[inaudible] >> booktv continues now on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> good evening, everyone. >> good evening. >> i am tracy dimond from enoch pratt free library. thank you for joining us at maryland state library for the blind and physically handicapped, and welcome. please take a copy of compass to learn about our upcoming programs or a flyer to my right,

you're left, and you can also check out our website pratt library.org to learn but everything going on like the new streaming service we've launched where with your library card you can use canopies, that's name of the service to watch oscar award-winning films and documentaries in addition to over 3000 of the films. it's pretty incredible. so tonight kathleen hall jamieson will talk and then will have q&a and then it will be time to mingle and buy books from the local independent bookstore, the ivory bookshop. kathleen hall jamieson, elizabeth prefers argumentation at the annenberg school for communication of university of pennsylvania is also the director of its annenberg public policy center. among her award-winning oxford university press books are packaging the president, eloquence in an electronic age,

spiral of cynicism, and the obama victory. tonight will hear her talk from and about "cyberwar: how russian hackers and trolls helped elect a president." where she draws on pathbreaking work in which she and our colleagues isolated significant communication affects in a 2000, and 2008 presidential campaigns. she explains how by changing the behavior of key players in altering the focus and content of mainstream news, russian hackers reshaped the 2016 and electrodynamics. so it is sure to be a very interesting conversation so please give a warm welcome. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you to come out on a bitterly cold evening and thank you to the c-span book viewers. hope you're in a warm place and one of which have a hot drink in front of you because this is a

generally depressing topic. let me start with a predicate, which is the 2016 was an unusual year. i don't expect you to dispute that idea but let me tell you why from a communications standpoint that it was an unusual year. ordinarily when we study communication and politics we pretty much can say that by the conventions you know who is likely to win the election. you can do that because you have enough people who are tied to the political party to say that basically if you like the candidate of the party, they are highly likely to vote for the party. there's a big enough distance between the candidates, it's pretty likely was the largest party at indication is the most likely to win the election. there are years that are exceptions in which elections extremely close. when the election is close, communication is more likely to matter but that's not the only reason that 2016 is a unique year. 2016 is unique because there were conditions that made communication more likely to have an effect on vote rather

than less likely. the first is very high levels of absentee balloting come with absentee balloting occurring during a time in which you are very high levels of media coverage of russian hacking and you had high amounts of russian activity in cyberspace. so ordinarily wouldn't be enough voters to persuade but since u.s. absentee balloting and it was tied to a very high level of undecided voting, it means anything that comes into the communication environment in the last month or so has a greater chance of being able to change the vote that it would for except for all voting on election day and those things are happening a month earlier. it's a combination of high level of the absentee balloting and a high number of undecideds as we are closing into last weeks of election, it is almost one in it. there are other factors that are at play as will. party is what holds people pretty much to their vote.

on average about night editing democrats are going to vote for the democratic candidate. they may waffle but they will eventually be likely to vote for the democrat. about nine out of ten republicans are likely to vote for the republican. .. >> there wasn't a great deal of affection for other of the two major party nominees. there were a lot of people who when they had their folk in hand or they went into the ballot box, they were kind of holding their nose as they cast their vote and under those circumstances, that's a

more difficult vote to cast. you might stay home, itmight be harder to get you out to vote . also remember, we had higher than average numbers of undecideds and independents and during this poll, we had absentee balloting. if something major happens and people have that ballot in hand, a communication stimulus can be created so in this context, the question is did the russian interventions do enough to change 78,000 votes in three key states hillary clinton won the popular vote, donald trump won the electoral college and he did it by capturing three battleground states . there are other factors at play in the election and it's easy to say i know why the outcome occurred the way it did. it was something hillary clinton did, something she said or something donald trump did that people like so i need to set up a situation which we specify all of that

is going to happen and it's all ached in,it's not going to change . if you held all those things content, everything that was good or bad that any of the candidates did, you assumed they were going to happen anyway, they were going to sit there. is there enough difference in the russian intervention to push 78,000 votes in one direction or another ? it's not a big number but it's not a small number either. what i don't and can't say is all these other factors might not be at play in the election, they obviously did. they got us to where we were where 78,000 votes is an issue but which of those votes if anything? i'm not going to make a case conclusively that the russians did it.

i'm going to make a case that i think there's a strong argument that they may have. i'm going to make a case for probably the probability, not for certainty and that's the reason for asking the question the way i have. how did russian actors help elect the president because all the other factors are there and because there is no evidence at least not in the public domain that the russians intervened by changing votes. they did get access to a few registration systems from our national security folks but didn't actually change ballots so you can't say they elected because they didn't pull levers and all these other factors are there. the question is, did they help? did they tip the balance to move 78,000 votes and that's the question i'm going to ask. as the author of other books and as an elderly woman, i don't usually have new experiences.my life is pretty predictable. i research, i am grateful on any given day that i wake up feeling healthy and can walk because i've had a couple

back surgeries. i don't expect to besurprised by anything. i was surprised by this . >>. [inaudible] russians persuaded enough people in the right space to vote a certain day and they've indicted several more russian intelligence agencies so we've had 13 indicted, 20 people persuaded 300 million americans to vote in a certain way or persuaded people not to vote at all. so if 20 people could do that to millions, then they are geniuses how many of you know what rg is?

what is called russia today is now called rt. those who are in the social media sphere, rt means retweet so when you go into your hotel room, i invite you to look weathered to see rt is on your cable menu because you'll find it in a surprising number of places. this is the kremlin talking to you and there are familiar faces on these channels. these may not be familiar faces but frank king is on this channel, ed shall was on this channel. you could see him as well so the people who watch rt haven't realized that this is an outlet that was once called russia today but rt has commentary about my book. that for me is a brand-new experience. it didn't get my argument right but i want to say i was thrilled.

thank you, kremlin. to set up the argument they're going to try to make i want to show you another clip. this is mike huckabee. >> there was action by russian actors or the russian government but to make the reasoning that they changed the election results, these are big ones. >> that's beyond any belief. you have to believe in unicorns to go there. thefact is there were allegations the russians may have hacked into the dnc computers but there is no evidence it had any impact on the election . >> over here we have do unicorns exist and over here we have the russians absolutely categorically did it. my argument is unicorns over here, russians absolutely did it looks like this. what did the trolls, the imposters in cyberspace ,

pretending us nationals do? they get us into this realm of certainty. unicorns certainly did it because i don't know whether they're targeting this precise enough to reach the voters but the platforms know that they haven't released the data. unicorns, absolute certainty, trolls. more certainty,because we know they changed the media agenda and we have polling to

suggest they may have done it in a consequential way and a strong theory that says when you change a media agenda and you change the criteria people are using as a result in effecting a candidate, that can influence votes. we also know when you create in balance in messages so there's more negative messaging about one candidate, that's where you get communication affect which is why we don't usually see them in campaigns. usually communication makes little difference becauseboth sides advertise message , they talk to constituencies that are roughly equal at comparable levels and they balance each other out . so if someone else comes into this equation and pushes up the message balance, that's where we see changes and we saw that historically in 2000, saw it again in 2008 so where there is a message in balance, that's where you see communication affect . if the russian hackers create a message in balance by getting more information about hillary clinton or the trolls in some people's media feeds, that's where you expect to ship votes. not massivenumbers but enough numbers that on the margin you could change any election and unicorns here, over here, absolute certainty . if russian disinformation influenced james comey's a decision to make public the laptop, if the russian

disinformation played a role in his decision to makethings public which he did by notifying congress because it became complete almost immediately , then the case becomes more certain because the effect of the end of the election when those nine days change the media agenda are clear in the polling data. there's a 2 and a half point shift and that's a conservative shift . i'm being conservative in saying 2 and a half one in hillary clinton's lead at that point, attributable to the server coverage and coverage of the comey investigation so certainty, unicorns. trolls, hackers. russian disinformation. if kathleen is going to make an argument that this could have created, there are any number of combinations of those thingsthat would increase the likelihood that there was an effect . this isn't an argument that says this alone or this alone

although in the comey case there's a strong argument that if russian disinformation, that that was credible but there's enough there the argument becomes more plausible and if the message imbalances are created so that the argument i'm trying to make and i'm going to make it based on research that the community has doneand i've done with my colleagues over the years . we had the good fortune of being in the field with what's called a rolling cross-section in 2000 and all that means is we were in the field surveying every single day . rather than aggregating up five days of data and saying we know in this five days, we had a random sample every day and it means we can watch day-to-day changes in the electorate across time. we have over 100,000 in 2000, the largest survey the academic community had run until that time and it's an

incredibly close election and it's an electionin which one candidate wins the electoral college and we had the advantage in that election because we didn't have social media yet . being able to say that, it's over here in the battleground. it's not over here in the non-battleground. what that means is we could see what happens when you've got advertising versus not advertising and comparable kinds of voters and there was one more advantage that 2000 handed us and in the last week of the campaign, you had a breaking news that there was a dui back in george bush's record and as a result in the last week of that campaign, he basically went silent on television. he was only on the network evening news one night. that's an area in which we

still had major broadcast networks giving time to candidates and discussing serious issues so al gore took advantage of every one of those weekday nights to talk to the candidates about issues and meantime george w. bush did not with the exception of one day and in those environments, george bush was hammered by al gore on the social security issue where the question was is george bush going to short change social security or not? depending on which construction you were going to use linguistically of their two positions so what happens in that environment is you've got a message in balance. you've got a lot of exposure for gore and news across the whole population, less so for bush whereas in the battleground, you could compare what advertising is doing in oneand not the other and here's the third thing we had . gore ran out of money in that campaign and as a result he conceded key battleground states. he was under spending bush and we get to look at the results of message in balance.

we drew the conclusion that what shifted the votes on the margin and helped gore nationally win the popular vote was the difference in messaging and news over a week. what helped bush win the electoral college was the imbalance in advertising . that's one of the reasons when we came into the 2000 campaign, we were looking at specific messages in advertising and asking when candidate obama outspent candidate mccain, and he did dramatically, could we see that message pushed up inside our polling data ? we're in the field every day and we matched up the voting data to the advertising data for cable, television and radio. social media was not a big factor and were able to show that as the obama messaging went up , it began to push

votes in his direction in the margins, specifically through those issues he was advertising on. at the back drop for saying when you see these imbalances in 2016, we have a reason to think imbalances matter and the question is were there and balances in a situation where we assumed all the other things that were going to happen are not going to change so where that imbalance coming in by the russians? we're going to argue that russian trolls, they had a sound theory of the election and i'm going to argue that actors affected the press agenda and my theory would be that they change it in ways to create message and balance and change through the case of news of the kinds of things people were focused on because we have another body that says when something becomes more important to you, you're more likely to use it in assessing candidates. we don't use every possible consideration when we're

trying to figure out how to vote, we use the ones most salient to us and thosethings are put in place in part by forms of communication . >> i'm going to argue the jury was sound, hackers affected it. start with the trolls and i magnify cultural change. they targeted voters they needed to target, tried to mobilize evangelicals and veterans, the immobilized black voters and sanders supporters and shift nonliberal center supporters and those different disaffected off rather than casting a democratic vote to jill stein. if this theory is consistent with donald trump needs electorally, i started out very skeptical of the notion that someone in st. petersburg could figure out how to influence an election. when the washington post asked me to write the op-ed which was the genesis of this book , it did so because social media platforms in late october were beginning to slow the advertising

content on their sites. the washington post said you've studied does, did this help elect donald trump? that's how i wrote this book. i started saying look at the evidence and see but i was doubtful until i looked at that ad and to my surprise found they had a theory of what donald trump needed or on the other side what one needed to do with ellery clinton was electorally sound . donald trump couldn't mobilize white evangelical christians and white catholics, at least roughly to the romney level but he couldn't mobilize military households and veterans to the romney level, and he wasn't going to win the

electoral college or the popular vote and if you look at the statistics in august, it's way below where he needs to be with both of those constituencies. the trolls went after those constituencies to try to swing them against hillary clinton and i was surprised to see that. if you wanted to hurt hillary clinton, the constituency she needed most were black voters. she didn't need to get the all obama level but somewhere in that range and i was surprised to see they spent most of their efforts here trying to demobilize african-american voters and if you want to demobilize sanders supporters, make sure she can't get her coalition put back together and just to be sure that your shifting enough people away from her that they're not going to vote for trump, there's a move to shift aside and that also surprised me because you'd expect it to shift someplace, they'd shift toward gary johnson because he's going to get more votes on average, libertarians are a bigger constituency than the green party but they were pretty savvy in their understanding of what the electoral needs were of donald trump or the potential electoral things they need to

activate for hillary clinton. they also were tied into the trumpmessage structures in ways that were consistent with donald trump's messaging. they're largely not putting new messages into play for the trolls . they're largely taking existing messages already in conservative and more right-wing media sphere and amplifying it, making it more salient and they're doing it in a way more consistent with what donald trump is saying. they also targeted voters they needed to target so here's survey data about a dominant constituency donald trump needed to reach.i'm going to let you read it because i tell my students you can read more rapidly than i speak. my students doubt that buti don't . those who believe the us needs protecting against foreign influence are 3.5 times more likely to vote for trump .

with two thirds of white working-class say american culture has gotten worse, 68 percent say the us is in danger of losing its identity, 62 percent said immigrants threaten the country. more than half say discrimination against whites has become as problematic as discrimination against minorities. these attitudes are there, the question is did he harness them? if you hold these attitudes you are more likely to support donald trump so if the trolls are coming in with messages consistent with this, they're not only being consistent with donald trump but with his electoral needs to reach these voters . here's a cultural change. now you know why i'm not reading this out loud. -- let me pause for a moment

to talk about the nature of social media. a social media environment is highly likely to be talking to people who are like us ideologically. not all of us, but most of us. it's an environment that tends to draw together people who already agree with. they don't necessarily live near each other but they get into communities where they like and share things in common so it becomes an area in cyberspace in which people are likely to relate things to each other that there already disposed to believe and in the process, they're more likely to share with other people are outside that sphere by talking to them in a kind of two-step flow phenomenon. my colleague at the university of pennsylvania demonstrated that in the past year so materials online just influence the people who get them, it influences the people who are talked to by

the people who get them and in cyberspace, you've got a tendency to life and share without really processing things deeply. we move quickly and we see an evocative image to hit like, to hit share and if lots of people like it and lots of people are sharing, you're more likely to think you like and share it and your quicker to share the material so what happens in an environment in which someone takes bots which are automatic processes and amplifies that material by creating the illusion that lots of people like this . doors of those arguments, those are bots liking and the bots are creating the sense that this is normative, this is something everybody accepts. what you're doing is creating an environment that's right for anger, fear, negative emotions and that is self reinforcing and that can in

the process increase the likelihood that those outside those social circles get some impact and that's my theory of how the social media environment is changed politics. in the past when you have something in print time to read it in print and that took time to share it with someone else. it was a slower process. doesn't mean you didn't share it, doesn't mean it didn't influence you but it didn't have a quick visceral movement that had right now. and you saw something in print and you couldn't say he, thousand or 2000. people agree that this is great content. it wasn't that kind of social structure around the sharing. to create a sense that we all adapt it but in that environment you get a persuasive power and you get what some call a contagion effect. they magnify calls for change, targeted voters they needed and nowlet me talk about those voters . i'm going to show you materials. they started with denying you'll. and that helps aggregate the

audience. so to the extent that you like this, you probably like this kind of content, probably identify with jesus, now i've got you identified riyadh now i can use a look-alike function in social media to figure out what other people like you are. i can start to identify the people who like this kind of content. one of the things that people assume mistakenly when they approach this book is that i'm going to make the argument that the trump campaign had to have coordinated in order to make this happen. and i'm going to argue the opposite. because built into the social media structure are those ways to reach people that made it possible for someone in st. petersburg once you knew who to reach to reach them very easily. require any coordination you have to figure out how to get the message and then use a look-alike function to find people who are like that and aggregate those people up .

and you also had to find a way to figure out who donald trump needed to influence? i read a book called spiral of cynicism. and i can tell you that you don't need insider information to figure out which candidate needs which voters and where they are. our immediate do a great job of making us into campaign consultants. they spend more time telling us things that are useless to voters or helpful to campaign consultants than they do just about anything else and what jill and i showed in a book called spiral of cynicism is that tactical coverage activates learning but it does something else. it means that you can read english and you're in st. petersburg , you've got a guidebook for who you have to reach. you didn't have to be smart or know anything about the electorate although they did say learn such things as you want to work inside the state, they didn't have to come here to find out what nonetheless you can figure out my reading our media pages of books in which i" literally from media outlets

about what you have to do in florida, what you have to do in pennsylvania, who you shouldn't try to reach, being successfully reached . you've got capacities in social media and you got the information you need practically adding inside our media structure and then they sell the clinton playbook. they had a turnout model for the three states and for the clinton campaign so we know they have to , presumably when hackers got it, they shared it with the trolls. i don't know that for certainty but i will let you in the scintillation of the kremlin they figure out how to pass that through with any of that there was no need for any coordination inorder to accomplish everything i'm showing you. it doesn't mean there wasn't, it just means you didn't have to have it in order to see what i'm seeing . >> now we're going to start moving. >> clear issue identification. >> more clear issue identification.

mobilizing veterans. >> this is taking a statement by hillary clinton out of context . a commonly used in conservative media. mobilizing veterans. mobilizing veterans. >> this is an ad that aired by an independent expenditure committee in the united states . not russians. >> there's so much at stake in this election and that's whyi'm supporting hillary clinton. hillary clinton is honest and trustworthy . >>. >> i don't believe whati'm saying. >> but you're an actor . >>. >> honest and trustworthy, give me a break. make americanumber one is responsible for the content

of this advertising . >> was sponsored by the crooked hillary clinton pack, backed by robert mercer. breitbart run my and featured the same still photo from the video. was featured by the russian full account at canógop which share the ad and was then retweeted by michael flynn. what does this show you? there's a synergy that takes existing content and amplifies it out. try to extend its reach and in thiscase to try to demobilize african-american voters . more demobilization attempts. >> sanders supporters. sanders obviously didn't say that. and the stein.

stein of all these pieces was the most interesting because once you look back, things become more obvious than they are when you're working in the campaign. i would have expected a try to mobilize people and ship them over to get the libertarians.instead it still stein. here's an appeal, vote for jill stein, it's not a wasted vote. only way to take our country back is stop voting for the corporations andbanks . book jill stein. here's the search and buy a news outlet, a search of sputnik archived shows that 100 stories on air and online were in the green party. >> that's interesting. and if you think about picture you've seen of michael flynn with vladimir putin, you look at the rest of that pictureand you'll see jill stein was at the same dinner . as an anniversary dinner for rt riyadh so suddenly, the move stein makes sense because time is more

hospitable to russian views been gary johnson had been. so there's some logic behind the move to get people to shift over to stein. that said, you take the baseline vote jill stein and this is convenient because she was the candidate of the party for years before so you got the same candidate which means you control what people thought about the candidate. take the difference between her vote in 2012 and interbase level of support given the traditional democratic nominee, and you put the difference between that and the boat she got in the three key battleground states and two out of those three states the difference alone would have been enough to ship those state. so there's not an insubstantial entries and support for sign. maybe there's something else going on out there that i haven't seen but i haven't seen it. and if you didn't share it with me, we're interested to figure out where to that mobilization come from, we do know the russians were trying

to help . so this is what i've argued so far. but i don't know about the trolls is whether they're targeting was precise enough. i know it could have been because they had access to voter playbooks would have made that possible but i don't know that that happened. my argument for them is over here and like continue, it's a more tentative argument than hackers. hackers affected democrats around the democratic national convention and what they were doing at that point was putting out information that suggested vendors porters should not stay with the democratic ticket. the news agenda before presidential debate on october 9, that the second debate. the affected agenda through october and the agenda during last two debates and affected the agenda i would argue but not through the content but through the illusion of having content in the last 11 days if they influence that decision. let's first look at the convention. first effect, the material

that suggests there was a scale of the dnc against sanders, content is released and debbie wasserman schultz resigns. that's a disruption and as hillary is trying to consolidate the base, content from democratic operatives. >> .. information being used to try to discredit the clinton foundation so there's a second track of information that begins to come out at this time. the debate, sorry, the news agenda for the second debate. october 7 is an important day. in 2016. i'm sure one of the things you

will remember although you may not member as october 7 is some vulgar statements by candidate trump. some language that it never got into news before it got into news including grab them by -- and i will not repeat the rest of the sentence. the "access hollywood" tape rakes on that date but that's not the first news event of the day. the first news event is one that says the office of defense intelligence had made announcement along with homeland security that says the russians were behind the hacking. that's major news. you could raise we say that will be above the fold and lead the newscast for the weekend. the question is how do you know that? you do work for barack obama. can we trust this? also ask, is it accurate, , why would they want to hurt hillary clinton? so the first news event of the date as that. the second is the "access hollywood" tape. now you got an event that an

ordinary circumstances would tank the campaign. very serious video allegations. remember what it took to into the candidacy of gary hart. we now have a movie about that. within an hour of the time that story breaks in the "washington post" we have a third news event of the day, and this is the one the mueller investigation appears to be focused on. we get the hacked materials from the desta, the first tranche comes up. -- podesta. the news folks have a choice. they got intelligence community, two parts, said russians did hacking. news story number two, they get "access hollywood," what can be more irresistible than sex of all vulgarity? three, that hacked content, release segments of speeches that bernie sanders wanted to see all through the primaries. disinherit newsworthiness inside those hacked segments, assuming they are hacked segments and

accurately represent woodhill eclipses. what would you guess the news media would do? i would have guessed that it would take story one, the russians did the hacking, move it over into story three and say the russians hacked content has just been released in the form of speech excerpts and they look like this. now they have two news stories, "access hollywood" versus russian hacked content just release. that's the mill content, here the hacked speeches. they lost the first narrative. print news covered it below the fold, but by the time we get to sunday it's gone. the russian origins are gone. for the rest of the campaign the press is going to treat the russian hacked content as wikileaks. i want you to think for a moment what the implications are insane and some wikileaks. if we could leaks of put things in public domain that some and some probably approve of, things a government probably didn't

want us to see. the news has treated wikileaks as a quasi-legitimate news outlet outlet in the past when it release of those kinds of things. when you say wikileaks, people note here russians as result. that's name that's been around for a while. what people also don't here is julian assange doesn't like hillary clinton because hillary clinton wanted him prosecuted for which he considered his misuse of national security data when he released some of the other material earlier. you would think the press would be saying wikileaks run by julian assange, who doesn't like hillary clinton. no. you would think they would say wikileaks, passing russian hacked content through. they didn't. we would interpret the content differently if we kept the tie to the source. something might say i like julian assange. i like russians. which time they might be more prudent of the content. some people might ask, why are they doing this? what is of interest in this?

should some of this be discounted on the scripts because there's nothing comparable been done with donald trump. this is a like press leaking with a pestle fight anything it can from anybody and try to get out. this is asymmetric come happening only one side and it is taught to go. it is being used in this case to blunt the effects of "access hollywood" tape. which it effectively did that by creating a counterbalance narrative. we know from the woodward book that inside the trump campaign there was active consideration of moving mike pence to the top and moving condeleezza rice into the vice presidential spot. it was that serious. what helps blunt the "access hollywood" tape? hacked content drop strategically and the press greets the counterbalance narrative that looks like this. >> i'm chris wallace. explosive leaks just before the second presidential debate. more hacked e-mails that show what hillary clinton really told those big bankers. donald trump apologizing after

release of a tape of you making of remark about women. >> let's do it. >> the republicans are playing the campaign and saying he should step aside. we will assess the damage with trump advisor rudy giuliani, and do some of hillary clinton's speeches to wall street banks are leaked we'll talk to the campaign manager about how she will handle the fallout. >> that's a topical parenchyma what it implications tactically for the candidates? notice what you're not hearing, intelligence community confirms russians did the hacking, russians are the origin, or julian assange through wikileaks, or both of the hacked speech content. that counterbalance narrative plays some role in helping donald trump survive that weekend. we don't not big the role is that we know it played some role. imagine that third piece in the narrative isn't there at all.

so the hacked podesta content is not drop within an hour. come in to the sunday of the debate, to disaster october 7, october 9 you have the russians hacked and you have "access hollywood," two at the trump stories. instead, first drops and get a counterbalance narrative. what use was made of the content? >> so john, what is a real view, crackdown on big money or kiss up to them? >> there's now a counterbalance narrative and the narratives what's the real hillary clinton, what are we seeing in these speeches as opposed to the fake hillary clinton who sing of the things in public, what is the real donald trump, this is a public-private narrative about both. is this locker room banter which is what trump and his associates alleged, or is this sexual admissions at sexual assault which is what clinton supporters are alleging. this is a public self, private self narrative for both but it

is counterbalance. the agenda throughout the month of october, what happens with wikileaks as opposed to what happens with "access hollywood"? here's the number of articles mentioning wikileaks and headlines by outlet. you see substantial play in conservative media, but you see a respectable level of play in mainstream media. it's during this time that you see between the first two bars that we find a drop in perception that hillary clinton is qualified to be president. the question is what was in the news agenda during this time i might've explained that shift? one possible explanation is, it is the wikileaks content that is getting substantial exposure. clinton's scandal coverage, the first two bars in yellow, that's where the drop in perception of qualification is. this last with the jump in

green, that's the comey time where for 9/11 days you got negative clinton headlines in news about speculation about what's on the wiener laptop. what happens "access hollywood," the bottom line is "access hollywood." the top line is wikileaks. wikileaks because of continued to drop tranche after tranche after tranche, managed to keep itself in a new cycle for the rest of the election. here's the effect on qualified to be president. here's a change in qualified to be president which i would hypothesize the something to do with this. affected the agenda during the last two debates. here's the speech excerpt of hillary clinton. she says you just have to sort of figure out how to get back to the word balance, how to balance the public and private efforts that are necessary to be successful politically and that's just not a comment about today.

if you saw the movie lincoln and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th amendment passed and he called one of my favorite predecessors, secretary stewart, i just been governor and send it from you, rant against lincoln for president and he said i need help to get this done, but her butt is watching all the backroom discussions and deals in people get nervous to say the least i need both the public and private position. that statement was not a statement that said hey, wall street banks, i'm going to tell you something and private, i'm going to get rid of dodd-frank. the publicly until the end but i'm going to be tough on you. this is statement made in the context of discussion of a link in the film. debate question. >> the question involves wikileaks release of reported excerpt of sector clinton's paid speeches which she has refused to release and one line in particular in which secretary clinton purportedly say you need both public and private condition on certain issues.

so, is it okay for politicians to be to thank? is it acceptable politician to have a private stance on issues? secretary clinton, your two-minute. >> right. as i recall, that was something i said about abraham lincoln after having seen the wonderful stephen spielberg movie called lincoln. it was a master class watching president lincoln get the congress to approve the 13th amendment. it was principled and it was strategic, and i was making the point that it is hard sometimes to get the congress to do what you want to do, and you have to keep working at it. and yes, president lincoln was trying to convince some people, he used some argument, convincing other people, he used other arguments.

that was i about a great disply of presidential leadership. but, you know, let's talk about what's really going on here, martha. because our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days that the kremlin, meaning putin and the russian government, are directing the attacks, the hacking on american accounts, to influence our elections and wikileaks a as part of that asr other sites with the russians hacked information to we don't even know if it is accurate information, and then they put it out. we have never in the history of our country being in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election. and believe me, they're not doing it to get me elected. you are doing it to try to

influence the election of donald trump. now maybe -- >> now she's blaming -- she got caught in a total lie. her papers went out to all the friends of the banks, goldman sachs and everybody else, and she said things, wikileaks, that just cannot. and she lied. now she's blaming the lie on the late great abraham lincoln. that's one i haven't -- okay, honest abe. honest abe never lies. that's a good thing. that's the big difference between abraham lincoln and you. that's a big, big difference. were talking that some difference. but as far as other elements of what she was saying, i think it would be great if we get along with russia because we could fight isis together as an example but i don't know putin. but i knows any time anything wrong happens, they like to see the russians. maybe there is no hacking. but the reason given rush is because they think they can

tarnish me with russia. i know nothing about russia. i know about russia but i know nothing about the inner workings of russia. i have no deals, i have no business dealings, i have no loans from russia. >> and not so we get to today. to find out what the impact of the statements in debates was pulling to i encourage you to take a look at the book, to find what argument is about the comey disinformation, and could you to take a look at the book that the argument is hacking effective the debate agenda, affected the news agenda, the hacking minimize the likelihood that sanders supports would be consolidated and clinton and disrupted the campaign. the question is to what extent was the extent great enough to ship 70,000 votes? i'd be happy to take your comments and your questions. or not. yes, ma'am. >> what did you think -- >> because we are recording for c-span, if you could speak into

the microphone. thank you. >> what do you think really motivated comey to come up with that information at the last minute? >> we know that from the public record, from director comey, that there were two factors at play for him in making the unprecedented decision to make the joint announcement about closing the clinton investigation without charging. ordinarily you would expect that they would simply indicate they're not charging. one was the meeting between bill clinton and loretta lynch on the tarmac. the second was information that he's not free to disclose a public which is classified information in which press coverage would suggest is information in russian hands the suggest loretta lynch give assurances to clinton supporters in some fashion that investigation would not go too far. there's no reason to believe,

based on press accounts, that loretta lynch knows the person she supposedly communicate with one of the others who were relaying information had been that easy. there is as the result of reason to suspect the information he says was concerned would be released imminently was, in fact, russian disinformation. so if the second classified fact is russian disinformation in the summer decision, then the question is, is that not still at play in october when they could have quietly undertaken investigation of the contents of the wiener laptop and not disclosed the fact that they were doing it? and if you believe that it is likely that hillary clinton is going to be president of the united states, which we know director comey has said he believed based on polling data was likely, it is at least possible that he was trying to protect the integrity of her election by ensuring that the fact that investigation of the

server was not released after she became elected, and the country then say wait a minute, we would've changed our boat had we known that. so that is my argument for the information being russian disinformation, and if it was being amply as well. otherwise, i don't see why he would make the statement in essence public by going to the congress. yes. >> you started out by saying it was going to be a discouraging talk, as i recall. >> did i disappoint you? >> not in the least. so i thought you would now tell us what should be done to minimize the effect of the social media campaigns in our political process. >> the social media platforms were just sitting ducks for this. i mean, they're targeting

structures are such that you did not need sophistication to know how to engage in sophisticated targeting. i have studied political key medication for a long time. after each major election i sit down with the time buyers up until this last election to say tell me exactly how you targeted the time line. it was a very sophisticated art and that would explain have a micro-targeted this and cross targeted that and readers did this relationship to the cable company relationship to the television, after which we would create charts and graphs that would try to capture it in order to put it in our study. we don't need to do any of that to understand how you could reach exactly the same people right now because we could have ourselves with the knowledge that was publicly accessible, done sophisticated targeting. add a level of sophistication or higher than time buyers when engaging in recent elections. that's all vulnerable social platforms were, and they were because they were not set for politics.

essentially they are selling us. in the process they have highly sophisticated means of knowing that when the ad start calling around, notice you search to find one thing and for the next couple of weeks all the ads follow you around, well, imagine you take all of sophistication and you drive been some simple instructions to get to evangelicals, to america households, to african-americans, to sanders supporters et cetera and the structures are sitting there to deliver. first they fixed that sows more difficult to make those targeting this now as an outsider. secondly, you could buy advertising that's been illegal for a foreign national to buy advertising in our elections, but you could do it inside these platforms because everything is so anonymized and so digital. one of the mueller indictments have been indicting people for illegal activity. with the data set of structures so you have to provide in one case a social security number,

and another a business id number and there's a verification process to confirm your buying from within the united states. they're trying to make moves to shut this down. if you went on to youtube during the election you would affect all kinds of rt content but you wouldn't have known rt, formally russia today, and that it is state sponsor. when you go on youtube now you will find rt discovered spot to cut it and you'll find pbs as government funding and bbc. they have universalize the disclosure but now we've got more protection because now we can tie source back to country. you might say of the russians. propaganda we all you want but at least you now know it is the russians doing it. we got those kinds of changes in place. there are no partnerships with fact checking organizations. i am ultimately the correct of that check.org. i sign off on all of it. where now part of the partnership that takes crowdsourced disinformation,

checks it to say is it accurate or not and would post up content to facebook. when someone searches for they get our correction over to the right in the search structure. that's an attempt to dampen down the effects of this information without infringing on political speech. big issue is how do trying to get more information in an environment which privileges first amendment and not to nebulae that is possible? there are moves that a been made by the platforms. are not enough but the are there. where better protected than we were in the past. i'm concerned we haven't heard from our big reputable media outlets what they would do differently if exactly the same thing happened again. after they made big mistakes in the past they have written editorials to say to us we really made a mistake and here's how we have learned. they haven't said that about the use of the hacked content. in some cases basically they st the hacked content wrong. that's just bad journalism here in the pressure of having thousands and thousands of

things dumped on them with all those resources rushing to find things they present for newsworthy, you can see how they would make that mistake. humans make mistakes under that kind of pressure. i would like to from our reporters that this hacking could've been against republicans or democrats. i would've guessed in the past if you said the russians would envy they would intervene to disadvantage the republicans, not the democrats which is on average will be true of russian relationships ideologically to the parties. instead of people think is just the platforms can get that of the control, i'd also to say a big effect of the hackers was mediated by our presses. the hackers would've had no real effective not done the cut into news site like to see what aesthetically. in the coming situation i think the russians may have effectively checkmated him. if you believe that you can't have fbi and the justice department discredited by information in russian hands,

just accept the possibility you're trying to set this up in order to make it really hard for director comey took any good choices. first you would make sure hacked content that is released is accurate so that nobody could say this must be inaccurate if something is dumped that is disinformation. hacked content as as far as we know i could. the media couple of exceptions but as far as we know the major pieces hacked content that were released are accurate. the beginning of a book by the statement quality president putin that essentially says what's wrong with hacking? it was accurate, wasn't it? we should worry about those people are trying to manipulate the american people, which i think is one of the funnier statements i've read in the last two years. what that says to me is there's a strategy, protect the accuracy of that so when you drop the disinformation it accuracy will be soon. given how polarized we are, if this information had been dropped to say loretta lynch was in the tank for the clinton

administration, don't you think a good part of the publish and we had believed it and we would've called an election into question? what was the good choice under the circumstances if that is a circumstance director comey found itself in? and if he thought hillary clinton is going to be elected anyway, then the path that makes the most sense is one in which you make sure the public knows that you in fact, are engaged in the investigation. investigation could it come out in a way that was negative for hillary clinton. who knew was going to be in those emails e-mails as a resuf that investigation? but it was public and as a result you couldn't discredit her if she were elected. i think you might have made a different calculation had the polls not suggested strongly she was going to be elected. >> in an earlier social media day, -- pre-social media day, if one wanted to influence policymakers, the post or the

times for the "wall street journal", ," depending on the pt of view, would have been obvious in the social media world, i come from the earlier day, what is the most influential channel or even medium in this new world? >> well, first, in a campaign environment the reason i wanted to play the clip free of the debates, the debates of what of the last venues that democrats and republicans and independents come together to watch in common. so upwards of 68 million of direct use, that doesn't get all the secondary viewing, are all the viewings through news pickups the parts of the bait, so to the extent there is one form that is still dead that we get both candidates with equal opportunity to make the case, moderated by respected journalist, i was supposed in fallujah form we've got is debate. debates reinforce what people believe but that doesn't mean they are not valuable because

the increased the level of active information we have about both candidates. on average across debate. the reason is it's an interesting finding because those of us who study politics, you think we will not miss anything that we do. sometimes you know when candidates position which are never the other. there are extraordinarily valuable. i wish we could find more venues like that in which we would come together and get people as much unmediated time to communicate with us as they could unfiltered so we could make her own judgment. i think i'm now at the time. appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. aikido folks are watching through the c-span book channel, and for those of you heading out into the cold winter night. thank you so much for joining me. [applause] >> thank you everyone, for joining us. there's time to mingle and

purchase books from the bookshop. you can also get your books signed, and if you have any lingering questions, we are here until 8:00. thank you. >> here's a a look at some of e best books of 2018 according to time magazine. >> my parents took it too far. i arrived at university underprepared. people thought as being

anti-semitic. i think the focus tonight. i would say this was a ideal education. i would not say that but he do think they had something about people feeling of ownership over what they learn. if you think of education a lot of people talk about education as way to make money, as way to get a better job. but the way i expressed it it's about making a person, not about making money. everyone should have the opportunity. >> all of these authors have been featured on booktv and you can find their programs in their entirety @booktv.org. type the author's name in the search bar at the top of the page. >> here's a quick look at the next three programs on booktv.

>> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. i'm george selgin, director of potatoes institute at the cato institute center for monitoring a financial alternatives. i'm very pleased to welcome you all to today's cato book forum. the subject of which is the book "borrowed time: two centuries of booms, busts, and bailouts at citi" by james freeman and vern mckinley. i'd like to begin o