--- title: The Challenges of Election Coverage Present Opportunities description: In an unprecedented election year, the press has opportunities to present voters with a clear picture of relevant issues. canonical: https://time.com/6970077/media-coverage-election-opportunities-2024/ author: Nancy Gibbs article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-04-25T15:10:55.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:48:47.549Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why This Election Is the Media's Opportunity to Rebuild Trust og:description: In an unprecedented year, the core of journalism remains the same og:url: https://time.com/6970077/media-coverage-election-opportunities-2024/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt09ae60d0ea724a98/698a55dc86f68ee6db6f506d/press-media-election-trump.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: US-VOTE-POLITICS-ELECTIONS-TRUMP og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why This Election Is the Media's Opportunity to Rebuild Trust twitter:description: In an unprecedented year, the core of journalism remains the same twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt09ae60d0ea724a98/698a55dc86f68ee6db6f506d/press-media-election-trump.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why This Election Is the Media's Opportunity to Rebuild Trust > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. Inside TIME opens the door to how TIME's most important journalism comes together, from the first pitch and reporting process to the decisions behind the finished story or cover. Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs takes readers inside the newsroom, revealing the journalists, ideas and editorial choices behind the stories shaping the global conversation. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: How AI May Meddle With The Election Year [Watch (HLS stream): How AI May Meddle With The Election Year](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Pe8KJmwX.m3u8) (4:21)  _Published 2024-02-23. The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. Experts on AI explain how it may meddle with the 2024 election._  by [Nancy Gibbs](https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/)  ## Nancy Gibbs Apr 25, 2024 3:10 PM UTC  Members of the media wait for the arrival of former President Donald Trump at a "Get Out the Vote" rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, on Feb. 17, 2024. Members of the media wait for the arrival of former President Donald Trump at a "Get Out the Vote" rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, on Feb. 17, 2024. Alex Wroblewski—AFP/Getty Images  by [Nancy Gibbs](https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/)  ## Nancy Gibbs Apr 25, 2024 3:10 PM UTC What does it tell us, my students ask, that nine years after Donald Trump oozed down the golden escalator and into contention as Leader of the Free World, the American press, mainstream edition, is still arguing about how to cover him? Once the charge was that he gets millions of dollars in free media because reporters obsessively overcover him; now it’s that he gets a free ride because they have outrage fatigue. If you fact-check his lies, you risk spreading them further; if you don’t, you are normalizing nonsense. Round and round the arguments go, especially now that reporters must weigh how to cover the [first criminal trial of a former President](https://time.com/6966558/donald-trump-hush-money-trial-politics-election/), a campaign conducted from a courtroom where voters once again are judge and jury. James Madison defended even a young, sloppy, partisan press as a “great bulwark of liberty” and you can feel in the growing attacks on press performance an urgent, underlying “do better; this election is too important to screw up.” Conservatives for years have flayed the “lamestream” press as arrogant and agenda-driven but political independents' faith in the media has also dropped rather precipitously and according to Gallup, for the first time more Americans say they have no trust at all in the press than say they have a great deal or a fair amount. **Read More:** [_Is America in Decline?_](https://time.com/6967600/america-decline/) In fact, these days the most indignant denunciations of the mainstream political press often come from the left (though this could be because so many on the right have stopped watching and reading). Critics who charge reporters with “false equivalency” and “bothsidesism” condemn reporters for performing objectivity rather than practicing it, for normalizing depravity and numbing the audience to each shattered norm. Now that we experience politics in surround sound, inescapable and all-consuming, it’s little wonder [researchers are tracking “news avoidance,](https://newsliteracy.psu.edu/podcasts/episode-extras/news-avoidance-and-why-it-matters)” a rational response to coverage that people say feels disconnected from their lives and needs, and leaves them feeling depressed and angry. The debate over how to cover this campaign reflects in part the challenge of unprecedentedness; have reporters ever faced more new questions than this fateful election presents? Everything from a candidate campaigning [from criminal court](https://time.com/6967208/donald-trump-hush-money-trial-day-one/) to the rarity of [presidential rematches](https://time.com/6959246/biden-trump-rematch-history/) to the [implications of age](https://time.com/6693305/biden-age-memory-trump-campaign/), [the threats of AI](https://time.com/6965299/risks-ai-elections/), the speed and scale of contagious falsehood, and sadly, the challenge of doing a job whose business model is shredding beneath us makes practical and ethical choices harder. At the very least, these conditions should be enough to chasten the press critics who suggest that the answers are obvious. Fortunately, while there are few easy answers—we _do_ have to cover the Trump trial and reckon with AI— there are clear opportunities. The core of journalism remains curiosity, with its patient partner, humility. We are seeing things in our politics we’ve never seen before, which is an invitation to explore and inquire and inform, not in perfunctory “diner safaris” but in an open-ended, open-minded conversation with people who hear the same speeches, read the same tweets and truths, and come to wildly different conclusions about what they mean and why they matter. [Research into political division often uncovers mass distortion;](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/697253) we see one another through a glass darkly, [exaggerating differences, attributing extreme positions to those who don’t actually hold them](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1017/S0022381614000085?casa%5Ftoken=e8Uidp92q34AAAAA%3A1r3gMaknXq-0MlNiwl4E7SeZfX5Hr%5FdgLrgVItHrMk%5FEN0Ab2ob2Mmi%5FHlbDmIL3mn7gL8t1h5s&journalCode=jop). Research by the nonpartisan group More in Common, for instance, [drilled down on the radioactive topic ](https://www.historyperceptiongap.us/#false%5Fdivergence)of how we teach history. “Many Republicans believe most Democrats want to teach a history defined by shameful oppression and white guilt,” they observed. “Many Democrats believe most Republicans want to focus on the white majority and overlook slavery and racism. But we found that both impressions are wrong.” People at the extremes of left and right are far more likely to post and tweet about politics than the vast center of the electorate, which adds more distortion to the picture. **Read More:** [_The Fantasy of a Lily-White America_](https://time.com/6966768/fantasy-white-america-eddie-glaude/) The challenge is that even when you tell voters that their political opponents are less extreme than they think, people don’t believe it. In much of our current media landscape, we aren’t likely to encounter the layered worldviews of voters who hold complex, even apparently contradictory views on everything from tax rates to trans rights to GMOs to wind turbines. Reporters perform a true public service when they embed not in campaigns but in communities, capture the trials and trade-offs of small-business owners and caregivers, working parents and police officers, and refocus the lens from the hated horse race to the intimate, immediate information voters need to make decisions about their lives as well as their votes. One [reason local news is far more trusted](https://knightfoundation.org/articles/local-news-most-trusted-in-keeping-americans-informed-about-their-communities/) than national news is that it is simply closer to the facts on the ground. But people don’t only trust it more for the information they need to engage with their communities; they trust it far more for information about how to vote. The collapse of local news outlets—more than [two newspapers a week go under on average](https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2023/report/#executive-summary)—puts all the more responsibility on larger regional or national newsrooms to fill in the gaps, deploy reporters creatively, recruit local partners, and present a true picture of the issues most relevant to communities. Show, don’t tell, as we teach young reporters, and there’s no better time or place than the campaign that promises to shape our fates and fortunes for a generation. ### More From TIME ## Transcript 2024 is going to be the first AI election that we've had in the United States and we should expect that there will be attempts to use AI to attack our election infrastructure to further poison the information environment. The 2024 election will be more risky than before because of artificial intelligence its own President Polk's are very focused on RD pics and you fix could be used to make it look like candidates are other officials are staying something that they never said. We've already had that other countries elections in Slovakia. We saw a debate audio used against one of the candidates in the weekend before the election. And now we have a lot of the power generated by a generator internet and social media are filled with AI generated content in done because of the way those content is generated by AI. Call it was have certain biases. The biases will manifest in those content in previous elections would do see sociopaths. We're used to spread misinformation. There are concerns that they make it easier for Bad actors to fool election workers by imitating a people who work in elections in a phone call or in an email and getting election workers to provide information that they shouldn't be providing voter. Suppression is another area where I think people are worried that day. I made may be helpful. We have a history in the Uso robocalls being used to confuse voters about went about social media being used by false information. So maybe that voters don't show up or are scared to vote. I am worried that a I may become yet another one. That the dangers of AI and then start to believe that AI has taken over our elections or maybe rely on a i to give them information. I used all of the main commercial chat box and ask them questions about the elections in different states to test them and all of them provided some wrong information a little bit of a flip side. I think it's really important but would say something called the wires dividend if you think back to the 2012 election, which was Romney vs. Obama or the 2016 election, which was Trump versus Hillary Clinton in both of those cases. There were audios that leaps of one of the major candidates, you know, she was down in Palm Beach. If something like that comes out in the future that is legitimate. It's going to be easier for candidates to deny that a video or audio of them is actually real It's critical to stop double check yourself and and do research to find out whether or not what you're seeing on social media is accurate a lot of election officials and other politicians on social media have been verified the watermarking and requiring some kind of authentication of video audio images that appear on social media and long-term Year all of the security measures that we talked about that we need to put in place to defend our elections. We have to double down on them and we have to invest further over the course of the next few months to make sure that the system is as resilient as possible. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6970077/media-coverage-election-opportunities-2024/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6970077/media-coverage-election-opportunities-2024/"},"headline":"Why This Election Is the Media's Opportunity to Rebuild Trust","datePublished":"2024-04-25T15:10:55.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:48:47.549Z","description":"In an unprecedented year, the core of journalism remains the same","url":"https://time.com/6970077/media-coverage-election-opportunities-2024/","keywords":["politics"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt09ae60d0ea724a98/698a55dc86f68ee6db6f506d/press-media-election-trump.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Nancy Gibbs","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/nancy-gibbs/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt09ae60d0ea724a98/698a55dc86f68ee6db6f506d/press-media-election-trump.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"US-VOTE-POLITICS-ELECTIONS-TRUMP","caption":"Members of the media wait for the arrival of former President Donald Trump at a \"Get Out the Vote\" rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, on Feb. 17, 2024.","creditText":"Alex Wroblewski—AFP/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/politics/","name":"politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6970077/media-coverage-election-opportunities-2024/","name":"Why This Election Is the Media's Opportunity to Rebuild Trust"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"How AI May Meddle With The Election Year","description":"The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. 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