This is a really weird tweet. https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1317618438362157057

Imagine being the type of person who thinks that weirdly, Dems just happen to endorse uniquely corrupt candidates! Twice in a row! And that had they just nominated the other candidate in the race that it would have gone off without a hitch.

Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Bullock, Booker... et al. No matter who they nominated, yes, this was going to be the final play from the Trump team. Had Bernie won the primary, we’d be hearing about some nonsense smear against him.

Biden wasn’t even in my top 5 preferred candidates out of all the people who ran. There are many people who were running whose policy views more accurately match my own — including Sanders. So while I think it would have been great had he won the primary for policy reasons,

... one side benefit of that would have been that the same people who spent 2016 (and now 2020) “tsk tsk tsk”-ing everyone who pointed out that it was an influence campaign of bullshit would understand how universal that kind of campaign can work. Against anyone.

The issue is that the way information spreads in traditional media and online makes these sorts of campaigns pretty easy to carry out. And they’re effective.

For instance: if you insist a document is damning, smoking gun evidence of a campaign-destroying scandal, and it’s just you doing that, the next person who comes along can say, “What? No it doesn’t. I looked at it myself.”

But...

... If you have news outlets willing to blast out your message claiming that the document is proof of whatever, backing you up, it gets harder for individuals to push back. Even if they’re right.

That’s the right-wing media ecosystem. That’s what’s happening.

One example of this was the “death panel” lie about the ACA. Remember that?

Here’s a poll from 2012. The ACA had been law for more than 2 years. A sizable segment of the population was still convinced it has “death panels” https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/258753-poll-four-in-10-believe-in-health-law-death-panels

Once people get convinced of something, it’s hard to get them to change. What may begin as an astroturf/propaganda effort will, if successful, become a genuine belief among certain segments of the population https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8273007/obamacare-poll-death-panels

As I’ve repeatedly said: “here’s someone’s hacked/leaked emails” is not a newsworthy story in itself. There’s zero news value in what NYP has put out. These things are being framed in a way to prime people to believe that they’re evidence of...something bad, not specific.

Same exact thing that happened when the Mueller report came out. Within 15 minutes of that being posted online there were already people insisting that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing and everything was some sort of conspiracy theory. But it’s not what it said.

It’s about getting a message out into the world and making it become the accepted truth. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually the truth. It’s why Barr wrote a letter that summarized Mueller’s findings so inaccurately that Mueller himself had to write a response saying so.

But because of Barr’s letter, every newspaper in the country proclaimed Trump’s innocence even though the report itself made very clear that it didn’t establish “innocence,” and that no matter what they’d have found, they couldn’t charge Trump with anything.

It drives me up a wall that journalists of all people fall for this stuff. But let’s be clear: they only fall for it because on some level they *want* to fall for it. Grim knows better. Greenwald knows better. All the “anti-anti-Trump” contrarians know better.

That is EXACTLY what this thread is about! How do you not get this?!

Let me break it down for you: no such candidate exists. None. No one. Nowhere. And certainly not in the Democratic primary. How is this not sinking in? https://twitter.com/mattgrawcock/status/1317640087832825856

Exactly. When he ran for president, he had about as clean a record as could be. But then there’s birtherism and Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko and so on. None of those were actually scandals. They were manufactured controversies. https://twitter.com/adamkotsko/status/1317641153517322240

The difference between 2008 and 2020, unfortunately, is that the way information gets shared is optimized for this, and the network of media outlets that amplify manufactured controversies is stronger than ever:

There’s no candidate who’d make it to Election Day.

People reverse engineer justifications for their views all the time, moving the goalposts as they go. Here’s an example:

1 + 2.) It’s ridiculous to think this thing happened

3.) Well, we can’t be sure this thing happened

4.) It’s good this thing happened

Also, one thing I think doesn’t get enough attention when discussing 2016 and influence campaigns: the unintended consequences.

In all, there were maybe... 3 or 4 mini-scandals that came out of the DNC emails. Give or take. But every day you’d have major news outlets ...

... blasting out stories that were like “New leaked emails!” It suggested that there was something newsworthy in them. Why? Because ordinarily, if there’s a story that ends up in the news, it’s newsworthy (obviously). The very existence of a story suggests something’s amiss. ...

That was one issue. Newspapers should have published stories about anything that was actually of note in those leaks. Write those stories about the 3 or 4 things that were actually newsworthy. Absolutely.

But in 2016, the story was often just “emails exist.”

And here’s the problem with that: If you present something to someone, priming them to believe there’s something nefarious in what you’re showing them, they’re going to try to put pieces together that may not actually even exist. Just for the sake of solving the puzzle.

And that happened in 2016: people started seeing codes that weren’t there, their brains filling in the blanks, fueled on by others doing the same thing: out of that, we got the absolutely bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy... which led to the QAnon stuff.

That’s why journalists matter: they contextualize information and verify facts *before* throwing a story out into the world. They don’t just float things out there and go “something in this email is probably a crime, but idk. Just planing seeds of suspicion.”

Utterly irresponsible.