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An award-winning team of Boston Globe reporters discussed the challenges of covering the 2020 election coverage and anti-media sentiments during a virtual panel sponsored by Syracuse University on Tuesday.

The three journalists –– political reporters Liz Goodwin, Jess Bidgood and Jazmine Ulloa –– specifically talked about their work for the series “Back to the Battleground,” which won them the 2020 Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting. The series chronicled voters in the four crucial states President Donald Trump won in 2016: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump’s losses in three of those states –– Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin –– played a pivotal role in Joe Biden’s recent victory in the 2020 election.

The virtual panel was part of the Newhouse School of Public Communication’s 2020 Election Series.

Goodwin, Washington deputy bureau chief for The Boston Globe, said reporting on the president is challenging because he makes false claims, like his baseless allegations of election fraud, and reporters have to contextualize his claims without lending them credibility.

“We’re not just here to be like the megaphone for Trump,” Goodwin said. “He has a really giant megaphone already, the biggest one in the world.”

The reporters said the goal of their project was to put a spotlight on issues important to voters living in the states they documented, they said.

“We definitely didn’t think we were going to just have written the book on the Midwest,” Goodwin said. “We knew we weren’t going to be able to tell people Trump is going to win or Trump isn’t going to win.”

Bidgood, a national political reporter for The Boston Globe, said she was surprised by how many people in the states she covered were willing to share their thoughts with reporters, given a rise in anti-press sentiment in the last four years.

On Election Day, Bidgood was at a polling location in a town outside Milwaukee when a voter walked out wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap and a T-shirt that read “Don’t Believe The Fake Media.” She approached to ask him questions and he asked her if she was offended by his T-shirt.

“He almost felt kind of bad about it like he hadn’t actually encountered a sort of personification of the media before,” Bidgood said. “There are also times when you’re at a Trump rally and everyone’s yelling ‘the media sucks’ and throwing things at you and that’s really not pleasant.”

Ulloa said she spent Election Day in Houston. While covering the election in Texas, she found that there is a stark divide between voters in rural and urban areas.

“The rural-urban divide seemed really, really stark there,” she said. “People were very energized for Trump and it wasn’t just white people. It was Latinos. It was Vietnamese Americans who were afraid about socialism.”

One of Ulloa’s biggest worries this election cycle was the spread of disinformation among Black and Latino voters, she said. WhatsApp messages distorting Biden and Kamala Harris’ platform and painting them in a more radical light are targeting this electorate, Ulloa said.

Bidgood said she was surprised to see how many voters hadn’t changed their political opinions since 2016. She expected the last four years, the pandemic and the protests against police brutality and racism this year would have triggered a more drastic political shift, she said.

“I thought that on Election Day we might see more evidence of people changing their minds in some way over the last four years and I’m not sure how much we’ve really seen,” Bidgood said. “I think the 2024 campaign started yesterday,” Bidgood added.

Published on November 11, 2020 at 1:03 am

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