During the semester, I shall post course material and students will comment on it. Students are also free to comment on any aspect of media politics, either current or historical. There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges.
Flattering interviewees (an actual email to yours truly):
Dear John ,
I hope all is well.
I would like to introduce myself again. I would like to introduce myself. My name is XXX I’m an international producer for Russian Television - Channel One that based in Moscow, Russia. We also have offices in New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles. “Chanel One” is a number one broadcasting company in Russia and also very popular in Russian Community around the world. We have over 250 million audience in 190 Countries. Channel One is as big in Russia as CNN and FOX in US.
We have been working on our weekly news show "Sunday times" about Donald Trump's meeting with Putin. Our network's CEO Mr. Ernst asked me to contact you and include you in our show. He really would like to have you as a part of our show. You opinion is very important for Russian audience. ...
You are very well known in Russia. Russian politicians and regular people look up to you as a peer where they watch your interviews and follow you on social media for inspiring messages. It would be such an honor and pleasure to meet you in person and film an interview with you.
Russia and 2016: The Internet Research Agency (Now Project Lakhta)
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 and a story about "Black Fist"
The report also explains the role of 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 IRA influence 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!"
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.
As the hacking and dissemination of emails unfolded, then-candidate Trump regularly drummed the idea that the election was rigged. In parallel, WikiLeaks had suggested to Donald Trump Jr. that the campaign should challenge the election results should Mr. Trump lose. On October 21, 2016, WikiLeaks sent Donald Trump Jr. a Twitter direct message: “Hi Don, if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT concede and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred – as he has implied that he might do.”
When asked to find Ukraine on a blank map of Europe, only about 1 in 3 voters correctly located the country, slightly more than the 28 percent who were able to identify Iran on a map roughly two years ago in the wake of a U.S. strike on the Islamic Republic’s most powerful commander. Nearly 3 in 4 voters were able to find Russia on the map.
A stringer us a freelancer but one who, rather than pitching ideas to a newspaper, magazine or other medium, is paid to do a specific job for various reasons. (See http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=Dealing_with_stringers.)
Reuters, like many news organisations, uses freelance journalists to supplement its network of staff journalists. We use "stringers" in places where the flow of news is not sufficient to justify the presence of a staff correspondent, in countries where the authorities may not allow Reuters to assign a staff journalist or to cover stories of a specialist nature when we do not have the necessary expertise among our own staff. We also occasionally use ad-hoc stringers for individual stories and assignments.
Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases. We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.
In private, however, Trump was different:
Press conferences were different WH COVID coordinator Dr. Birx reacts to the bleach comments
Experts and journalists often pushed back bluntly on right-wing COVID lies, wielding “The Science” as justification. But in reality, the multifaceted, messy nature of science means that there’s no such thing, in the singular. “That line of ‘following the science’ is so hopelessly naive,” Yong says. “But it’s very quotable, so we end up using it.”
Very early in the pandemic, Kai Kupferschmidt, a colleague of Jon Cohen’s at Science, wrote about major flaws in a study suggesting that COVID might spread asymptomatically. It soon became clear that COVID does spread asymptomatically, but that didn’t stop anti-maskers, months later, from circulating Kupferschmidt’s old story as grist for their cause. The article went viral; Science had to append a clarification. “It’s Greek tragedy stuff,” Kupferschmidt says, “but you can imagine a world where someone reads my story, decides he doesn’t need to wear a mask, goes to a store, meets my dad, infects my dad, and my dad dies of COVID-19 because of a story I wrote.”
Allsop on Fauci:
Last year, I called Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, by now, President Biden’s top COVID adviser. We spoke the day after he had appeared on threeofthe five Sunday shows (I thought he’d sounded tired) and amid a barrage of deranged attacks on his character in right-wing media: Lara Logan, then a Fox News commentator, had just compared him to the infamous Nazi scientist Josef Mengele; Tucker Carlson had compared him to Benito Mussolini. “Breitbart wants to cut my head off, Fox News tries to discredit me virtually every night, and there are all kinds of conspiracy theories like I created the virus or something like that,” Fauci told me. “I mean, that’s crazy.”
Husam Zomlot Palestinian Ambassador to the United Kingdom
"My cousin is not Hamas. These kids are not Hamas."
Husam Zomlot, Head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, lost 6 family members amongst the almost 700 killed in Israeli strikes into Gaza.#Newsnightpic.twitter.com/Oih0hpWhxt
1. Appraise the Biden administration's media strategy in the first two weeks of the war in Gaza. What message is the administration trying to convey? To whom? How? And for what end? Consider the message box, though in this case, there is more than one. That is, the administration is competing with non-US powers (e.g., Hamas, the Palestinian Authority) as well as domestic critics.
2. Pick any current event in the Mideast (e.g., a battle, a terrorist incident). Compare and contrast coverage in at least 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, find some outside documentation of the event in question (e.g., government sources) and learn about the news organizations. Take care to 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 English-language sources at:
4. Pick any other relevant topic, subject to my approval.
Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than six pages long. I will not read past the sixth page.
Please submit all papers in this course as Word documents, not Google docs or pdfs.
Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of Chicago Manual of Style. Endnotes do not count against the page limit.Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
Do not use ChatGPT or any other generative AI. Misrepresenting AI-generated content as your own work is plagiarism.
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, October 27. I reserve the right to dock papers one gradepoint for one day’s lateness and a full grade after that.
Dunaway writes that Members use "the media to send messages to one another, interest groups, the White House, and other political elites" (p. 211 of 11th ed.)
