HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.
We're delighted to welcome back the foremost expert
on American political communication.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
Oxford University Press has published her newest
work, "Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls
Helped Elect a President - What We Don't,
Can't and Do Know." The author of 16 books,
including this latest forensic examination of
Russian digital dirty tricks.
Jamison is director of the Annenberg Public Policy
Center and the Packard Professor of Communication
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kathleen, it's a pleasure to finally have you here.
JAMIESON: It's a pleasure to be here.
HEFFNER: You've been here with Bill Moyers.
You've been here with my grandfather.
Now I'm delighted to host you.
JAMIESON: Thank you.
HEFFNER: You say unequivocally, this is war.
What's the line between dirty tricks and war
and how was that surfacing on the Internet during
the 2016 campaign?
JAMIESON: Begin by asking what would constitute an
attack because the notion that this is a cyber
attack leads to the question,
can you call it cyberwar, and there are people in
the intelligence community who were very nervous
about using that label because they want to say
it means you're trying to take down the
infrastructure so they literally where you attack
the grid for example, and as a result you don't have
electricity or you attack the financial structures
and as a result, Wall Street collapses.
But what I want to suggest with the idea
that this is a cyber attack and it's cyberwar,
is that a foreign power managed to enter
the territorial United States pretending to be us.
That's the case of the Russian trolls in cyberspace.
Now does that sound a little like soldiers have invaded us.
Although they disguise themselves so they didn't
know that they were soldiers and they marauded
around inside our Internet trying to manipulate the citizenry.
Now they didn't kill anybody,
but what they did was created an information
climate that produced an effect.
This is information warfare.
It isn't the kind of warfare with guns.
It's a kind of warfare in which if you create a
message imbalance, so there's more attack
against one candidate or extreme discourse against
one candidate on the margins,
you're able to shift votes.
They also then again attacked.
They invaded, and this is illegal.
They stole material from the Democrats and they
leaked it back through WikiLeaks into our press
system, so they altered the dialogue.
Now that means they entered our country
literally in cyberspace.
Don't think of it in physical space,
extracted something and turned it as a weapon
against one of our own political candidates.
In that sense, I think what you can call this
is a cyber attack, and I'd like to use the analogy to
war to say it's not meddling.
When the press says meddling.
If I say somebody meddled, I think your response is,
well, tell him to go mind their own business,
but if somebody attacked in a forum in which
imposters pretended to be us and manipulate us,
stole things, and changed our message environment,
I want people to use a stronger word.
I want attack, I want intervention and I'd like
people to think it's a form of cyberwar.
It's informational warfare.
HEFFNER: Criminality.
Ultimately those who conspired to circulate,
disseminate messages that were manipulating
the public, but that were using criminal means to
infect us with the carcinogens of misinformation.
That is really disinformation.
JAMIESON: It is.
HEFFNER: What was the methodology in this study
that you relied on to demonstrate this imbalance
in the way that the trolls were targeting Clinton.
JAMIESON: Let me distinguish the trolls
from the hackers.
HEFFNER: Right.
JAMIESON: So the trolls are in cyberspace
pretending to be US nationals and manipulating
the information environment,
trying to aggregate likeminded communities
and influence them, increase the likelihood
that circulating in those communities is material
that would benefit Donald Trump and disadvantage
Hilary Clinton and sow discord within the body politics.
The hackers are stealing content,
passing it through front groups to try to disguise
the Russian origins and trying to create a message imbalance.
Now what the book argues from his 40 to almost 50 years
of academic research that says that we know how
we're influenced in campaigns.
We know that what we think about matters in our
determining how we assess a candidate,
so the agenda setting, the focusing on one thing
and not another, increases the likelihood
that when you assess Clinton versus Trump,
you're thinking about that thing that's now more
important and what that means is that if in this
information environment, the trolls in cyberspace,
the hackers through our media system are able to
make some things more salient or important,
they're more likely to be used as we assess
Clinton's qualifications to be president.
If that happened in the past reliably,
our experiments show and our surveys show it and we
see the same pattern happening it's reasonable
to think it happened this time too,
and we also know in the past when one side gains
the message advantage, they create more total
communication, usually communication against
the other side. That's when you shift votes,
when you've got comparable balance of communication,
it kind of tends to cancel itself out,
but you get an imbalance.
You shift votes, so again, we have historical
research that says that happens.
The trolls did it in cyberspace,
the hackers through WikiLeaks did it inside
our new structure, so when I step in in the book and
say I have survey data that suggests that during
the period of major hacked content being covered in
news and separately polling data from the
impact of the last two debates in which it is
reasonable to assume that what has happened is the
media agenda has been changed against Clinton,
both in what is the focus and also in the imbalance.
The survey data suggests, in effect I'm not simply
saying, oh look, I see an effect.
I'm saying the theory suggests that there should be an effect.
There has been in the past.
Here I'm surmising from actual data there is as
well, and that's the basis for saying they probably
did change the outcome because in the past those
kinds of manipulations created enough of effect,
a bigger effect than the one needed to shift 78,000
votes in three states.
HEFFNER: Those 78,000 votes also are something
we haven't adequately scrutinized the question
of whether or not that intervention in our
election, not interference,
intervention was also at the state level with the
outcomes - the numbers of voters and do we have full
enough evidence now to eliminate the possibility
that there were votes that were tampered not just
folks, minds and disinformation that was
catapulting people to turn out a certain way.
JAMIESON: They. It's a really important question.
Our intelligence community has said there is no
evidence that there were vote changes.
We do know, however, is something that's very
alarming from the intelligence community and
that is that in some instances the Russian
hackers got enough access that they could have altered data.
Now the intelligence community is saying they
have no evidence that they did,
but the fact that the level of penetration into
the system was that extensive opens the
possibility that there may have been an impact that
wasn't detected and we know that by one
revelation 21 states had some form of penetration,
although most of those were not the ones that
actually had access, where access was actually gained
to the registration data.
What that suggest is that the efforts our
Secretaries of State to protect our electoral
infrastructure are even more important than we
ever thought they were in the past,
and something and we have every reason to believe
the Secretaries of State are taking this very
seriously, that we ought to be on guard against as
we ask, how do we protect 2020?
HEFFNER: There has been some reporting that the
Russians stayed quiet or we're not as active a
presence on social networks and that might in
part be the implementation of new safeguards for
advertising even though Amy Klobuchar's Honest Ads
Act hasn't been implemented.
We haven't been as rigorous as we need to be,
but as we prepare and recognize that we need to
be more imaginative in shielding ourselves from
this kind of pernicious influence,
what are you proposing that the media can do
which were really reckless in their framing of
narratives around the WikiLeaks disclosures in
the hacking, you and I were saying there needs to
be an acknowledgement on the part of political
reporters with respect to that kind of foreign
interference and acknowledging it and maybe
reporting it differently.
JAMIESON: One of the things that I'm concerned
about is that we learn all the lessons we can from
2016 and the platforms, because there's been so
much scrutiny of the platforms have out are
first are more highly accountable than they ever
were before although there still needs to be
additional accountability and put,
put in place changes that are productive changes.
We need to ask extent to which they're working.
I'd like to see them do more.
But in the press area, if you had to say we've got
three players that are potentially at issue in
this argument for effect, the trolls,
the hackers, and then those in our governmental
system who might have been influenced by the climate
or by the information itself.
It's the reporters I'm actually most concerned
about not being self aware of the extent to which
they played a role in becoming accomplices in
the Russians activities.
So for example, on October 7th,
you're alluding to the fact that at the beginning
of that news cycle, we had the report from two of the
intelligence agencies that the Russians were behind
the hacking.
Shortly thereafter, the "Access Hollywood" tape
and "Access Hollywood" story are posted
by The Washington Post.
Now at that point you've got two stories that are
hostile to Donald Trump's candidacy.
One, the Russians are behind the hacking and
two, the "Access Hollywood tape."
Moments, practically moments within an hour
of the "Access Hollywood" tape, and now this is clearly a focus
on Mueller investigation, the Podesta hacked content is
leaked by WikiLeaks.
The first trench of Russian content,
Russian-gotten content is leaked.
In that environment the news media have a choice.
They've got three things on the table.
The Russians were behind the hacking,
one, two the "Access Hollywood" tape,
explosive story, ordinarily think would end
a candidacy, and three, the Podesta email hacked
content is starting to be leaked.
The media very briefly covered the first story:
the Russians are behind, dropped it to the bottom
of the fold for the next day because the
"Access Hollywood" and Podesta leak began to take dominance.
By that Sunday, the news media had stopped
reporting the Russians had hacked and we had it confirmed.
Now if the reporters had done a good job,
they would have said Russians hacked.
Here's Podesta-hacked content,
and they would have an infused their reporting
with the awareness that it was Russian hacked.
So instead of saying WikiLeaks released,
thereby obscuring the Russian origins,
they would've said WikiLeaks released content
illegally gotten by Russian hackers.
HEFFNER: Right.
The thrust of the focus would have been on the
criminality and the pursuit of the hackers,
and ultimately indicting and prosecuting them,
which only came once Robert Mueller was
appointed to really view it through that lens
because Comey, James Comey was quiet about this up
until the point that he was fired,
but I would submit to you that it's broader than
that with respect to Donald Trump,
the media feed off of him.
Isn't it going to take a certain amount of talent
on the part of his opponent,
assuming that Trump is the nominee for the
Republicans in 2020 to be able to compete even if
journalists are responsible stewards of the discourse.
JAMIESON: It is, but go back to October 7th
and ask the question, what is it then Hillary Clinton
can do if the press frame is ignoring the Russians
did the hacking and as a result it's not part of
the news structure and Hillary Clinton comes back
as she did in both of the subsequent debates when
hacked content was being used in the debates
and said, but wait a minute. The Russians did it.
There's no public structure of awareness to
say she's telling the truth.
There's no backdrop, news understanding and so by
defaulting in its obligation to keep that
piece front and center the press disadvantaged
Hillary Clinton a inadvertently,
but even as she tried to legitimately point to the
intelligence community finding that the Russians
were there and in the process what we have is a
situation in which the news didn't ask the
subsequent questions, and you're pointing to this
because reasonably once you say the Russians did
the hacking, you'd ask, why do the Russians want
to hurt Hillary Clinton?
Why do they want to help Donald Trump? Do they?
What is the difference between their policies on Russia?
Is there some advantage to one candidate's policies
over another?
Oh, Hillary Clinton said things Vladimir Putin really doesn't like.
Would that make her a better or worse?
President Donald Trump seems to be more
accommodating about the Russians.
Is that a good or bad thing?
We never had that press discussion and so the
press did not set the agenda and frame the issue
in a way that let the public understand the whole.
HEFFNER: As you point out in your interview
with Jane Mayer, if it had been secret memos divulged
from the Trump Organization or the Stormy Daniels affair
or the payoff, and if that had all been revealed
in that frame, we would have perhaps had a different
outcome, if they had hacked into the Trump
files that it would have inverted the situation or
at a minimum equalized if you had two sets of
hackers, not that we're condoning any one hacking,
but we're looking at the frame.
Here's what I want to ask you.
The bellicosity have a president's political
communication is not new. We've seen that whether it's FDR,
TR, going all the way back to Andrew Jackson,
but Donald Trump's insistence that fake news
is rampant and that journalists are the enemy
of the people, that is a-historical.
I can't think of a president,
whoever demonized journalists in the way
that Donald Trump has, as a whole cohort in that environment.
Is it not important for us on television and in the
media to just continue to reassert how much of an,
ahistorical anomaly this is in terms of his, his rhetoric?
JAMIESON: It's important first not to accept
vocabulary, "fake news." So one of the big
successes of President Trump has been to get the
mainstream media adopt a language that discredits itself.
At the point at which you say "fake news" you're
assuming there is such a thing.
I'm going to argue that was news as the noun.
Fake news is an oxymoron.
Among other things the things that are fake news
and I would call impostor sites that pretend they're
news fake news, but nothing else,
in that kind of an environment.
When you say that everything I dislike is fake news.
Everything I want to discredit is fake news we
lose track of what we should worry about in the body politic.
I think we want to call it viral deception as the
thing that we're concerned about and not delegitimize
news by suggesting that there is such a thing as fake news.
Legitimate journalism when it's found wanting,
when it makes a mistake corrects itself.
That is a characteristic of journalism.
Viral deception when it's called out,
you say that's deceptive, that's wrong,
does not correct itself.
The hallmarks of news, man that fake and news don't
go together as adjective a noun,
so I want to call it viral deception.
VD, like venereal disease.
I want us to just that you don't want to catch it,
you don't want to transmit it and you've got it you
want to quarantine it and cure it and I want
the negative effect attached to it
and then I want to say our focus should be on what's deceptive.
Now let's look back on news.
If there's a deception in news,
of course we should correct it and good news does.
That's why you can't be fake news because one
characteristic of news is it's self-correcting.
And the other concern about deception is its vitality.
It manages to circulate in the body politic
and we can't catch it, so viral deception
is my preferred term, one big success of President Trump
is he's gotten mainstream journalists to themselves
by using fake news,
HEFFNER: Sure. But in terms of being constructive and looking
towards the political communication of our
future, the antidote or the contrast to Trump,
President Obama said in one of his first 2018
midterm campaign appearances,
I disagree with some of my fellow Democrats.
I don't think we need to fight fire with fire,
but he described fighting fire with fire as those
tactics of viral deception, lying to the public.
I don't think that you fight fire with fire
necessarily through deceptive means. It means charisma.
It means gravitas.
It means sometimes bravado,
sometimes machismo aren't those qualities in
political communication that we are to,
that we ought to see as really requisite in
challenging Donald Trump?
JAMIESON: Well, see, first,
I think the question is to whom are you going to speak?
There are people on each side ideologically who are
locked down attitudinally.
They're never going to change their beliefs no
matter what you do.
The question really is when you're speaking,
what about those people who are kind of leaning to
one side or late into their site,
or genuinely confused or undecided or not political
and about to be politically motivated.
Those are the people you're talking to and the
question is, are there ways to appeal to our
better nature appeal to positive virtues to
positive emotions, not simply appealing to fear,
anger and prejudice, and a skilled communicator can
create a sense of our better self,
motivate us toward it rather than our are more
venal self, our more partisan self,
our more self interested itself.
When the nation is in a mood to accept that kind
of anger, hatred, prejudice,
deception, fear is that in that moment that person is
there because that climate has been created,
not just by somebody but by a lot of some bodies.
I can increase the likelihood that you
or I are feeling partisan and I can increase
the likelihood that we're feeling fearful,
but I can also increase the likelihood that we're
feeling that we want to get it right.
It's called accuracy motivation,
and that we're feeling pride in our community,
that we're feeling that we're part of a collective whole.
The question for politicians is,
can they find that alternative rhetoric.
In theory, that's the rhetoric on which we were
founded and developed as a country.
We've had periods in which we've moved into anger and
fear for extended periods, but we bounced back,
remember the McCarthyism era?
The question is, can we find a rhetoric which is
the alternative and make it compelling.
HEFFNER: These tactics that you chronicle are
really built for politicians who are going
to do the opposite as Donald Trump has aspired
to do as you point out with some success in the
revisionist history of our vocabulary.
One of the most egregious examples of that
manipulation was folks in, in North Carolina in
particular, if you trace it to the origin,
but telling communities that you could text your
ballot, you can text your vote.
And that was one of the most malicious,
deceptive paid ads during the Facebook propaganda
buildup in '16.
It seems like now in North Carolina we have evidence
of actual physical individuals going
house-by-house and collecting ballots and
disposing of them, and so the tactics at work
digitally are almost becoming alive in the flesh.
JAMIESON: Well and one of the problems in a digital
world is digital communication,
although it does many wonderful things –
it provides access to information that is
positive at unprecedented levels so you can be more
informed now than you ever could,
but this is a structure that's set up to play on
anger, fear and prejudice, and because you respond
quickly and viscerally, when you see lots of
people liking and bots can do that,
automatic accounts can do that.
You will press like and share before you've
thought and nonetheless add your voice to the
other voices and your friends see that and are
more likely to accept material that if you had
the time to consider carefully,
you might actually not have sent in that environment.
It is increasingly likely that we're going to see
efforts to mobilize based on fear and prejudice and
to demobilize based on quick information that is inaccurate.
That suggests that you can do things in ways that you can't.
That's the appeal that says,
well, just text your vote in,
it's just fine, We'll get your vote.
HEFFNER: Looking specifically at 2020,
what is the key to undoing the pervasiveness
of that viral deception?
JAMIESON: The platforms have now increased the
likelihood that you see the source of the content
and identify it.
So for example, on YouTube you had RT looking just
like it was a reputable news site or
are originating in the United States.
After all, in 2016 you saw Larry King,
formally of CNN, had Schultz formally of MSNBC
on that channel.
You might well think you're hearing US
originated broadcast, not when you're looking
at YouTube anymore.
They now say, our RT gets its funding from the
Russian government.
Now it also says PBS is partially government
funded, trying to play an equal role in identifying
across the board, but that means at least you'll know
it's the Russians, and that's good news because
we use source in assessing message.
Now you might say, I love the Russians,
happy to be propagandized.
More likely you're going to say,
oh, I might be wary of the content.
Now, it's much harder to buy ads if you're a
foreign national.
You now have to demonstrate on different
platforms that you're actually inside the
United States purchasing in one case by getting content
sent to you that you have to send back
through the mail system.
You've got to provide a social security number,
a business number, all of that to try to minimize
the likelihood that ads, which is the clearest way
to micro target are not coming in from the outside.
That's a big improvement too.
You also have an increased vigilance about fact
checking information, so Facebook now has a
collection and factcheck.org,
which is part of my policy center as part of it,
that we're trying to feature corrections
alongside the misinformation.
So if you search for the misinformation,
we hope you'll read the correction first,
that's less likely, you're less likely as a result to
be influenced by all of those things are
potentially protective.
We need to figure out how we can get more in place
and the press needs to tell us that it's learned
the lessons of 2016. It will not uncritically air content.
It will tell us when it has an independently verified content.
It will tell us who hacked if we know there's hacking
in there, it will not create false scandal
narratives and it will keep things in context.
HEFFNER: I'll commit to those principles.
Kathleen, I don't know if my brethren in the
profession will do so and I don't know what our
means of accounting for those values will be.
Lastly, in the seconds we have left,
what about the macro level?
What about the political communication,
leadership that I think our country will be hungry
for in 2020 to go back to that question of
candidates for higher office who are going to
use their rhetoric as a means of corrective course.
Just like those prescriptions you
identified for the journalists,
for the citizens, for the academic world.
What about the political leadership as an
alternative to Donald Trump?
JAMIESON: I think there is a hunger in the country
right now for the kind of statement that Ambassador
Nikki Haley issued when she said,
our opponents are not our enemies.
Our opponents are just our opponents.
I think everyone who's running for higher office
ought to comfortably make the statement.
I think there's a hunger for recognition that if we
delegitimize the press, we have lost our ability
to hold those in power accountable.
I think there's a hunger for people trying to
articulate the importance of a free press and also
the responsibilities that that entails.
I think it's also extraordinarily important
that our political leaders on both sides call out the
abuses on their own side.
We have a tendency to critique excesses on the
other side, but not on our own.
The most powerful moments and John McCain
demonstrated that in 2008 are ones in which someone
says to his own followers, followers, we don't go there.
We saw that during John Roberts nomination
when a group on the left put up an illegitimate
add factcheck.org.
Fact checked it almost immediately and people on
the left stood up and said, we don't do that. That's inappropriate.
Take that ad down. We should look to McCain.
We should look to those people on the left.
We should say we want more of you in 2020.
HEFFNER: The indefatigable Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
Thank you for being here and I say amen
to that last point. Thanks.
JAMIESON: Good to be with you.
HEFFNER: And thanks to you in the audience.
I hope you join us again next time for thoughtful
excursion into the world of ideas.
Until then, keep an open mind.
Please visit The Open Mind website at
Thirteen.org/OpenMind to view this program online
or to access over 1,500 other interviews and do
check us out on Twitter and Facebook @OpenMindTV
for updates on future programming.
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