worthy of alarm. We try not to write stories and frame headlines that play on people’s fears. We also do as much as we can to report on good news. There is good news on the democracy beat, too. This country is full of people that are doing what they can to protect democracy. 2022 could have been a catastrophic election for democracy if all of these elections deniers won and for the most part, they did not. And so we reported on that.
Aguiar: In a time when so many newsrooms are struggling financially and a lot of beats have been scaled back or cut, why is it important for newsrooms to invest in democracy coverage at a time when they’re looking to cut costs?
Lerner: There’s a hierarchy of needs in newsroom coverage. Having a functioning democracy is on the very bottom, because you’re not going to have a functioning press if you don’t have a functioning democracy.
I think any way that newsrooms can differentiate their coverage from their competitors is important nowadays, because there’s just so many things grabbing people’s attention. Not everyone is covering democracy, and not everyone’s covering it with the depth and expertise that it needs. I have covered politics strictly in the past. I can tell you that if you’re covering the first presidential debate that’s going to happen next month, there are going to be hundreds of reporters from every national news outlet. Someone from every local news outlet is going to be assigned to cover what Trump and Biden say on that stage. That will get plenty of attention.
But what policies an election director might change that can have huge impacts on who has the right to vote in Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan, these critical swing states that are going to determine who our next president is, there just aren’t people paying attention to that on the same scale. I think the stakes are just as high, if not higher, than what they might say in the debate.
Aguiar: What recommendations do you have for local newsrooms who want to do more democracy coverage for the 2024 election?
Lerner: It’s critical that local newsrooms pay attention to the stories about elections from a service journalism perspective. There are a lot of newsrooms, and The Guardian is just one among many, that are doing really good democracy coverage now. I would recommend local journalists read them and think about how the themes that they’re covering can be applied to your local newsroom. I used to work for a newsroom called VoteBeat that covers election administration on the local level, and they’re a really good resource to look at for how to cover election administration.
And I would just encourage newsrooms that don’t have the resources to strictly dedicate a reporter or a team to democracy to give their politics reporters, or whoever it might be, some time to take a step back and to think about elections and the stakes in their communities when it comes to democracy.
