Journalist Details 'Brazen Ways' Trump Will Use His Power To Get Reelected

I see some of that on my right-wing Facebook friends links. Boggles my mind the stuff they will accept as true w/o question. Although to be fair, I see liberals accept unlikely things as true w/o question, but not to the extent as the right-wingers. And I don't see the torrent of lies that I see on right-wingers pages.

I suggest reading and/or listening to the whole interview at the following link.

Please support truthful reporting by buying the March issue of The Atlantic.

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/11/804811544/journalist-details-brazen-ways-trump-will-use-his-power-to-get-reelected

Terry Gross
February 11, 20201:39 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

(Reading) The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups and freelance operatives who are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage leaves behind could be irreparable.

That's what my guest, McKay Coppins, writes in his article "The 2020 Disinformation War: Deepfakes, Anonymous Text Messages, Potemkin Local-News Sites, And Opposition Research On Reporters - A Field Guide To The Year's Election And What It Could Do To The Country." It's published in the March issue of The Atlantic, where Coppins is a staff writer. While researching the piece, he tried to live in the same information world as Trump supporters so that he'd receive the same disinformation supporters did. In his article, he explains the surprising impact that had on him. Coppins wrote a 2015 book called "The Wilderness: Deep Inside The Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest To Take Back The White House."

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some of it was partisan spin, but a lot of it, frankly, was just completely false or posts that were designed to recast the - what was happening in the impeachment proceedings and make people think that something entirely different was happening.

GROSS: So give us a sense of the more fictitious narratives that you were reading.

COPPINS: So the overall narrative that they were pushing was that President Trump was, in this Ukraine matter, primarily interested in cracking down on foreign corruption and that Democrats were trying to use this to plot or execute a coup. This is a word that comes up over and over again. That was kind of the message that they were pushing. But throughout the impeachment proceedings, every day that there was a new witness or a new development in the case, the Trump campaign would put out these new videos or these ads that were designed to convince you almost that the opposite had happened.

[I see this on right-winger Facebook pages. As soon as something negative comes out about Trump, there is a post claiming the opposite, or accusing Democrats of doing it.

So there were days when I would watch the impeachment hearings live on TV and I would see what I felt like was pretty damning testimony about the president's conduct in the Ukraine matter, and then I would check in on this Facebook feed and I would see a video that the Trump campaign had put out that took elements of that testimony but cut them together and recast them to make it look like it was an exoneration of the president. There would also be campaign videos that made it appear that all of the witnesses in the impeachment proceedings were just offering their opinions or how they felt and that they weren't presenting any new facts, which was also clearly not true.

But if you were an average Trump-supporting news consumer who wasn't following along on the impeachment proceedings day to day and just saw these videos, you would think that that was the fact, that was what was happening.

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And the more time that I spent in this Facebook feed, the more it felt like observable reality itself had almost drifted out of reach.

GROSS: It turns out there's a word for this, an expression for this - scholars call this censorship through noise. Explain what censorship through noise is.

COPPINS: Yeah, it's interesting. It's a term scholars use to describe what illiberal political leaders have done in other countries, which is, you know, in the past, the way that illiberal autocrats or dictators or whatever function is that they would do what they could to censor dissenting information. They would shut down opposition newspapers. They would jail journalists. They would cut off access to information that challenged their authority or power.

And that still happens sometimes, but a lot of these illiberal leaders have discovered that in the Internet age, in the social media age, in what scholars call the information abundance age, it's a lot easier to harness the power of social media for their own means. So rather than shutting down dissenting voices, they've learned to use the democratizing power of social media to jam the signals or sow confusion. They don't have to, you know, silence the dissident who's shouting in the streets; they can actually just drown him out. And I think that over time, you've seen this in other countries - certainly in the Baltic states, in Eastern Europe, Russia.

If journalism and facts are treated as equal in credibility to partisan propaganda or lies from political leaders, if it's all one level playing field, then it becomes almost impossible for political leaders to be held accountable for their actions because you have a population that's either disengaged or distracted or confused and unable to kind of respond to the various corruptions and scandals and things that they're getting away with.

GROSS: You say that the Trump campaign might be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. What are some of the signs of that?

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GROSS: One of the things you learned about in writing about the disinformation war was how the Trump inner circle amplifies their attacks against journalists who they see as being anti-Trump. So give us an example of one of the stories, you know, that a journalist wrote that resulted in a whole campaign against him.

COPPINS: Yeah. Well, I was kind of made aware of this effort last year. I was on the phone with a Republican operative who is close to the Trump family, working on a separate story. And he casually mentioned over the course of our conversation that there was a reporter at Business Insider, the website, that was about to have a very bad day. And the journalist in this case had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, and that had prompted the president's son's kind of inner circle, his friends and allies, to work together to put together a hit piece on this journalist.

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And I talked to this journalist after the whole thing happened. And he said that, you know, it was very bizarre and unsettling, and he had the feeling that this was somehow a coordinated effort, but he couldn't quite prove it. What I ended up finding as I did some more reporting on this is that there is a very organized project by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of Trump.

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They're not trying to make journalists be better or get them to do their jobs better. They're trying to discredit them and weaponize information and make it so that journalism and facts are seen as on par with political talking points and propaganda.

GROSS: So that you just give up trying to discern the difference between the two.

COPPINS: Exactly, so that everybody feels like, you know, this is all just a matter of opinion. It's all a matter of worldview. It's not a matter of facts. I'll have my set of facts, you have your set of facts, and that's fine.

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I want to get back to the discrediting of journalists and digging up embarrassing information and storing it and then using it when the time is right to attack them. Do you think that this is having a chilling effect on journalists because - let's face it. A lot of journalists now are not only getting attacked on social media. They're getting death threats. I mean, their families are in - are being threatened, too. It's really a terrible period in that sense.

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it is clear that these Trump allies' efforts to discredit the institution of the press are drawing direct lessons from a lot of those countries, you know - because illiberal leaders have long ago learned that when the press as an institution is discredited or weakened, it makes it a lot easier for them to get away with the things they want to get away with.

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COPPINS: Yeah. Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager, spoke to donors in Miami last year and actually said that one of the things he wants to do is train swarms of surrogates - those are his words - to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers.

So I spoke to one political strategist who told me that the way that these are often used is that a candidate who's looking to plant a negative story about, say, a Democratic opponent can actually pay to have the headline that they want posted on some of these these "news" sites - I use news in quotes - these faux news sites. And by working through a third-party consulting firm instead of paying the sites directly, they actually are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file their finance reports to the Federal Election Commission.

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