The challenge of capturing Election Day 2024 in a headline - Poynter

Three major legacy media publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, displayed markedly different headlines on the front page of their digital papers this Election Day. Some felt more assertive than others.

The three read:

The New York Times: After Divisive Campaign, Polarized Nation Has Its Say The Washington Post: Race between Harris, Trump now in voters’ hands The Wall Street Journal: America Heads to the Polls as Hard-Fought Race Comes to a Close

One of journalism’s biggest debates centers on language choice. Journalists are advised and critiqued over and over on their word choices in reporting and headlines. They are counseled endlessly on the power of language and the duty of their enterprises to state the facts without editorializing.

This is especially true during presidential elections. In a time when journalists are questioned about “sanewashing” former President Donald Trump and routinely checked for the use of euphemisms that don’t actually say anything, writing clear headlines that speak to the moment without insinuating accusation seems like it should take priority.

Though the rhetoric from Trump’s campaign has been characterized as divisive, it might be a bit of a stretch to blanket the entirety of both campaigns under that word. And a country with unlimited access to information and interaction thanks to social media might feel polarized in the comments sections of those channels — where people can be at their worst — but it might not be accurate to assume such a binary persists in the everyday life of Americans.

The Post puts the onus on the public to choose the next president of the United States, a nod to the democratic process. It also refrains from using verbiage that would accuse it of making any kind of assumption about the basis of either candidate’s campaign or the state of the American public.

The Journal’s headline is a little more convoluted, alluding to a “hard-fought race,” which could feel subjective to readers. But at least it does not try to characterize the public when it states that Americans head to the polls.

Election Day is fraught with anxiety for many of the journalists tasked with covering it. The job of accurately portraying the entirety of the country as it exercises democracy through the voting process is a big one. Headline writing is hard on a slow news day, let alone a day as tense as the presidential election of 2024. Much feels unprecedented — somehow more so than it did in 2016 and 2020 — and tension is at an all-time high.

And yet, journalists are tasked with boiling it all down into around eight words.