Elections and Media

Be Prepared to Defend Political Advertising

[Commentary] With elections looming in 2018 that look to generate lots of political advertising, broadcasters should be well versed in defending the current state of political fundraising and spending, particularly the newly won right of corporations and other associations to spend unlimited amounts in support of their causes and candidates.

Assessing Impact of Media

The real information problem—which we at the Hewlett Foundation are actively exploring with potential philanthropic interventions as part of our democracy reform work with the Madison Initiative—is biased news, including misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. Research shows that many citizens are psychologically predisposed to want to read biased news that reaffirms their pre-existing beliefs and tribal identities. This creates obvious pernicious incentives for commercial technology platforms that want to keep people on their sites. So, compared with fake news, biased news will be harder to address.

Polarization and hyper-partisanship remain the key concerns at Madison. However, some recent evidence calls into question the correlation between growing ideological polarization and social media, given that the most rapidly polarizing—older—demographics are the least likely users of social media. So while some actors are motivated by ideological partisanship, some are profit motivated, some seek to amplify prejudices via hate speech, and still others appear not particularly ideological, but instead most interested in shifting the balance of power domestically (or in the case of Russia globally, towards a more illiberal democracy).

Homeland Security official: Russian government actors tried to hack election systems in 21 states

People connected to the Russian government tried to hack election-related computer systems in 21 states, a Department of Homeland Security official testified June 21. Samuel Liles, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting director of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Cyber Division, said vote tallying mechanisms were unaffected, and the hackers appeared to be scanning for vulnerabilities — which Liles likened to walking down the street and looking at homes to see who might be inside. But hackers successfully exploited a “small number” of networks, Liles said, likening the act to making it through a home’s front door.

Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump surrogate, now defends him as a Sinclair TV pundit

TV station powerhouse Sinclair Broadcast Group raised a few eyebrows in April when it hired Boris Epshteyn as its chief political analyst. Epshteyn, after all, was a combative TV surrogate for President Trump during the presidential campaign and briefly was a Trump administration press aide, raising an obvious question: How independent would his political analysis be? The answer, judging from Epshteyn’s first few weeks on the job, seems to be not very.

In his initial pieces for Sinclair, the owner of the largest string of TV stations in the nation, Epshteyn has played much the same role he did during the presidential campaign — as a Trump booster and defender. His “Bottom Line With Boris” segments have echoed positions taken by Trump himself, especially the president’s distaste for the news media.

Pay to sway: report reveals how easy it is to manipulate elections with fake news

Political campaigns can manipulate elections by spending as little as $400,000 on fake news and propaganda, according to a new report that analyzes the costs of swaying public opinion through the spread of misinformation online. The report from Trend Micro, a cybersecurity firm, said it also costs just $55,000 to discredit a journalist and $200,000 to instigate a street protest based on false news, shining a light on how easy it has become for cyber propaganda to produce real-world outcomes.

The Fake News Machine research paper comes at a time of increasing concern across the globe about the hacking of elections and the ways that fake news on social media has manipulated voters. The report delves into the underground marketplaces that can allow campaigns, political parties, private companies and other entities to strategically create and distribute fake content to shift public perceptions.

Russian Cyber Hacks on US Electoral System Far Wider Than Previously Known

Russia’s cyberattack on the US electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.

The scope and sophistication so concerned Obama administration officials that they took an unprecedented step -- complaining directly to Moscow over a modern-day “red phone.” In October, the White House contacted the Kremlin on the back channel to offer detailed documents of what it said was Russia’s role in election meddling and to warn that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict. The new details, buttressed by a classified National Security Agency document recently disclosed by the Intercept, show the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the efforts. But they also paint a worrisome picture for future elections: The newest portrayal of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the US’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling.

In Watergate, One Set of Facts. In Trump Era, Take Your Pick.

Watergate unfolded in a much simpler time in the media industry. There were three major news networks and PBS; a major paper or three in every city; and a political dynamic in which leaders duked it out by day and dined together at night. They did so on a solid foundation of agreed-upon facts and a sense of right and wrong that was shared if not always followed. The Trump-Russia scandal is breaking during a time of informational chaos, when rival versions of reality are fighting for narrative supremacy.

The causes are legion: The advent of right-wing talk radio and Fox News; the influence of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit; and the mainstreaming of conspiracy sites like InfoWars, which had almost five million visitors in the last month. By allowing partisans to live in their separate informational and misinformational bubbles, and, in some cases, to allow real news to be rendered as false — and false news to be rendered as true — they have all contributed to the calcification of the national divide. Mainstream journalism, a shiny and ascendant conveyor of truth during Watergate, is in a battered state after decades of economic erosion, its own mistakes and the efforts of partisan wrecking crews to discredit its work, the most recent one led by the president himself. All of it gives the Trump White House something Nixon never had: a loyal media armada ready to attack inconvenient truths and the credibility of potentially damning witnesses and news reports while trumpeting the presidential counternarrative, at times with counterfactual versions of events.

When Trump got elected, TV writers found new purpose

After the election of Donald Trump, "House of Cards" creator Beau Willimon had to dramatically shift his view of what the future looked like in his next work fiction. Willimon had been developing and conceiving his next show, "The First" for Hulu, for two years at that point. The series, abut the first human mission to Mars, is set 15-20 years in the future. After November 2016, he said, he knew the world in which his show was set had to be very different that what he had initially imagined.

Trump claims ‘vindication’ from Comey testimony, calls him a ‘leaker’

President Donald Trump broke his public silence June 9 on former FBI director James B. Comey’s testimony to Congress in the Russia probe, accusing him in a tweet of lying under oath and calling him a “leaker.” A day after he had allowed surrogates to respond for him, President Trump took to Twitter to attack Comey directly, writing: “Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication … and WOW, Comey is a leaker!”

President Trump’s statement came as surrogates fanned out to defend the president and his personal lawyer was preparing to file a “complaint” early next week over Comey’s testimony to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently.

Comey: Russian hacking ‘massive effort’ against US elections

Russian hackers were meddling with the 2016 US election right from the start of the campaign season. Former FBI director James Comey testified before a Senate Intelligence hearing on June 8, a month after President Donald Trump fired him on May 9. The hearing, centered on Comey's conversations with President Trump, comes amid the FBI's investigations into potential campaign ties with Russia that continue to haunt the commander-in-chief. Allegations of Russian influence on the US presidential election stretch all the way back before the midyear Democratic National Convention, when hackers spear-phished officials and released documents through WikiLeaks.

Greg Gianforte, Montana Republican Charged With Assaulting Reporter, Apologizes

Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican charged with assaulting a reporter the night before he won a seat in the House of Representatives, formally apologized to the reporter and said he would donate $50,000 to a journalism nonprofit as part of a settlement.

Gianforte wrote in a letter to the reporter, Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, that his actions on May 24 were “unprofessional, unacceptable and unlawful.” In the apology, Gianforte promised to donate $50,000 to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an advocacy group for press freedoms and journalists’ rights. “As both a candidate for office and a public official, I should be held to a high standard in my interactions with the press and the public. My treatment of you did not meet that standard,” wrote Gianforte, who won Montana’s lone seat in the House on May 25. “You did not initiate any physical contact with me, and I had no right to assault you.”

Jacobs accepted the congressman-elect’s apology, he said. “I hope the constructive resolution of this incident reinforces for all the importance of respecting the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and encourages more civil and thoughtful discourse in our country,” Jacobs said.

Republican political operatives want to sell the dark arts of opposition research to tech companies

A team of veteran Republican operatives is taking its talent for under-the-radar political muckraking to an unlikely place: The liberal-leaning, Democratic-donating, Donald Trump-hating tech epicenter of Silicon Valley. The newest startup setting up shop in the Bay Area is Definers Public Affairs, a Washington (DC)-based outfit that seeks to apply the dark science of political opposition research to the business world. Their mission: To arm companies with ammunition to attack their corporate rivals, sway their government overseers and shape the public’s opinion on controversial issues.

To the GOP-led political venture, Silicon Valley is a natural target for their so-called “oppo” efforts. The tech industry is characteristically hyper-competitive, with boardroom squabbles, takeover attempts, and legal wars over employees and patents and regulations. Definers hopes to supply some of its future tech clients with the gossip, dirt and intel to win those fights. But the firm’s new Oakland-based operative — Tim Miller, who previously served as communications director to GOP presidential contender Jeb Bush — plans to do it with a decidedly Republican bent. The region’s tech heavyweights have long struggled to form relationships with GOP candidates and causes, so Miller and crew are pitching a way for those companies to leverage the power — or outrage — of the country’s most influential, vocal conservative groups to defeat their political or corporate enemies.

Facebook’s Role in European Elections Under Scrutiny

Facebook provides little information on how political parties use ads to reach undecided voters on the site. And concern has been growing since the American presidential election about the company’s role in campaigns, including about how politically charged fake news is spread online. Now, as voters head to the polls across Europe, groups in Britain, Germany and elsewhere are fighting back, creating new ways to track and monitor digital political ads and misinformation on the social network and on other digital services like Twitter and Google.

5 Unanswered Questions Raised By The Leaked NSA Hacking Report

Here are 5 other questions that remain unknown about this story and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections.
1. How widespread are these attacks?
2. Can the federal government do more?
3. Why do these leaks keep happening?
4. Why can't the US stop these cyberattacks?
5. Will this change Trump's tune?

Politics Fuels Cable, Not Broadcast, News

CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC spend much of their prime-time hours dissecting President Donald Trump's every move and people on all sides of the political spectrum can't seem to get enough. Ratings are up at all three networks. Even with the same material to cover, the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly wraps were down a collective 4 percent in viewership for the season that ended in May. That fits a typical pattern, where news ratings generally rise during an exciting election year and fall when a new president becomes immersed in the day-to-day grind of governing.

Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election

Apparently, Russian Military Intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing e-mails to more than 100 local election officials just days before November 2016’s presidential election. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed US government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A US intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive. The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into US voting systems than was previously understood.

Government contractor charged with leaking classified info to media

The Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet, prosecutors announced in a press release June 5. Court documents filed by the government don't specify which media outlet received the materials allegedly leaked by Winner, but NBC News reported that the material went to the Intercept online news outlet. The Intercept published a top secret NSA report June 5 that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company. Details on the report published by The Intercept suggest that it was created on May 5, 2017 — the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on whether Winner is accused of sharing the report published by the Intercept. In June, Winner allegedly “printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information” before mailing the materials to an unnamed online news outlet a few days later, according to prosecutors.

How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

[Commentary] After 2016’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don’t like. The criticism was well placed: Facebook is the world’s most popular social network, and millions of people look to it daily for news. But the focus on Facebook let another social network off the hook. I speak of my daily addiction, Twitter.

Though the 140-character network favored by President Trump is far smaller than Facebook, it is used heavily by people in media and thus exerts perhaps an even greater sway on the news business. That’s an issue because Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.

Putin Hints at U.S. Election Meddling by ‘Patriotically Minded’ Russians

Shifting from his previous blanket denials, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks in 2016 to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. While Putin continued to deny any state role, his comments to reporters in St. Petersburg were a departure from the Kremlin’s previous position: that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Donald Trump’s victory, the country had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats. Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”

Pew State of the News Media: Cable News Fact Sheet

Cable TV is home to a set of news channels that have become a destination for political news. In fact in 2016, cable news topped Americans’ list of most helpful source types for news and information about the presidential election. Financially, these channels have generally set themselves apart from other news media by their comparatively robust business model. In prime time, combined average viewership for the three major news channels (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) increased by 55% percent to 4.8 million viewers. Total revenue across the three channels was projected to increase by 19 percent in 2016, to a total of nearly $5 billion

During the campaign and the early months of his presidency, the concern over Trump’s Twitter use was political. Now the worry is increasingly legal.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when President Donald Trump refrained from flamethrowing messages on Twitter. That time is over. Never mind that his aides have asked him to stop. Never mind that now the lawyers have told him to stop. Even though his White House has been warned that tweets could be used as evidence against him, President Trump has made clear in the days after returning from a largely Twitter-free overseas trip that he fully intends to stick to his favorite means of communication. Throughout 2016’s campaign and into the early months of his presidency, the concern among Trump’s advisers was mainly political. Every time the president let loose with one of his 140-character blasts, it distracted from his agenda and touched off a media frenzy that could last for days. But now the worry has turned increasingly legal. With multiple investigations looking at whether the president’s associates collaborated with Russia to influence the election, any random, unfiltered tweet could become part of a legal case.

Of what was Greg Gianforte ‘sick and tired’?

[Commentary] Montana GOP congressional candidate Greg Gianforte said of a Guardian reporter, “The last guy did the same damn thing.” From the looks of things, “the same damn thing” appears to boil down to asking questions of the candidate. Polite and relevant questions: Are they what had made Gianforte so “sick and tired”? Are polite and relevant questions what he was bemoaning when he talked about “the same damn thing”? Speaking of the news media as the people’s enemy and singling out reporters in menacing fashion at public events are both aspects of Trump’s trickle-down authoritarianism. He has done both. For decades, Republican candidates talked and talked and talked about the ravages of the so-called liberal media. Historians may look back at recent events — the manhandling of reporter Michelle Fields by a Trump campaign aide last year; the Jacobs confrontation — as the beginning of an action phase.

Democrats want to turn net neutrality into the next GOP health-care debacle

Now that the Federal Communications Commission has released its official proposal to repeal network neutrality rules, Democrats are vowing to fight that measure in the courts, at the Federal Communications Commission, and in the realm of public opinion.

Sensing they've hit on a white-hot campaign issue, Democrats are seeking to stir up a grass-roots firestorm around net neutrality that can thwart the GOP plan — or at least make it incredibly costly for Republicans to support. Democrats argue that Republicans want to strip consumers of key online protections and hand more power back to large Internet providers, and liken the issue to another hot-button topic: former president Obama's health-care law. “The more the public understands about what the Trump administration is trying to do to net neutrality, they'll understand that it's the same thing they're trying to do to the Affordable Care Act, to the Clean Air Act, to gun safety laws — and net neutrality is just another part of the very same story,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA).

By raising the issue of net neutrality to the level of health care, Democrats such as Sen Markey appear to believe they're in for similar victories on net neutrality. The decision reflects a doubling-down on a populist strategy — and it reflects how deeply they are convinced the public is already on their side.

Republicans want to leave you more voicemail — without ever ringing your cellphone

For years, consumers have warred with telemarketers for ringing their landline phones at all hours of the day. Pretty soon, though, they might find their mobile voicemail under the same sort of assault — that is, if the Republican Party and others have their way.

The GOP’s leading campaign and fundraising arm, the Republican National Committee, has quietly thrown its support behind a proposal at the Federal Communications Commission that would pave the way for marketers to auto-dial consumers’ cellphones and leave them prerecorded voicemail messages — all without ever causing their devices to ring. Under current federal law, telemarketers and others, like political groups, aren’t allowed to launch robocall campaigns targeting cellphones unless they first obtain a consumer’s written consent. But businesses stress that it’s a different story when it comes to “ringless voicemail” — because it technically doesn’t qualify as a phone call in the first place. In their eyes, that means they shouldn’t need a customer or voter’s permission if they want to auto-dial mobile voicemail inboxes in bulk pre-made messages about a political candidate, product or cause. And they want the FCC to rule, once and for all, that they’re in the clear. Their argument, however, has drawn immense opposition from consumer advocates.