Media Briefing: How news coverage has changed during the Biden administration’s first 100 days

By Tim Peterson

This week’s Media Briefing looks at how, with a less volatile White House, news organizations are finding more opportunities to do deeper reporting on issues like social justice and immigration.

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A new era for news

The first few months of Joseph Biden’s presidency have been a breath of fresh air for news organizations. “There isn’t a Twitter feed where news may be committed at 11 o’clock at night or 9 o’clock at night or whatever hour. There is an element of, dare I say, predictability,” said Elaine Quijano, an anchor at CBS News Digital’s streaming outlet CBSN.

Following four years reporting under the ever-present specter of a tweet by President Donald Trump overtaking the news cycle, the relative mundanity of President Biden’s tenure, which marks its 100th day in office on April 30, has allowed news organizations to spend more time and energy reporting original stories on topics like social justice rather than racing after a tweetstorm.

“It’s been a much more deliberate pace set the by White House and, for us as journalists, an opportunity to get back to the basics of reporting and telling the important stories and not either being dictated to or run by the pace that Trump set,” said Rick Klein, political director at ABC News.

The key hits:

Under the Biden administration, the news cycle has returned to a more regular rhythm.
That has enabled news organizations to put more resources to original reporting on issues like social justice and immigration.
That, in turn, has enabled news outlets to differentiate themselves from one another.
The news cycle’s slower pace also provides a reprieve for newsrooms dealing with burnout.

The White House now consistently provides news outlets with the president’s schedule on a daily basis as well as well transcripts of his calls with foreign leaders, which were provided less consistently during the Trump administration. “All of these mechanisms are in use, and so that has allowed for better decisions about staffing and planning for coverage,” said Glen Johnson, politics editor at Axios.

To be clear, the news cycle continues to be more akin to drinking from a firehose than sipping from a straw, with the world still dealing with a pandemic and the issue of racial injustice. But the quieter White House has created an opening for news organizations “to spend more time on investigations and reporting that might take a little bit longer, that we wouldn’t necessarily have had the bandwidth to do during the last couple months of the Trump presidency,” said Matt Berman, politics editor at BuzzFeed News.

For example, in late February, BuzzFeed News published the result of a month-long investigation into harassment allegations against Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn, and the amount of time that story took to report on a single member of Congress would have been harder to come before Biden took office, he said.

Other …read more

Source:: Digiday