Speaking to technology industry executives at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee addressed AP’s election coverage, trust around polling and the accuracy of AP’s new voter survey in telling the story of the U.S. midterm elections. CONT. Lauren Easton, Associated Press Read more »
As Americans wake up to a divided Congress, pollsters breathe a sigh of relief
THE MORNING AFTER THE MIDTERMS, journalists are working through the complicated picture that emerged from yesterday’s elections. With Democrats gaining in some states and Republicans in others, the results defied easy generalization. As Cook Political Report National Editor and sometime WNYC host Amy Walter tweeted, the midterms have turned out […] Read more »
Why Trump’s unpopularity may not be the handicap you’d expect
The Republican Party comes into Election Day with a significant handicap. The party’s leader, the man in the White House, is less popular nationally coming into a midterm election than any president since 1974, save one: George W. Bush in 2006, whose popularity in 2002 had vanished four years later […] Read more »
Blame Fox, not Facebook, for fake news
Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris and Hal Robert, three scholars affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, have a new book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” presenting major new research about the political consequences of American media. I asked Benkler, who is the Berkman professor of Entrepreneurial Legal […] Read more »
Fundamentalists Are More Likely to Fall for Fake News
Precisely two years after the election of President Donald Trump—a contest stained by deliberately inaccurate information that was shared and weaponized on social media—America has not yet come to grips with the issue of fake news. How it spreads is a central issue, but an even more basic question is […] Read more »
What It Takes to Make 2.7 Million Calls to Voters
When Monica Bouchard, 66, calls voters across the country, sometimes hundreds within a few hours, she makes sure to use “the best voice possible”: kind, clear, engaging and anything but monotonous. … Ms. Bouchard is one of more than 1,000 people telephoning voters ahead of the 2018 midterms as part […] Read more »