'Baby Yoda' dwarfs 2020 candidates in interactions with news stories on social media

As some of the readings earlier in the semester discussed, outside of a certain bubble, politics is not a hot topic among many on social media, and many social media users do not interact with politics at all. A recent data analysis by Axios found that social media users found that news stories about 'Baby Yoda,' a character from the new Star Wars TV series "The Mandalorian" get almost twice as much interaction from social media users as news stories about any 2020 democratic candidate.
In terms of overall number of interactions with news stories since Nov. 12, Baby Yoda trails Biden, Sanders and Warren, but gets a much higher rate of interactions. The study also only measured interactions with news stories, rather than overall social media posts, which would likely put Baby Yoda farther ahead.
Axios' story characterized this as particularly bad news for recent entrants Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, how were hoping to sweep ahead in part through a groundswell of support for new faces in the race.

The Impeachment News Industry

The New York Times published a story today titled "The Impeachment News Industry Is Here to Help (Overwhelm You Even More)." It discusses the rise of podcasts, newsletters and at least one video series dedicated to the topic, which all promise to help Americans understand and keep up with impeachment news.

The article reports that podcast and newsletters, specifically, are "in" right now, and that's why media outlets are turning to them to attract viewers/listeners. "Impeachment" — a buzzword that grabs people's attention — is being strategically used as well.

"CNN, for example, has seen two to three times the number of average downloads of its daily political podcast briefing since it was rebranded last month from 'The Daily DC' to 'The Daily DC: Impeachment Watch,' according to Courtney Coupe, the vice president of CNN Digital Productions."

This is an interesting — and evidently effective — tactic to gain listeners. After the impeachment news cycle ends, CNN feels confident it can keep its new audience by transitioning to election coverage.

Nixon Deepfake

Here is the link to a Nixon deepfake video: https://www.axios.com/deepfake-richard-nixon-apollo-11-speech-50268e67-0188-4f03-8f78-9260303a855c.html?fbclid=IwAR2HorfXqqXEo9bLdwdTcspSnXz1jXSGWNI0WjAb6A0Z6RqrcrMoRdEOY0c

Remember What I Said about the Decline of the Alternative Press? (Caution: Strong Language)

Adios Motherfuckers! Today, the day before Thanksgiving, our owner Duncan McIntosh Company has decided to shut us down. For the last quarter century, we’ve tried to bring good stories to Orange County. It’s been fun, but now we’re done. pic.twitter.com/Y51ynOHbgp

— OC Weekly (@OCWeekly) November 27, 2019

A Recommendation to Cancel Local Newspaper Subscriptions?

An opinion piece in POLITICO titled "Care About Journalism? Maybe You Should Cancel Your Newspaper" intrigued me.

Jack Shafer, a senior media writer, discussed the possibility that consumers of local news should pay more attention to who runs their newspaper, and possibly cancel subscriptions to better serve journalism.

But when you pay for a newspaper, you’re also making a decision to send money to whoever owns it. And if you really care about local news, you might want to think twice about continuing your subscription to one of the 50-plus dailies operated by Alden Global Capital under the Digital First Media nameplate in Denver, Detroit, Long Beach, San Jose, Boston, St. Paul, and other smaller cities. Good journalism still gets done at these newspapers because reporters care. But less and less of it gets printed, because Alden owner Randall Smith and his right-hand man, Heath Freeman, don’t care about the news. As newspaper industry analyst Ken Doctor has amply documented, Alden is cannibalizing its papers for profit in a way that should repel subscribers.

Shafer revealed papers that I have read frequently, including the San Jose Mercury News and Orange County Register, whose newsrooms have shrunk drastically in an assault on local news, as Alden continues to rake in subscription revenues but invests less of those earnings in the journalism itself. 

Don’t ask what my breaking point would be if I lived in an Alden town, because I’m a newspaper dead-ender. But if you pay for a local paper and it provides you little value—and shows no sign of doing so in the future—you have every right to cancel.

However, Shafer wrote that most local newspaper subscribers are older, and thus a reader strike of the paper that could have an actual impact is highly unlikely in towns where Alden owns the papers.

Bloomberg News & Bloomberg the candidate

Billionaire former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg's entrance into the 2020 Democratic primary raises a thorny media issue because he owns the eponymous Bloomberg News empire. Bloomberg's leadership recently said it would cover his campaign, but won't investigate him or any of his democratic rivals. Although supposedly in the name of fairness, the move essentially assumes that Bloomberg reporters cannot be objective when covering their publication's owner or his competitors (despite the fact that major news organizations regularly cover — and write stories critical over — their ownership).
According to CNN's media newsletter "Reliable Sources," Bloomberg staffers aren't happy. They said it's "damaging" and "embarrassing," and they're frustrated that Bloomberg isn't stepping away from the company and saying it should be editorially independent.
Bloomberg News' reporter covering the Bloomberg campaign isn't taking it easy on his boss, though. He emphasized the "significant hurdles" that Bloomberg faces, and his background as a Wall Street billionaire and former Republican.
Also, in a striking example of crossover between news media and politics, multiple leaders of Bloomberg's opinion section are moving over for the campaign cycle to work as Bloomberg campaign staffers. Reporters are also reportedly frustrated by this development.

News Media and Entertainment Media

FOR DECEMBER 2, READ GRABER, CHAPTER 10.

Survey data:

• Colbert
• In 2016
• In 2019

Five linkages between news and entertainment:

First, Back to media ownership: news and entertainment media usually belong to the same companies. In 1958, Edward R. Murrow said:

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the coporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.

News anchors and broadcast actors even belong to the same union -- which in turn supports policy initiatives to aid broadcast journalists.

Second, entertainment figures enter news and politics: Reagan and Schwarzenegger were hardly the first. In 1934, novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California.

.


Sometimes the old work of entertainers it ... awkward to see years later.  Al Franken in 1991 played Senator Paul Simon asking Clarence Thomas about ... sexual harassment!! (about 5 minutes into the video).


Also see:

• Pappy O'Daniel
• Helen Gahagan Douglas
• George Murphy (via Tom Lehrer)

Newspeople sometimes involve themselves in the entertainment media. One major example is the movie Dave (1993):

Third, the entertainment media are subject to certain kinds of government regulation.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Late Night host are dealing with the Democrats for their very "unfunny" & repetitive material, always anti-Trump! Should we get Equal Time?

66.9K

4:00 AM - Oct 7, 2017

Twitter Ads info and privacy

44.1K people are talking about this

Fourth, entertainment media are often vehicles for political and social commentary.

• Again Tom Lehrer (1965) on Werner Von Braun
• Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson (Lichter, p.26)
• John Oliver on civil asset forfeiture

Fifth, certain kinds of works are hybrids of the two: talk radio, TV interview shows, "fake news,"

Will Rogers pioneered 20th century comedy.  He also had a bromance with Mussolini

A certain California governor in an early comedy sketch!

A guest that you would not have expected on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Four-Page Paper, Fall 2019

Choose One:

1. Pick any current (2019) event in the United States (e.g., a development in the impeachment controversy). Compare and contrast coverage in two American and two non-American sources (from different countries). How did each define the story? Did any show a bias? Did any miss something important? In your essay, try to find some outside documentation of the event in question (e.g., government sources) and learn about the news organizations. Distinguish between coverage that an organization produces and wire stories that it merely carries. Remember that coverage may consist of more than one story and may involve more than one day. In addition to Nexis (on the library site), here are some possible sources:

• http://watchingamerica.com/WA/
• http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/
• https://www.rt.com
• https://sputniknews.com
• https://en.irna.ir/
• http://www.aljazeera.com
• https://www.bbc.com/news
• http://www.france24.com/en/
• http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/
• http://www.granma.cu/idiomas/ingles/index.htmll

2. Pick any current (2019) event overseas (e.g., the Netanyahu indictment). Compare and contrast coverage in two American and two non-American sources (from different countries). How did each define the story? Did any show a bias? Did any miss something important? In your essay, try to find some outside documentation of the event in question (e.g., government sources) and learn about the news organizations. Distinguish between coverage that an organization itself produces and wire stories that it merely carries. Remember that coverage may consist of more than one story and may involve more than one day. You may find non-American sources above.

3. Write an update to the chapters in Politics Is a Joke. Have John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel taken the place of Jon Stewart and the Comedy Central version of Steven Colbert? How do Oliver and Kimmel both resemble and differ from their predecessors? What effect have they had?

4. Devise your own topic, subject to my approval.

----------------------------------------

• Essays should be typed (12-point) double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. 
• Essays should be Word documents, not pdfs.
• Cite your sources, using endnotes in Turabian/Chicago format. 
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. 
• Return essays to the class Sakai dropbox by 11:59 PM on Friday, December 13. Essays will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness and a full grade after that. 

Thanksgiving Break - Political Fatigue?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democratic-debate-watched-by-6-6-million-viewers-11574381417

"Sponsored by Comcast Corp. ’s MSNBC and the Washington Post, the debate was the fifth among the Democratic contenders. It came after a long day of impeachment hearings that aired on cable news channels, which may have contributed to political fatigue for viewers."

With weeks of impeachment hearings (although lacking "pizzazz") and nonstop campaigning, this past week's Democratic debate seemed to fade in the news cycle despite being an important moment as certain candidates onstage last Wednesday are not yet guaranteed spots in future debates, and the primary is looking as uncertain as ever. 

Building on my last paper and on the topic of entertainment media and politics, I think this brief SNL clip captures the Harris media strategy better than my 6-pages could:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8EQFhj8ca4

The discussion of SNL / Comedy in the readings can be tied to this study published in The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 76, No.1 (Spring) entitled "The Tina Fey Effect: Young Adults, Political Humor, and Perceptions of Sarah Palin in the 2008 Presidential Election Campaign." 

The abstract of the study concludes: "Using panel data of young adults, we find evidence that exposure to Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin's performance in the 2008 vice-presidential debate on Saturday Night Live is associated with changes in attitudes toward her selection as VP candidate and presidential vote intentions. These effects are most pronounced among self-identified Independents and Republicans. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41345969?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents

For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HsyEvr5Pnw

We live in a society

Interesting difference in framing, found on twitter.

https://twitter.com/GarbyJooman/status/1198022768656183296

Protocols

On October 30, we discussed the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It came up today.

Hill on the anti-Semitic smears of George Soros pushed by Trumpworld: "The trope against Mr. Soros ... is the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion" pic.twitter.com/a8AyAzdlQs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 21, 2019

Losing the News

A report from PEN America sums up much of what we have discussed in this class so far:

As local news outlets are gutted and shuttered, reporters laid off, publication schedules cut, and resources tightened across the country, Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions sounds the alarm about the existential threat facing local watchdog journalism and proposes big-picture solutions for its revitalization.

Key conclusions:

•  As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.
• With the shift to digital, the business model for for-profit local journalism has collapsed, as circulation patterns have been upended and tech giants, notably the digital duopoly of Google and Facebook, have siphoned the majority of advertising revenue for content paid for and produced by news outlets.
• Local newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations are being bought and consolidated by hedge funds and media conglomerates and often subjected to relentless cost cutting—leading to coverage that is more national, less diverse, and, in some cases, more politically polarized.
• Newspapers have been hit the hardest, losing over $35 billion in ad revenue and 47 percent of newsroom staff over the past 15 years. Over 1,800 newspapers have closed, leaving more than three million people with no newspaper at all, and more than at least a thousand have become “ghost newspapers,” with little original reporting.
• Because newspapers still provide the majority of original local reporting in communities, their evisceration robs the American public of trusted sources of critical information about health, education, elections, and other pressing local issues.
• Many of the communities traditionally underserved by legacy local media—communities of color, low-income communities, and communities in rural areas—are those most affected by its decline. Finding meaningful, scalable solutions to the local news crisis presents an opportunity to revamp the industry to better represent, reflect, and serve all Americans.
• Across the country, existing and emerging outlets are building out new revenue streams, experimenting with digital-first and nonprofit models, and collaborating rather than competing to better serve communities’ pressing information needs. But in the face of market failure, adaptation and innovation alone cannot address the crisis at the needed scale.
• Philanthropic funding must expand dramatically to make a dent at the local level. Only a small fraction of philanthropic funding for journalism supports local news, and that funding is concentrated on the coasts and a handful of other states and often bypasses smaller and midsize outlets, as well as ethnic- or minority-led ones.
• Legislators and regulators must ensure that technology companies fairly compensate local outlets for the journalism they produce, which including levying an ad revenue tax on platforms like Facebook and Google to fund local watchdog reporting.
• The Federal Communications Commission must roll back recent decisions that enable media consolidation and cost-cutting and clarify and enforce the requirement that media broadcasters produce programming that serves the public interest.
• Given the scope and scale of the problem, a solution is unlikely without dramatically expanding public funding for local journalism, through either reform and expansion of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the creation of a new national endowment for journalism. PEN America is calling for a new congressional commission—a Commission on Public Support for Local News—to assess the viability of these options and recommend a path forward.

Niche Issues, Interest Groups

Helena Bottemiller Evich -- food/ag policy reporter

Reporting drives other media

• The Hill
• Vox
• Mother Jones

The difficulty of covering fragmented jurisdiction:

Other examples:

• The Intelligence Community
• Law enforcement: federal and state-local
• Consultants for police
• Officer-involved shooting
• Social media 

Some examples of niche-issue media:

• Food Safety News 
• Education Week and its special-ed blog
• Inside Higher Ed
• Disability Scoop
• High Times

Corporate public affairs

• Definers and Facebook
• Facebook did it years ago with another firm
• Definers tactics

Other case studies:

Monsanto's Internet campaign against Carey Gillam

Astroturf

• "Free and Fair Markets"  -- website
• "California Drivers Alliance
• Crowds on Demand
• Fake regulatory comments
• Front groups:  'International Life Sciences Institute"
• Support of think tanks

"Off the Record"

During #ImpeachmentHearings break, Rep. @MarkMeadows says, “Let me go off the record real quick...” right in front of the live @cspan camera. He talks about how it’s normal not to obligate all the defense aid. pic.twitter.com/Qv8jvYZ95L

— Real Talk 910 (@RealTalk910) November 19, 2019

Pro-tip: Something's not "off the record" unless the journalist agrees to those conditions. You can't just invoke it without taking a breath and then keep talking... https://t.co/nZWzA3g8Sd

— John Myers (@johnmyers) November 19, 2019

And you cannot do it retroactively 

Locality Labs

At The Guardian, Adam Gabbatt reports on a shadowy operation that tried to influence a Hinsdale, MI, local ballot measure on school funding.

Enter Locality Labs, a shadowy, controversial company that purports to be a local news organization, but is facing increasing criticism as being part of a nationwide rightwing lobbying effort masquerading as journalism.

The company, with two other linked organizations, was responsible for the Hinsdale School News, a print newspaper that was distributed around Hinsdale voters. The paper had the Hinsdale high school district logo, and the look of a journalistic organization. But, as the Hinsdalean reported, the “newspaper” was stuffed full of articles, mostly byline-free, which had a distinct anti-referendum skew.

“The depths of what they went to were pretty egregious,” said Joan Brandeis, who was part of the Vote Yes Campaign.

“This was purposely done to mislead people into thinking that was a publication from the district.”

The unusual effort in Hinsdale – which ultimately failed when Hinsdale voted yes to the $140m funding, was one of the more strident examples of what appears to be a sweeping effort to populate the country with local, rightwing-skewed news sites.

Locality Labs operates scores of sites across Illinois, Michigan, Maryland and Wisconsin, often sharing content. In Michigan alone, the Lansing State Journal reported, almost 40 sites opened in one fell swoop this fall.

“It is always a bit troubling in the current environment when websites don’t really indicate what they’re all about, and sort of hide who is behind them, and I think that’s clearly the case here,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the not-for-profit press watchdog Media Matters.

“In the fractured media environment that we’re operating in now, if you’re just scrolling through your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed and you see an article, you click on it and you might take in the information from there without really ever wondering what the source actually is.”

Investigations, State News, Local News

Actual Malice



The Gloves Come Off (literally)

 

The OJ Trial:  the Sequestration Loophole

Cops and the Media




"Umbrella Competition" (Graber 285)

• Los Angeles Times
• Glendale News-Press
• Crescenta Valley Weekly
• LA Daily News

Alternative and Ethnic Media

• LA Weekly
• La Opinion
• Los Angeles Sentinel

Local TV and duopolies

KCAL/KCBS

The Decline of Statehouse Reporting.

Corruption is the price of scant coverage.

• Isolated state capitals and corruption
• The City of Bell

How to follow California?

• Rough & Tumble (aggregator site)
• CALMatters
• California Watchdog
• Capitol Weekly
• Calbuzz (liberal)
• Flash Report (conservative)
• City News Service (you will find their stories in newspapers)

Stock Photos

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was revealed over the weekend to have used a stock photo from Kenya to promote his Frederick Douglass Plan for Black America.

This is not the first time in this election cycle a candidate has taken flak for using stock photos. President Donald Trump used stock photos in a campaign advertisement over the summer. The advertisement claimed they were Trump supporters. The ad also used a picture of a cafe in Japan as a stand-in for a small-town American main street.

Moments from Today's Not-Boring Hearing

Just an interesting article from Barack Obama's speech writer

https://lithub.com/what-was-it-like-to-be-edited-by-barack-obama/

"Boring" Hearings

Eric Trump demonstrates the "boredom" tactic that Dreyer mentioned for the Whitewater scandal.

Investigations, Impeachments, Presidents, and Congress

The Executive Branch

 Clinton and the Dreyer Memo
The Mooch Memo: "Surrogates/validators are important customers. They need to be serviced, supported, and coordinated better."

• Third-party validators
• Surrogates and spin rooms
• Reverse lobbying

Trump TV

The Legislative Branch

• Congressional Approval v. Congressional Reelection Rates
• Newt's C-SPAN strategy
• Press Galleries: House Press Gallery and Senate Press Gallery
• Social media and staff -- Dr. Glassman on staff allocation
• Sen. Feinstein and Rep. Chu
• Committee: Intelligence and Schiff personal page
• Party:
• House GOP
• House Dems

Courts

Epstein reporting

Project Veritas, a right-wing group, released a video of ABC anchor Amy Robach caught on a hot mic discussing her reporting on Epstein 3 years ago. She says that she interviewed a survivor and had found links to British royalty and American politicians but ABC did not let her run the story. They questioned whether people would care about the story because people would not know who Epstein is. As well, she mentions that the British royalty pressured ABC not to run the story and ABC gave in to the pressure because they wanted an interview with Will and Kate.

To me this seems like a perfect example of what Noam Chomsky was talking about in Manufacturing Consent. ABC got flak from elites like the crown and Alan Dershowitz. The media is oriented towards elite interests and strives to protect them.

Presidency, Congress, and the Media

To start with a handy hint: be very careful about what you say in public places.

Some hack/flack terminology: 

• Close hold: Don't tell anyone
• Gaggle: Informal, off-camera briefing with Press Corps by the White House Press Secretary
• Nothingburger : A derisive term to describe a story or event that doesn't have a lot of importance/significance — but is hyped as though it does
• Pool hold: The place where the reporters and photograhers stay while the president's at an event.
• Pooled Press: A media arrangement where the major TV networks "pool" their resources and one network covers an event for the others. ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC are in the network pool rotation.
• Pool spray : Media are  allowed into an event at the White House for a quick minute or so and photographers are "spraying the room" — shooting from left to right, quickly, to capture the scene.
• Prebuttal: A preemptive rebuttal
• Pushback: Opposition or resistance to a plan and in this case — a reporter.
• VIP pool: When the five networks "pool" their coverage of a very important person's travel.
• Walk it back: To try to refine, clarify or minimize a statement to undo the damage

Review: a typology of leaks


Reflections on pre-Trump press relations.



19:00, 40:00, 50:00


Nixon on the media




Back when this reaction was newsworthy...



Reagan

• Evans-Novak column of March 9, 1981: Stockman trashes Drew Lewis -- animus leak and Stockman's sneaky-schmuck denial
• Evans-Novak column of July 10, 1981: Sandra Day O'Connor -- policy leak
• "The Education of David Stockman"

Late Reagan


Novak had a temper, even with Evans:


He still had a temper in 2005:

 

 Late in life, he explained the leak in the Valerie Plame case:

Warren Doesn't Fight Back

By not responding to criticism, the Warren campaign seems to be handling themselves differently than others. A Democratic strategist explains her plan: “There is much more to be lost in attacking fellow Democrats than there is to be gained for a news cycle or two." Her campaign isn't creating as much media, a strategy challenging the idea that no publicity is bad publicity. Is the Warren campaign doing things right or wrong?

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/08/elizabeth-warren-campaign-067768

Freedom of the Press?

Trump issued a confounding tweet Thursday claiming that "We don't have freedom of the press!" in response to a Washington Post story that reported that AG Barr declined to make a public statement that Trump's Ukraine call was above board. It's not clear what Trump means.

Cord-Cutting

At Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Devin Leonard talks to Disney's Bob Iger about Disney+.  The article is not directly about TV journalism, but the implication is clear:  The future of video lies in streaming rather than cable, which means an ever-smaller audience for cable news.

It wasn’t easy for Disney to shift its focus to streaming, he says. For many years its cable networks, led by ESPN, generated 40% of profits. A big move to the internet was almost certain to cannibalize that business, to say nothing of Disney’s lucrative home-video operation. By the same token, standing pat as consumers fled to Netflix wasn’t an option, either.

Iger says the wake-up call came one day in August 2015, when he revealed that Disney was feeling the effects of cord cutting—people canceling their cable memberships and signing up for streaming services—and that ESPN had suffered modest cable subscription losses. Disney’s shares tumbled 9%. He’d known the stock would take a hit, but not that it would fall that far. “I try not to predict what Wall Street’s going to do, because I’m usually not right,” he says.

Deza

Information Disorder



Misinformation: a photoshop joke that some took as a sinister manipulation:

Disinformation, example from Clair Wardle:

Take, for example, the edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that circulated this past May. It was a genuine video, but an agent of disinformation slowed down the video and then posted that clip to make it seem that Pelosi was slurring her words. Just as intended, some viewers immediately began speculating that Pelosi was drunk, and the video spread on social media. Then the mainstream media picked it up, which undoubtedly made many more people aware of the video than would have originally encountered it.

Deepfakes:



Malinformation -- Trump Jr. tweets name of the whistleblower

Indictment

From a  recent Senate report:

The Committee found that Russia's targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed
to sow discord in American politics and society. Moreover, the IRA conducted a vastly
more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood.
The IR.A's actions in 2016 represent only the latest installment in an increasingly brazen
interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United
States.

...
The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA
information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues
were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the
country in 2016.     Examples

The report also explains an important concept: "payload content"

In practice, the IRA's influence operatives dedicated the balance of their effort to establishing the credibility of their online personas, such as by posting .innocuous content designed to appeal to like-minded users. This innocuous content allowed IRAinfluence operatives to build character details for their fake personas, such as a conservative Southerner or a liberal activist, until the opportune moment arrived when the account was used to deliver tailored "payload content" designed to influence the targeted user. By this concept of operations, the volume and content of posts can obscure the actual objective behind the influence operation. "If you're running a propaganda outfit, most of what you publish is factual so that  you're taken seriously," Graphika CEO and TAG researcher John Kelly described to the Commttee, "[T]hen you can slip in the wrong thing at exactly the right time." 

(U) The tactic of using select payload messages among a large volume of innocuous content to attract and cultivate an online following is reflected in the posts made to the IRA's "Army of Jesus" Facebook page. The page, which had attracted over 216,000 followers by the time it was taken down by Facebook for violating the platform's terms of service, purported to be devoted to Christian themes and Bible passages. The page's content was largely consistent with this facade. The following series of posts from the "Army of Jesus" page illustrates the use of this tactic, with the majority of posts largely consistent with the page's theme, excepting the November 1, 2016 post that represents the IRA's payload content:

• October 26, 2016: "There has never been a day when people did not need to walk with Jesus."
• October 29, 2016: "I've got Jesus in my soul. It's the only way I know .... Watching every move I make, guiding every step I take!"
• October 31, 2016: "Rise and shine-realize His blessing!"
• October 31, 2016: "Jesus will always be by your side. Just reach out to Him and you'll see!"
• November 1, 2016: "HILLARY APPROVES REMOVAL OF GOD FROM THE
• PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE."
• November 2, 2016: "Never hold on anything [sic] tighter than you holding unto God!" 

 
Soviet Operations During the Cold War (at about 3:30)

INFORMATION OPERATIONS AND FACEBOOK



Examples of Fake Facebook posts from 2016 

House Intelligence held a hearing in 2017.  From the committee minority staff:

Russia exploited real vulnerabilities that exist across online platforms and we must identify, expose, and defend ourselves against similar covert influence operations in the future.  The companies here today must play a central role as we seek to better protect legitimate political expression, while preventing cyberspace from being misused by our adversaries. 

• Memo Describing Representative Sampling of Advertising
• Exhibits Used During Open Hearing
• Additional Advertising Not Used During Open Hearing
• Russian-linked Twitter Handles

Going Beyond Facebook

From Fake News into the MSM



RT and Sputnik and OAN

At least one semi-happy ending....



r />

Bubbles, Bias, and Bogus Stuff

Meme Wars

Internet Bubbles in 2016

The Comments Section

• Warren's health care plan -- comments turned off
• Consider Buttigieg
• And, of course, Trump

The Tweeting President

• Over 11,000 tweets ... so far
• The Feed: Retweets and Quotes
• Regular people in Trump tweets

Facebook Usage:  Sharers and Talkers (Hall and Sinclair 109)

• Facebook remains dominant
• Old people share fake news

Third Assignment 2019

Choose one of the following.  If you prefer a topic of your own, please let me know.

1.  In developing a media plan for his impending impeachment, what can Donald Trump learn from Bill Clinton?  In your answer, consider the similarities and differences in the media environments of the 1990s and today.  (You can find primary sources here.)

2.  Benjamin Wittes and Perry Bacon, Jr. offer sage advice about how to read stories with unnamed sources. (Also look back at our 10/2 class.) Analyze at least three recent (2019) stories about a current investigation or controversy that rely on such sources.  Answer these questions:

• Are the stories credible?
• Why do they use anonymous sources?
• How do the anonymous sources differ from the named sources?
• Who might the anonymous sources be?  What might their motivations be?  Be specific.

Obviously, you will need to research the investigation or controversy.  Keep an eye out for followup stories in which people confirm, deny, or sidestep anonymous allegations.

3.  Pick a "niche" issue that is typically not at the top of the news agenda (e.g., California transportation funding, food safety, NASA funding, research on Alzheimer's Disease).  Examine coverage both in mainstream media outlets (e.g., The New York Times) and specialized media (e.g., issue blogs, social media).   What facets of the issue are showing up in the specialized media but not in the mainstream media?  Examine the interaction of the mainstream and specialized media:  is one driving coverage in the other?

4.  Pick any high-profile criminal case from 2018 or 2019.  How did media coverage affect the conduct of the trial and its outcome?  In your answer, consider such elements as gag order, changes of venue, and the press strategy of the opposing sides.

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and in a Word document that is no more than six pages long. I will not read past the sixth page. 
• Cite your sources. Use endnotes in Turabian format. 
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. 
• Return essays to the Sakai dropbox by 11:59 PM, Friday November 22. Essays will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness and a full grade after that.