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Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News: The media has this incredible quadrennial habit of learning all the lessons of four years ago and applying them when the medium has already moved on. Things keep changing, yet we fight the last war. So I think the media is totally prepared not to repeat the mistakes of the last cycle, like giving Trump endless livestreams and letting him use provocative tweets to dominate the conversation, but I’m sure we will **** it up in some new way we aren’t expecting.

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“Try not to get caught up in the theater”
Weaning off of a Trump media obsession

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Hayes Brown, senior editor and reporter, BuzzFeed: When you look back at the Nixon impeachment situation, people only had a few news sources at that time. They had their local paper, they had the big three networks. And that was it. Maybe if you were very fashionable in the middle of the country, you somehow got the New York Times delivered. And you read the news magazines, but that was really it in terms of media. Now people can go to wherever they want to find the facts that they agree with. On the one hand, this breakdown, this splintering, that has allowed for the rise of new voices, allowed for more diversity, allowed for more opinions to come forward, without having this, you know, establishment system saying, ‘Well, these are the stories we care about.’ On the other hand, it’s made it much harder for the average person to look out there and figure out what is the objective truth.

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Betsy West, Columbia journalism professor and co-director of the documentary “RBG”: One of the scariest developments in our political landscape is that disinformation is moving from print to video. We saw this foreshadowed this year with two different videos of a supposedly drunken or stammering Nancy Pelosi that were crudely faked. These videos were quickly revealed to be phony but not before millions of viewers saw and shared them on social media. You can just imagine the potential havoc created by a video showing a candidate doing or saying something inappropriate that comes out on the eve of an election.

It’s one thing to write a false story that gets disseminated. It’s something even more powerful to create a video that appears to be real.

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Baquet, New York Times: All of us in the media were just so convinced Trump couldn’t win. But he was outside of the paint-by-numbers game we have developed.

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Ramos, Univision: I’m seeing more reporters who are not believing the polls and doing their homework. I personally am listening to conservative radio stations in Miami that I didn’t listen to in 2016 trying to understand Trump voters, specifically Latino Trump voters.

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Gitlin, Columbia University: There was a sense after 2016 that we weren’t listening to enough people in diners in Ohio. That wasn’t so much misguided as it was inflated. The average Trump voter has above-average income. Overall—to generalize—news media went from not noticing people whose life chances are impacted by the rustification of the Midwest to thinking that they are now the central story. It’s an absurd overcompensation. This is another instance of pack journalism, from ignoring a population to doubling down on a population. And in both cases, it’s a stampede reaction, not grounded in sociological knowledge or political science knowledge, but rather in a kind of feeling of having failed to get the odds right during the campaign. [Reporters felt] that it was incumbent upon them to find a simple solution or simple remedy. Simple compensation. ‘Okay, we blew that. We’re going to do it better this time.’ Except it’s a false solution. It’s a solution on the cheap. It doesn’t come to grips with the way in which a career racketeer got away with presenting himself as a plausible politician.

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Frank Bruni, columnist, New York Times: There’s a real tension in the media as we go into 2020, and a real challenge. We are an industry that is hardly swimming in revenue, we are competing fiercely for the eyeballs we need to stay alive. And we’ve learned that if you write a story about the ridiculousness of Trump’s latest tweet – whether that story is riveting to his fans or to his foes who cannot marinate enough in their distaste of him – it gets a lot more traffic than an analysis of Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-all plan. Trump understands what news catches people’s interest, he has a very acute sense of what people will click on. So I’m concerned that we are going to end up giving Trump more than the lion’s share of media time all the way up to election night.