The Iowa caucuses in February kicked off the first of the U.S. presidential election nominating contests in 2020. On the Republican side, the nomination of President Donald Trump wasn’t in doubt (especially after he was acquitted by the U.S. Senate the next day in his impeachment trial). On the Democratic side, at least eleven candidates—including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang—were still in contention to be Trump’s general election opponent in November.
On the evening of February 3, Iowa Democrats gathered in small neighborhood meetings in schools, churches, and meeting halls across the state, representing more than sixteen hundred precinct sites. But reporting those precinct vote tallies back to the state party headquarters via a new smartphone app didn’t go as planned.
The faulty app delayed the final results of the Democratic Party caucuses for that night by days. The news media seemed both perplexed and agitated, but not because Iowa wouldn’t eventually come up with an accurate count—in fact, for the first time at the Democratic caucus meetings, attendees used paper ballots to record their votes. Instead, the outrage of more than twenty-six hundred media members, including those from twenty-six countries, was due to their impatience in reporting the winners and losers, the story they had planned to tell. The lack of data that Monday evening left them without a way to tell that routine story.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo scolded the Iowa Democratic Party for not having prompt results and confirmed the news media’s role in what was supposed to happen in the political narrative: “[The campaigns] were making big bets on Iowa. Who was going to get talked about and in what way . . . especially with media and narratives. And that’s now been stalled. . . . And, literally, this state had one job . . . and they blew it at the most important time in the election.”1
Media That Reports—and Interprets—the News
Cuomo’s rant about the lack of immediate election results illustrates a key part of the relationship between the news media and U.S. elections. It’s hard to imagine an election in the United States in which we didn’t have the news media report and interpret the results for us. In the Democratic nominating contests after Iowa, for example, the results were more immediately clear, enabling the media to make quick projections of winners and losers, and equally quick conclusions about the meaning of the results. A look at headlines from the New York Times after the next four nominating contests shows how the paper framed the changing themes of the Democratic campaign story:
After Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, a Times analysis on the next day’s front page was titled “Establishment Finds Itself on the Outside.”
Following the Nevada caucus, which Sanders won even more convincingly, the front-page headline was “In Show of Might, Sanders Wins Nevada.”
In South Carolina, where Joe Biden had a big win (his first), the headline read “Vaulting to Life, Biden Captures South Carolina.”
After Super Tuesday, the March 3 contest with fourteen states, American Samoa, and Democrats abroad voting, the Times’ headline read “Big Night for Biden Serves Notice to Sanders.”2
These headlines suggest how we should interpret the outcomes of these contests and provide us with a story to follow into the general election.
Our Role as Citizens: The Importance of Media Literacy
While the media may present a narrative about election events, what is the role of everyday citizens in interacting with and interpreting the story or stories that media sources tell? Each individual plays an important role in thinking critically about this information and drawing conclusions from it.
Today’s political climate in the United States is perhaps at its most volatile in generations, and in the midst of an already chaotic primary season, the global pandemic of COVID-19 and its ensuing economic and social upheaval further disrupted the expected course of the 2020 presidential primaries and campaigns. The stability of our electoral system has been stressed like never before andthe role of a free press in reporting on politics and elections is also in question, with an ascendant social media, rampant partisan propaganda, and information anarchy—from sources both foreign and domestic. After a 2016 presidential election in which U.S. investigators reached conclusive findings that the Russian government not only hacked computers and e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and various Democratic presidential campaign workers and disclosed those stolen files but also operated a “social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States,”3 we need to be prepared as media-literate citizens to be ready for what 2020 and the following election years might throw at us.
In this Extended Case Study, we propose to use the critical process to investigate the potential problems we should anticipate in the 2020 election and its aftermath, and what we can do to be better informed and prepared to participate. As developed in Chapter 1, a media-literate perspective involves mastering five overlapping critical stages that build on one another, which collectively make up the critical process:
Description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study
Analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage
Interpretation: asking and answering “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings
Evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, or mediocre, which involves subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical “bigger picture” resulting from the first three stages
Engagement: taking some action that connects our critical perspective with our role as citizensand watchdogs to question our media institutions, adding our voice to the process of shaping the cultural environment.
We’ll explore each of these steps in more detail in the activity that follows.
But before we engage in the explicit steps of the critical process, let’s examine some of the potential problems and current threats to our elections and how the news media cover them. Any of these issues could be a path for you to investigate the intersection of the media and elections—institutions that are foundational to our democracy.
1Chris Cuomo, “Cuomo Scolds Iowa Democratic Party: You Had One Job,” CNN, February 4, 2020, www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/02/04/iowa-delay-results-caucuses-sot-vpx.cnn.
2See Matt Flegenheimer and Katie Glueck, “Establishment Finds Itself on the Outside,” New York Times, February 12, 2020, p. A1; Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “In Show of Might, Sanders Wins Nevada,” New York Times, February 23, 2020, p. A1; Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Vaulting to Life, Biden Captures South Carolina,” New York Times, March 1, 2020, p. A1; Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Big Night for Biden Serves Notice to Sanders,” New York Times, March 4, 2020, p. A1.
3Robert S. Mueller, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Office of the Special Counsel, March 2019, https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf, 4.