Tom Jones of Poynter, November 7, 2020, praises the news media for its performance during election week. They reported tirelessly, avoided calling the race prematurely and admitted when they didn’t have the data to offer an assurance. Jones sees it as a platform for rebuilding trust in the media, eroded during the last four years in part by repeated bashing by President Donald Trump.
Stanford lecturer Janine Zacharia, San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 2020, writes that the task of establishing trust remains an ongoing challenge as Trump lies and propaganda proliferate. She praises the news media for labeling and mitigating Trump’s declarations of victory and lies about election fraud but says Trump’s fake news campaign will take years to counter. It can start with building back a robust local news industry and exacting a price for those posting rubbish on the social media.
Lauren Harris of the Columbia Journalism Review, October 22, 2020, thinks that it is imperative that the country address the crisis of a collapsing news industry with cuts and unemployed reporters, leaving a smaller army of reporters to deal with the onslaught of lies disseminated through dominant social media platforms.