Looking Back: Journalists' Perspective on the 2020 Election

The League of Women Voters St. Paul (LWVSP) presents "Looking Back: Journalists’ Perspectives on the 2020 Election” as a free public program on Tuesday, January 26, from 7:00pm - 8:00pm.

In the interest of public health and safety, this will be a virtual event. The event will be available via Zoom (register here) and also will be shown on LWVSP's Facebook page. The program will be recorded for future viewing.

This program is a discussion of a journalist’s perspective of covering an election in the midst of a pandemic and claims of disinformation. Panel participants include Star Tribune reporter Briana Bierschbach, The Minnesota Daily reporter Hana Irkramuddin and former Pioneer Press reporter Bill Salisbury. Some of the discussion will address:

• How COVID impacted reporting and access to candidates and events, and how did journalists work to ensure their reporting was not overshadowed by COVID.
• How disinformation and accusations of “fake news” was addressed by the media.
• What lessons were learned from the 2020 election and what might be done differently in the future.

Briana Bierschbach is a politics and government reporter for the Star Tribune. She has spent the last decade covering Minnesota politics for various publications, including MPR News and MinnPost. She started her journalism career in college at the University of Minnesota's campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, where she covered city hall. Bierschbach also has worked at the Pioneer Press, the Associated Press and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Hana Irkramuddin is Senior Staff Reporter at The Minnesota Daily. She is a Journalism major at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Bill Salisbury has been a newspaper reporter since 1971. He started covering the Minnesota Capitol for the Rochester Post-Bulletin in 1975, joined the Pioneer Press as a general assignment reporter in 1977 and was assigned to the Capitol bureau in 1978. He was the paper's Washington correspondent from 1994 through 1999, when he returned to the Capitol bureau. Although he retired in January 2015, he continues to work at the Capitol part time.