It’s the night of the 2024 presidential election Nov. 5 and Andrea Smith (CAS ’25) has been awake for 20 hours.
Smith is in Virginia, closely following the results of congressional races around the state, including Democrat Eugene Vindman’s victory in the state’s seventh district.
“I was there the whole night,” Smith told The Hoya. “I literally couldn’t even think, it was crazy. It was the Democratic race, so at the beginning of the night, there was a lot of energy.”
For Smith and countless other journalists across the country, election night was more than just waiting for results — it was an all-consuming process of making sense of events unfolding in real time, a pinnacle that comes after months of research and reporting. What the public saw on the surface — quick updates, live shots, flashing headlines — belies the painstaking, behind-the-scenes work that makes election coverage possible.
As a student journalist interning at NBC 4 Washington, a local news outlet for Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, Smith is part of a new generation of reporters learning how to navigate a rapidly evolving media landscape. A 2023 Deloitte study found that Generation Z and millennials are increasingly relying on social media.
Symone Sanders-Townsend — an MSNBC broadcaster, former chief spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris and current fellow at the Georgetown University Institute for Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) — said journalists continue to play an important role in informing the public.
“Journalists are supposed to be the ones who ask the hard questions, questions somebody else isn’t willing to ask, follow the threads wherever they lead and then report it out so that the people know,” Sanders-Townsend told The Hoya.
Local Reporting
As polling indicated a very tight election between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump, reporting in swing states proved crucial to understanding the pulse of local electorates.
Student journalists at Georgetown University captured this atmosphere through a trip to Detroit, Mich., from Oct. 24 to Oct. 27, led by former CNN embed for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and professor Sarah Mucha.
Joining Smith on the trip was Izzy Wagener (SFS ’26), who spoke directly with voters at a Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Mich., as well as with members of the Local 600 chapter of the United Auto Workers, a major labor union headquartered in Detroit.
“You can’t really understand what’s happening unless you’re on the ground in the place where things are happening,” Wagener told The Hoya.
Smith said speaking to Michigan voters informed her view of national concerns.
“I talked to a doctor who told me stories about her patients in Michigan and what post-Roe looked like, even in a state that had abortion rights in the constitution,” Smith said. “I was talking to a lot of Gen Z people in schools in Michigan and leaders of College Democrats at the University of Michigan and Michigan State.”
Matt Frei, Europe section editor and presenter at Channel 4 News, said his experience covering Republicans’ campaign events changed his outlook on the election.
Frei attended a rally featuring Kimberly Guilfoyle, a key advisor and head of fundraising for Trump’s 2020 campaign, as well as the fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. He said hearing her speak made clear the Republicans’ sharp understanding of messaging tailored to particular electorates.
“It was fascinating speaking to the people that she was going to address: All white, mostly rural, very middle-class Americans, but they didn’t look like the classic MAGA supporters and they didn’t all wear the hats,” Frei told The Hoya. “She gave a very good speech, she appealed to all the things they wanted to hear about: the economy, immigration and this kind of anti-woke agenda.”
Sanders-Townsend said attending swing-state rallies in person demonstrated a disparity between stories reported on national TV versus local stations.
“Anyone that went on the ground — particularly Michigan is a good example — could see that this national narrative that Donald Trump’s campaign is disorganized and doesn’t have a ground game and so on is not what you see when you actually go on the ground and you see the Trump yard signs and the huge crowds at rallies,” Sanders-Townsend said.
Sanders-Townsend reported from Lancaster, Pa., the weekend before the election, attending a rally with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, then one with Trump.
“The next day, Donald Trump had a rally like in the same town a couple blocks over and there was an energetic crowd of people. That’s when I said, ‘Okay, from what I saw with my own two eyes and from talking to people, this race is a lot closer,’” Sanders-Townsend added.
Mucha said on-the-ground reporting in swing states is essential for journalists in the Northeast United States.
“As a former embed, I’m a bit biased, but on-the-ground reporting — especially talking to voters — remains the bedrock of election coverage,” Mucha wrote to The Hoya. “Local journalism especially will remain critical. It’s an overused cliche, but those of us in the Acela corridor can have a distorted understanding of public sentiment across the country.”
“Reading coverage from journalists who live in battleground states or visiting these areas personally is just so essential to capturing the pulse of voters beyond the Beltway,” Mucha added.
Navigating Polarization in Reporting
Frei said this presidential election, in which Trump defeated Harris, differed from those he had covered in the past.
Frei has covered U.S. elections since 2002 at both Channel 4 and as the BBC Washington correspondent but said he encountered a uniquely existential political environment this year.
“If you asked both sides what’s at stake, both sides said freedom,” Frei said. “Republicans thought that their freedoms would be curtailed because we would become a sort of socialist paradise or dystopia and the Democrats thought that if Trump took over, we’d become an authoritarian state, that the rights of American citizens and the institutions would be diminished.”
Maryse Bots, an exchange student from the University of Edinburgh studying at George Washington University and writing for the GW Hatchet, said the U.S. media polarization struck her during election season.
“Obviously the U.S. has massively polarized media,” Bots told The Hoya. “Look at CNN versus Fox News and these narratives from either end are a massive part in how the U.S. is shaped.”
“I’ve realized increasingly when editing articles that I had to start fact-checking stuff and checking if that person had really tweeted this,” Bots added.
Smith said the unique obstacles that come with covering Trump make the task of remaining objective as a journalist even more complicated.
“In 2016, the media thought they put too much attention on him, the opposite of raising him on a public stage,” Smith said. “So, in 2020 they tried to pull back the amount of time they would spend covering Trump on the election. All these decisions and debates around whether we should cover all the crazy things he says or how seriously we should take them can impact the way our narratives shape public perceptions of candidates like Trump.”
During this year’s election, most major polls predicted a close race but a select few proved remarkably inaccurate — leading journalists including Mucha to question whether political journalists rely too heavily on polling data to draw conclusions about campaign trends.
Mucha said polls have traditionally played a significant role in shaping election narratives, but recent cycles have shown they often fall short of capturing the full picture.
“Despite their best efforts, polls can’t perfectly predict the makeup of the electorate on Election Day,” Mucha said. “Pollsters try, but there’s always uncertainty. I remind my students — and it’s advice I think applies to reporters, too — to be cautious about leaning too heavily on polling data as we approach elections.”
In many cases, polls drive headlines and shape public perceptions of the race before the first vote is cast.
Frei said polls accurately captured the closeness of the race throughout.
“It’s very, very hard, always in elections, to get a feel for the psychology of the voter, and the pollsters keep getting it slightly wrong,” said Frei. “The polls told you it was split down the middle, so that’s kind of what you went along with.”
Social Media’s Role in Election Coverage
The 2024 election coverage also illuminated a new generation of journalism, one that leverages digital tools to connect with voters in more dynamic and interactive ways.
A 2024 report by the Pew Research Center found that 86% of U.S. adults at least occasionally get their news from a digital device. When asked about their preferred news platform, 58% chose digital devices, compared to 32% who favored TV, 6% who preferred radio and 4% who opted for print. These findings highlight the growing significance of digital platforms in the public’s news consumption.
While Smith created a TikTok from her conversations with voters at rallies and recorded podcast episodes released on election day for The Fly, GU Politics’ podcast, Bots spent the election day filming interviews to create Instagram reels for the University of Edinburgh’s The Student newspaper.
“I think it was really important because it really engaged the student population at home,” Bots said. “I think what’s cool about student journalism is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. You can make it relevant for students in different ways, so I tried to appeal to this target audience.”
Wagener, photography editor for The Georgetown Voice, said photographs and visual storytelling play a crucial role in election coverage.
Wagener said she aims not only to document the atmosphere of rallies and political events on campus but also to capture the faces and emotions of the voters themselves in photo essays.
“I think photography is a way of capturing reality that words can’t always do in the same way,” Wagener said. “Obviously photography isn’t completely infallible, you can manipulate photos too and without proper context they’re not always accurate representations, but they do bring a human element to what is happening that readers want to see.”
According to Sanders-Townsend, the move toward consuming news and political information through social media platforms emphasizes the need for journalists to adapt their reporting to reflect this.
“Often in focus groups that we have conducted, one of the questions asked is, ‘Where do people get their news?’” Sanders-Townsend said. “Increasingly, more and more people are citing various social media sites. Oftentimes they’ll say Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, sometimes even specific pages on Instagram like Shade Room.”
Sanders-Townsend said people close to her, including her sister, do not have cable news, forcing her to adapt how she shares clips from her show, “SYMONE.”
“She gets her news from socials and YouTube and won’t see what I do on television,” Sanders-Townsend said. “I have to adapt by taking the key clips and putting them on socials, or summarizing that two-hour program into a condensed video I say vertically into my phone and put on TikTok.”
“I do think it is important, especially for younger people coming into the current media apparatus, to be attuned to the current media environment,” Sanders-Townsend added.
The rise of social media has made it easier for disinformation to spread, posing a serious threat to credible reporting. False or misleading information can quickly go viral, outpacing fact-checking efforts and overshadowing accurate news.
Frei that the increasingly hostile environment for credible reporting is driving many people to question the role of social media in a democracy.
“Those belief bubbles, those silos of prejudices and beliefs are enormous, they’re enforced by an algorithm on social media and it’s very hard to break through,” Frei said. “I think in American democracy, that is very dangerous.”
Mucha said the election brought into sharper focus the way non-traditional media platforms, such as podcasts, influence campaigning.
“Think Harris on Call Her Daddy or Trump on Joe Rogan,” Mucha said. “As news consumption continues to grow more fragmented, this shift toward different media platforms is likely here to stay and become even more of a factor in elections. While no one can predict the future, it will be telling to see how journalists and mainstream outlets adapt to this splintering of media in coming elections.”
Reflecting on how news about the election was consumed, Smith said she holds concerns over this rise in misinformation and the lack of effective content moderation.
“People are getting their sources of information from random TikTokers and a lot of people who aren’t journalists go on platforms as if they are,” Smith said. “I think that the mainstream media really needs to figure out how to compete with that.”
Smith said her experience covering the 2024 election and participating in the democratic process sparked her passion for political journalism and motivated her to continue her coverage.
“These past few weeks, getting involved in campaign reporting, even on a small scale, I absolutely loved it,” Smith said. “My time in Michigan was so thrilling and it was so beautiful to be part of a democracy and realizing how important journalism is in elections, making the public aware of the candidates they’re voting for and emphasizing how important voting is, regardless of your party.”
