With a little more than a year to go before the 2020 election, U.S. newsrooms are gearing up for what they expect will be a deluge of misinformation aimed at influencing, dividing and confusing voters.
The efforts fall, roughly, into two categories: Covering misinformation as a beat to alert readers to hoaxes and trends in false information; and learning or improving verification skills to ensure that news stories don’t reproduce or amplify falsehoods.
In an example of the former, The Washington Post last month announced that it had assigned reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker to what it called a new “digital democracy” beat focused on “the largely unregulated and increasingly dominant role of the internet in driving U.S. politics.” One of his early pieces was a smart take on how Republicans who express concern about President Donald Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are becoming targets of disinformation campaigns.
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Source: American newsrooms’ 2020 efforts: Cover misinformation but don’t amplify it – Poynter