Trump doesn’t need Russian trolls to spread
disinformation. The mainstream media does it for him.
By
Media columnist
Oct. 7, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT
Voting
fraud, according to study after
study, is rare. Mail-in ballots are, with a few exceptions, a safe way to vote.
But
millions of Americans have come to believe something radically
different: They think the Nov. 3 election could very well end up being
stolen. That the outcome — especially if it relies on counting the votes that
come in later than in a normal election year — might well be illegitimate.
Where
would they get such an idea?
Conventional
wisdom might say it comes from false stories and memes spread on social media,
originating from foreign troublemakers trying to influence the election results
— most likely in favor of President Trump, who is behind in public opinion
polls and stands to benefit most from doubt sown about the reliability of
mail-in ballots.
Not so,
says a major new study:
It’s the American mainstream press that’s doing most of the dirty work.
Eager to
look neutral — and worried about being accused of lefty partisanship —
mainstream news organizations across the political spectrum have bent over
backward to aid and abet Trump’s disinformation campaign about voting by mail
by blasting his false claims out in headlines, tweets and news alerts,
according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University.
Analyzing
55,000 stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 Facebook posts, the study’s
authors traced the disinformation campaign in the spring. It began with a Fox
News interview with Trump, followed by his April 8 tweet: “Republicans
should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats
are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever
reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
Ever
since then, says one of the study’s authors, Trump has been successfully
“harnessing professional journalism” to get the message out. Here, for example,
was the headline on
CNBC’s story on the tweet: “Trump slams mail-in voting, says it ‘doesn’t work
out well for Republicans.’ ” This
kind of coverage influenced plenty of people, especially Republicans — half of
them now doubt the reliability of mail-in voting.
“If
Biden wins clearly by mail-in voting and not in-person voting, you may well
have tens of millions of people persuaded that the election was stolen,” Yochai
Benkler, the center’s co-director and a Harvard Law School professor, told me.
And their outrage could translate into violence.
The
disinformation campaign “is transmitted primarily through mass media, including
outlets on the center-left and in the mainstream,” Benkler said. In particular,
it may be those outlets that try hardest to seem unbiased that are doing a lot
of the heavy lifting, he said — in part because of their broad reach and their
influence on less-partisan voters.
That’s
because Fox News devotees are unlikely to have their minds changed about
anything Trump says, and readers of outlets like the New York Times, for the
most part, are less likely to embrace the disinformation.
But
that leaves a middle 30 percent of the U.S. adult population,
Benkler wrote in Columbia
Journalism Review, that is “less committed politically, and less uniformly
committed to one or the other proposition, regarding fraud and mail-in
ballots.” These Americans “watch the TV networks, CNN, and local TV, and they
trust their local media. That local media, in turn, depends on syndicated
news.”
I asked
Benkler what he would do between now and Election Day if he could make one
change. He said he would get those news sources to stop amplifying Trump’s
falsehoods and do more to counter the falsehoods.
One
important way they can do that, he said, is with “the sandwich approach” —
sometimes called the truth sandwich,
in which accurate information is presented first, followed by the news of the
latest false claim or misleading threat, followed by a fact-check of the
information.
Vox,
for example, used the sandwich approach recently with a story that carried this
headline: “Vote-by-mail is not full of
fraud, despite Trump’s debate claims.” The article itself
stated the accurate information first, then took up the false claim, then
fact-checked it.
Because
Benkler put particular emphasis on the Associated Press, which supplies news to
many local outlets and is regarded as a definitive and reliable news source, I
asked John Daniszewski, the AP’s standards editor, about the complaint. He told
me in an email that for years, the news service has been advising its
journalists “to avoid amplifying misinformation and to use techniques like the
truth sandwich.”
For
example, on Tuesday, rather than emphasizing Trump’s remarks about his triumph
over the novel coronavirus, which the president again falsely compared to the
seasonal flu in terms of severity, the main AP story’s headline read: “Trump,
contagious in the White House, back to downplaying virus.”
AP
Managing Editor Brian Carovillano added that the news service is putting
particular emphasis on all-important headlines — and on top paragraphs of
stories, because that’s as far as many readers get. He also pointed to hundreds
of deeply reported stories, over many months, on election access and voting
issues, meant to provide context and counter misconceptions.
But
with Trump’s ability to control and dictate the news — and with the power of
his own Twitter feed and the relentless amplification from right-wing outlets,
particularly Fox — these solid practices and this good work apparently aren’t
enough.
It’s a
problem that comes up every time Trump commandeers the news cycle, as he did
Monday evening, timing his departure from Walter Reed National Military Medical
Center for shortly after 6:30 p.m. — just as the network news shows were
beginning their evening broadcasts, watched by tens of millions every night.
Trump’s
daily coronavirus briefings, similarly, often downplayed the seriousness of the
virus and gave dangerous attention to unproven treatments, but the news media
faithfully covered them. I was one of those who suggested not taking those
broadcasts as live feeds, but rather reporting on them after the fact, with
fact-checking incorporated into the story But, at least in the crucial early
days, most news organizations found them too irresistible in their live form or
were unwilling to give up the audience share to competitors.
So forget
the bots and Russian trolls, or at least don’t overestimate their influence.
The defining media story of this era is mainstream journalism’s refusal to deny
Trump a giant megaphone whenever he holds out his hand.