Editor’s note: This webinar has now taken place. You can see the recording on GIJN’s YouTube channel.
The United States election is just over a month away and the stakes are enormous. The campaign takes place amid the worst pandemic in a century, the most acute economic crisis since the Depression, growing inequality, and anti-racist protests. There are threats to send armed guards to US polling stations, concerns of interference with mail-in ballots, charges of rigged voting and foreign interference, record amounts of funding by donors both open and covert, and a tidal wave of disinformation. At the same time, the news media is under sustained attack.
US actions and policies at home and abroad affect people’s lives around the world. The outcome of the election — not only for the president but for the US Congress — will have global impact. In this GIJN webinar The US Election: What’s At Stake, the first of two focusing on the US Election, we bring together three American journalists who are digging into American politics to find out what’s at stake and what journalists need to investigate.
- David Cay Johnston is an investigative journalist specializing in economics and tax issues, and is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting. He is the founder of DCReport.org, a nonprofit news service reporting on the President and Congress, and the author of a number of books, including two on Donald Trump. The Making of Donald Trump (2016) and It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America (2018).
- Sarah Blaskey is an investigative reporter and data specialist at the Miami Herald. She is co-author, along with colleagues Nicholas Nehamas and Caitlin Ostroff, of The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-A-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency, a book on how Trump conducts government business from his Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago. For the book, all three journalists were named finalists for the 2020 Livingston Award for Excellence in National Reporting.
- Kat Stafford is the national race and ethnicity writer at The Associated Press, covering the 2020 election and how race intersects with society, culture, politics, health and more. Previously Stafford was an investigative journalist at the Detroit Free Press. She was named a 2019 Ida B. Wells Investigative Fellow and a 2016 Fellow at Loyola Law School, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Investigative Reporters and Editors.
The session will be moderated by Sheila Coronel, Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s School of Journalism in New York. She is a co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and served as its executive director for many years.
This webinar will also be offered in Arabic and Spanish.
Please also join the second of two global webinars on the American election, The US Election: Digging into Disinformation, on Thursday 8 October at 9:00 EST.
Helpful Resources
GIJN Election Guide: GIJN’s new guide — Essential Resources for the US Election: A Field Guide for Journalists on the Frontlines— lists over 100 links to the most authoritative sites.
GIJN Election Watchdog Alert: Follow our daily stream of updates of the latest tools to dig into Election 2020 on Twitter at #gijnElectionWatchdog and in Spanish at #gijnLupaElectoral.
Have an addition or update? Email us at ElectionWatchdog@gijn.org.
