Lesson about election night for media? Winner should be American democracy.

Every four years, major news organizations spend millions to create a dazzling spectacle out of what broadcast news pioneer Reuven Frank once called “a TV show about adding.” At the center of election night coverage is the race to be first to correctly call who will be the next president.

This year, in particular, news outlets are treading carefully. Polls are showing a virtual toss-up in the combative race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Early voting across the U.S. has been heavy. Rules differ from state to state and have shifted considerably since the 2020 election. Add to that the likelihood of post-election legal challenges and even unrest, television and print news organizations are preparing for a dramatic finale that likely won’t conclude Tuesday night.

“The theater of election night coverage” makes it look as if declaring winners and losers that night is the norm and if that doesn’t happen, “something must have gone wrong,” said Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine and now the Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

So there’s “an enormous obligation on journalists” to inform and remind people again and again that all 50 states have their own distinct rules about when and how votes are counted “and therefore, it is perfectly normal in a close race that it will take longer for some states to report than others, and that is not a sign of voter fraud or vote rigging or any of the other accusations,” she said.

To guard against that, organizations such as The New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press, and ABC News are taking steps to be more aggressive in explaining the variable state regulations to prepare voters for why there may be delays and to be vigilant on election night for signs of misinformation.

“That’s a major worry, that the period between when people vote and when there’s a decision is a very, very troublesome time for misinformation and for manipulation, and I think news organizations are super focused on that,” said Sally Buzbee, formerly a top editor at the Associated Press and until June, executive editor of The Washington Post.

Since 2000, U.S. elections have been “improbably close” Electoral College contests compared to prior elections, which makes tabulating delays “much more likely,” said Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS.

“I think the important thing is for there not to be an information vacuum” that bad actors can fill with confusion and disinformation. While it may not be as splashy or entertaining, news outlets can do a lot of civic good while votes are being counted to minimize predictions based on things like exit polls and instead, get “in the weeds” about state election rules and how that affects the vote counting and validating, he said.

The 2020 election between former Vice President Joe Biden and Trump serves as a kind of cautionary tale for news organizations. It took four days to call the election for Biden.

The tally was slowed by a record number of mail and absentee ballots cast due to the pandemic and ended in a close finish with a margin of victory of just 113,000 votes combined in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

While votes were still being counted election night, the Trump campaign prematurely declared victory. Even after Biden was declared the winner, the campaign, along with some supporters, pushed false accusations about widespread voter fraud, which were later disproved by investigations and recounts and rejected by courts but nonetheless persist to this day.

The very notion of an election night where the results are known hours after the polls close is relatively new. For most of the nation’s history, voting results always took time to come in.

“This is literally how AP started. The results from the West had to come in by Pony Express and then telegraph, and so, it definitely took many days to figure out who had won the presidency,” said Buzbee, currently a Nieman visiting fellow.

The expectation that voters would learn who won sometime after 9 p.m. election night began with the emergence of television in the 1950s.

The industry is now going through a “sea change.” Most major news organizations know “there is still demand for election night and for some spectacle around election night, but … are [also] now keenly aware that there isn’t an Election Day, there’s an election couple days or weeks,” said Buzbee.

Outlets are hoping to head off a repeat of the last election but face some challenges. Newsrooms have seen significant layoffs over the last two years. Some, like NBC, ABC, and the BBC, cut hundreds of jobs in the last two months. Election coverage is expensive, takes many months of careful planning, and isn’t necessarily a money-maker. Still, news organizations think it’s worth the investment and effort.  

“You’re building credibility if you do a good job on election night. If you are accurate, if you are compelling … on election night, then you are doing a good job with a big audience and what you hope is that translates into credibility long term,” Buzbee said.

Gibbs agrees.

“At the most basic level, what is a bigger news story than who is going to be the next president of the United States, who’s going to control the Senate, who’s going to control the Congress, who’s going to be confirming the next Supreme Court justices? Those outcomes have enormous impact on people’s lives and prosperity and health,” so it’s not surprising that news outlets devote so much time and resources to election coverage, she said.

Even if news outlets, especially TV networks, suddenly changed their approach, “even if somehow we dismantled the entire machinery of election night and made it ‘election week,’ I don’t think that that would change the fact that more and more people, especially people who are under 30 or even under 50, have many, many other sources where they’re going to be getting their information,” she said.

Many election officials learned from 2020 and are doing significant public outreach to provide greater clarity around their state’s rules and procedures, hoping to tamp down misinformation and reassure voters that their election is secure and fair, said Fung.

But the responsibility should not be shouldered solely by officials and journalists.

“I think every organization in society, whether it’s a business, or colleges and universities, or high schools, or nonprofits, should do their part to make our democratic institutions work. Obviously, a big part of that is encouraging people to participate in the democracy. But now, more and more, a bigger part [is] keeping people informed and updated” about what’s going on and why, said Fung.

“But I think we all have an individual responsibility as citizens, and then an organizational responsibility, to try to turn down the temperature and keep people informed in this moment of high anxiety on almost all sides.”

On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Gibbs and Fung will join other HKS panelists for “Democracy 2024: The Day After” in the JFK Jr. Forum at 1pm.