It’s election season. And if you’re a new voter, it may be intimidating trying to decipher the flood of campaign ads, figure out your ballot or even know who it is you are being asked to vote for.
Two people paying close attention to elections are Tara Newsom and Alex Mahadevan. They sat down with WUSF’s elections podcast: Our Changing State, Vote 2024 to talk about how young voters are navigating the election and how the media covers politics.
Alex Mahadevan is the director of MediaWise at Poynter, which aims to empower people with media literacy skills to identify misinformation.
As media organizations shrink and trust in the media slips, Mahadevan says people are turning away from legacy media organizations for their political news and information.
Instead, they might turn to a TikTok influencer or newsletter. “They're going to like an influencer on TikTok who agrees with, like, how they feel about the world, and they're going to media platforms that kind of match their information consumption habits,” says Mahadevan.
“So if I spend a lot of time, you know, reading newsletters, that's where I'm going to get all my political coverage,” he adds. Mahadevan says fact-checkers have an important role to play in political coverage.
“They get right to whether this policy that this politician is promoting works, whether the … rhetoric that they're throwing around is legitimate or not. And so I think readers should be seeking out fact checking,” he says.
Newsom, who is a professor of government and civic learning at St. Petersburg College, has been talking with students about issues they think are important. “In this election they recognize that democracy, their reproductive freedoms, climate change, foreign policy’s all on the ballot,” says Newsom.
“And so they’re really leaning in and understanding they need to participate in the democratic process, they need to be represented.”
