THE BRAIN LEARNS IN different ways. Mastering French verbs requires repetition. A single distressing experience, however, can impart a lasting lesson in moments; a car crash survivor, for instance, might come away with a deep fear of riding in cars.

Every afternoon at a quarter past four, an email goes around 30 Rockefeller Plaza to all of MSNBC’s on-screen personalities, all of their executive producers, all of their bosses, and all of their bosses’ bosses. It contains a long spreadsheet, in ye

Pick a day. Any day. There’s a good chance that David Axelrod has been quoted in a major American publication. Take August 29, 2019, a nice-sounding day. Joe Biden has been telling a story that doesn’t add up, about pinning a star on a naval officer.

My focus has shifted. The election is still incredibly important, but right now I’m focusing on the process of how people actually vote. It’s not a question anymore of if people will vote by mail, it’s how—and then how prepared the states are. In Ame

Now you can’t get the spontaneous voter voice, the person who wasn’t expecting to be quoted. That’s hard, because I think part of the lesson that a lot of campaign reporters took from the 2016 election was that we needed to make sure that we were tal

Within the Des Moines Register we have a dedicated politics team. Now two-thirds of those reporters are spending their full amount of time covering the coronavirus and its effects throughout the state We found that there is a ton of appetite for coro

Prior to May 25—the day Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, killed George Floyd, a Black man, while three other cops looked on—“Defund the Police” was not a message widely repeated in the press. But after that day, it was impossible to ignore. Pro

The story itself is different now. It’s the difference between covering a football game and covering a foosball match. One of them involves a lot of players and location and action, and one of them is necessarily bound to person-to-person outreach th

ABOUT THE NUMBERS CJR counted the number of biographies, White House and campaign memoirs, investigations, and policy examinations published about each president while he served in office. Sources included the Library of Congress, the Ronald Reagan P

To be at the center of a media frenzy is to be sucked into a vortex. Eventually, you get spit out. But even if you’re able to get back where you came from, nothing is ever the same, because it’s been documented in stories broadcasting a bizarro versi

Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux, a team of political scientists, don’t concern themselves with what people believe. Belief is a private act, they say. People tend to believe information not because it’s factual, not beca

Some political acts take place in public, others in private. The former—protests, speeches, social media posts—are readily accessible for journalists to cover. The latter can be harder to see, especially when people are sheltering in place. Who, by t

There are times when I get in a YouTube mood and I lose a day, maybe two, watching video clips. Often this happens when I can’t sleep. I turn my phone sideways and wander the vast metropolis of the uploaded, in search of novelty, history, laughter, m

The coronavirus pandemic is a campaign issue. The US-China relationship, which is now under renewed scrutiny because of the pandemic, is a campaign issue. How the pandemic is affecting the economy, people’s livelihoods, the healthcare system, educati

On Super Tuesday, when a slate of Democratic candidates were vying for their party’s presidential nomination, Joanne McNeil was in the apartment she sublets in West Harlem, on the fifth floor of a prewar walk-up. The place was in the middle of a reno

On Friday the thirteenth of March, Lourdes Torres, the senior vice president of political coverage at Univision News, traveled from Miami to Washington, DC. Her team was to cohost, along with CNN, the first virtual presidential debate in United State

A decade ago, when someone else was president of the United States, when there was no COVID-19, when George Floyd was alive, the writer Rebecca Solnit gave an interview to The Believer magazine. It was not a presidential election year. “We tend to th

IN EARLY MARCH I was wondering, as many people were, if I should get a face mask. I remember standing in my kitchen watching cable news when a medical expert declared that there was little evidence a mask could prevent our catching COVID-19, the dise

We’re staying away from the on-camera, sit-down interview, which is our bread and butter. You go somewhere, meet someone, talk to them, put a camera on a tripod, put a microphone on, and go. That’s your bite. That’s your quote. We’re not doing that n

DRIVING ACROSS THE BAY Bridge from the San Francisco airport to my childhood home, in East Oakland, I can see cranes moving cargo containers. I get on the 580 freeway, which divides the city. To the west are the Oakland Hills, where the wealthy live;

For years, the journalism industry has been in financial decline. In March, when the coronavirus pandemic shot through the United States, business imploded. Reporters lost their jobs at an alarming rate; some outlets folded entirely. All through the

IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, as Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency, a bacterium was spreading in New York City. Twelve people had become sick earlier in the year; by August, the outbreak had reached more than a hundred and twenty. A dozen i

Michigan was the last real primary state before the lockdown happened. The state confirmed its first case on March 10, the same night as the primary, about an hour after the polls closed. So I went from covering a Biden rally in Detroit on March 9 to

AT 1:15PM EASTERN ON Wednesday, May 22, a Trump supporter named Shawn Brooks posted a video on Facebook called “Is Nancy Pelosi drunk?” It suggested that Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, was slurring her words. Later that day, another video featurin