was involved. >> again, thank you so much. we will talk more. we will sign lots of books. we will share these cards thank you so much for coming out. [applause]. >> i think the signing party is down there, so find us and we'll talk more. >> you are watching the tv on c-span2. for complete television schedule visit the tv.org and also follow along behind the scenes on social media at book tv on twitter, instagram and facebook.

>> good evening, everyone. i met tracy diamond from the library. thank you for joining us at maryland state library for the blind and physically handicapped and welcome to writers live. please take a copy of compass to learn about our upcoming programs. you can also check out our website to learn about everything going on like the new streaming service we have launched wherewith your library card you can use canopy, the name of the service, to watch oscar award-winning films and documentaries in addition to i believe it is 30,000 other film, pretty incredible. so, tonight kathleen hall jamieson will talk and then we will have a q&a and then there

will be time to mingle and buy books from a local independent bookstore, the iv bookshop. kathleen hall jamieson, the professor of communication at the annenberg school for communication of the university of pennsylvania is also the director of public policy center among her award-winning oxford university prep books are packaging the presidency, eloquence in an electronic age, spiral of cynicism and the obama victory. tonight we will hear her talk from and about "cyberwar" how russian hackers helped elect a president, what we know-- sorry, what we don't, can and do no, where she draws on work where she and her colleagues isolated-- a specific communication in that 2008 presidential campaign.

jamison explained how by changing the behavior of key players in notching the focus and content of mainstream news russian hackers reshape the 2016 electoral dynamic. it's sure to be an interesting conversation so please give a warm welcome. [applause]. >> thank you for coming out on a bitterly cold evening and thank you to c-span book viewers. i hope you are in a warm place and one in which you have a hot drink in front of you because this is a generally depressing topic. 2016 was unusual year. i don't expect you to dispute that idea, but let me tell you why from a comedic edition that it was unusual. ordinarily, when we study communication politics we pretty much can't say by the convention you know who is likely to win the election and you can do that because you have enough people who are tied to the political party to say that basically if they like the candidate of their

party they are highly too likely vote for their party. there are years that are exceptions, however, in which the election is extremely close and when the election is close communication is more likely to matter. .. and it was tied to a very high level of undecided voting. it means that anything that comes into the communication

environment in that last month or so has a greater chance of being able to change the vote than it would, for example, if we were all voting on election day and those things were happening say a month earlier. so it's the combination of high levels of absentee balloting and a high number of undecideds. as we're closing into the last moments of the election. then there are other factors at play as well. party is what holds people pretty much to their vote. on average, about 9 out of 10 democrats, that is you say you are a democrat, are going to vote for the democratic candidate. they may waffle but they are eventually pretty likely to vote for the democrat. about 9 out of 10 of the republicans, those people saying i'm a republican, are likely to vote for the republican. well, in 2016 we had a higher than average number of people who said i'm neither one of those, i'm an independent. those people are more likely to be able to be persuaded because they are less tied down by party. and you had one other factor.

it's a factor that i don't expect anybody to think is controversial, which is there just wasn't a great deal of affection for either of the two major party nominees. there were a lot of people who, when they had their vote in hand and they were absentee balloting or they went into the ballot box, were kind of holding their nose even as they cast their vote, and under those circumstances, it's a more difficult vote to cast. that means you might decide to stay home. it might be harder to get you out to vote. and also, remember we have higher than average numbers of undecideds, higher numbers of independents and during this last month we have absentee balloting so if something major happens, people have that ballot in hand, the communication stimulus can create an effect. so in this electoral 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 decisive battleground states. there are all sorts of other factors of course that are 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 really liked, or, or, or. so i need to set up a situation in which we specify all of that is going to happen and it's all baked in, it's not going to change, because what i'm going to ask is if you held all those things constant, everything that was good or bad that any of the candidates did, you just assume they were going to happen anyway, they're just going to sit there, is there enough difference with the russian interventions to push 78,000 votes in one direction or another. it's not a very big number, but it's not a small number, either. but what i don't and can't say is that all these other factors might not have played some role in the election.

they obviously did. they got us to where we were, where 78,000 votes were still at issue. the question is, what pushed those votes, if anything, and was it the russians. so i'm not going to make a case conclusively that the russians did it. i'm going to make the case that i think there's a pretty strong argument that they may have. i'm going to make a case for probability, not for certainty. that's the reason for asking the question the way i have. i have asked the question how did russian hackers and trolls help elect a president, because all those other factors are there. and because there's no evidence, at least not in the public domain, that the russians directly intervened by actually changing votes. they did get access to registration systems but as far as we know from our national security folks, they didn't actually change ballots. so you can't say they elected because they didn't pull levers. you can't say they elected because all these other factors are there. the question is did they help, did they tip the balance in order to move the 78,000 votes,

and that's the question i'm going to ask. as the author of earlier other books, and as an elderly woman, i don't usually have new experiences. usually my lives prfe is pretty predictable. i teach, i research, i have great family, i play with my grandchildren, i'm grateful on any given day that i wake up feeling healthy and can walk, because i have had a couple back surgeries. that's my typical life. i don't expect to be surprised by anything. i was surprised by this. [ indiscernible ] >> russians persuaded enough people in the right states to vote a certain way and on the same day we have this revelation from the u.s. court saying they indicted seven more russian intelligence officers.

now we have seven more, 20 people persuaded 300 million americans in the right states to vote in a certain way or she writes, persuaded people not to vote at all. so if 20 people can do this to millions, then they are geniuses. >> how many of you know what rt is? rt was called russia today once. it's now called rt, and to those who are in the social media sphere, rt means retweet. when you go into your hotel room or to your cable system at home, i invite you to look to see whether rt is on your cable menu because you will find it in a surprising number of places. well, this is the kremlin talking to you and there are familiar faces on this channel. these may not be familiar faces, but larry king is on this channel, formerly of cnn. ed schultz was on this nl cchan

now deceased. in 2016 you could see him as well. there are people who watch rt and haven't realized that this is actually an outlet that was once called russia today. rt had commentary about my book. that for me is a brand new experience. now, it didn't exactly get my argument right but nonetheless, i just want to say i was thrilled. thank you, kremlin. to set up the argument i'm going to try to make, i would like to show you another clip. this is mike huckabee. >> everybody agrees there was untoward action by russian actors potentially linked directly to the russian government, but to make the leap that they somehow changed the election results is a big one. >> that's beyond any belief. you have to believe in unicorns to go there. the fact is there was allegations that the russians may have hacked into the dnc computers, but there's no evidence whatsoever that it had any impact on the election.

>> so if over here we have do unicorns exist, and over here, we have the russians absolutely categorically did it, my argument, unicorns over here, russians absolutely categorically did it, kind of look like this. what did the trolls, the imposters in cyberspace, the people who were freepretending were u.s. nationals do? they probably get us into this realm of certainty. unicorns certainly did it because i don't know whether their targeting was precise enough to reach the voters in the needed states. about here, unicorns, absolute certainty, trolls. hackers. more certainty, because we know they changed the media agenda and we have some polling data to suggest they may have done it in consequential ways. we have pretty strong theory that says that when you change a media agenda and you change the criteria people are using as a

result in assessing a candidate, that can influence votes. we also know that when you create imbalances in messages, so there's now more negative messaging about one candidate, that's where you get communication effect which is why we don't usually see them in campaigns. usually communication makes very little difference and it makes it on the margins because both sides advertise message, speak, talk to constituencies that are roughly equal in the population at comparable levels, and they pretty much balance each other out. so if someone else comes into this equation and pushes up the message balance, that's where we see changes. we saw that historically in 2000, we saw it again in 2008. so when there's a message imbalance, that's when you see communication effect. if the russian hackers created a message imbalance by getting more negative information into the media stream about hillary clinton or the trolls did the same in some people's social media feeds, that's where you would expect to shift votes.

not massive numbers, but enough numbers that on the margin, you could change an election. then unicorns here, over here, absolute certainty, trolls here, hackers here, if russian disinformation influenced james comey's decision to make public the analysis of the clinton server on the weiner laptop, the rest of this information played a role in his decision to make that public which in essence he did by notifying congress, because it was leaked almost immediately as you would have anticipated it would be, then the case becomes more certain because the effects at the end of the election when those nine days changed the media agenda are pretty clear in polling data. there's about a 2.5 point shift and that's the conservative shift. that is, i'm being conservative in saying two and a half points in hillary clinton's lead at that point, attributable as best one can tell largely to the server coverage and coverage of the comey investigation.

so certainty, unicorns, trolls, hackers, russian disinformation. now, pause for a moment and say if kathleen is going to make an argument that this could have created an effect, this could have, and this could have, there are any number of combinations of those things that would increase the likelihood that there was an effect. so this isn't an argument that says this alone or this alone or this alone, although in the comey case i think there's a pretty strong argument if russian disinformation was there, that alone could have. but rather that there's enough there that the argument becomes more plausible, if the theory of communication is sound and if the message imbalances are actually created. so that's the argument that i'm going to make. i'm going to make it based on research that the scholarly community has done and i have done with my colleagues over the years. whee the go we had the good fortune of being in the field with what's called a rolling cross-section in 2000. thaul mea

all that means is we were in the field serving every single day. rather than aggregating up five days of data and then saying we know in these five days, this is basically where the public was, we had a random sample every single day. it means that we could watch day-to-day changes in the he k electorate across time. it was the largest data survey ever run up until that time. it was an incredibly close election, in which one candidate wins the popular vote, one wins the electoral college. we had the advantage in that election because we didn't have social media yet. being able to say that when advertising is being used in a campaign, it's over here in the battleground. it's not over here in the non-battleground. so what that means is we could actually see what happens when you've got advertising versus not advertising, and comparable kinds of voters. and there was one more advantage 2000 handed us. in the last week of the

campaign, you had the 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 w t went -- he was only on the network evening news one night. remember, that's an area in which we still had major broadcast networks that were giving time to candidates and discussing serious issues, so al gore took advantage of every one of those weekday nights, that open access to talk to candidates about issues. meanwhile, 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, was george bush going to short-change social security with his private investment accounts or not, or personal savings accounts depending on which construction you were going to use of their two positions. so what happens in that environment is you have got a message imbalance. you've got a lot of exposure for

gore in news across the whole population, less so for bush. whereas in the battleground states, battleground/non-battleground, you could compare what advertising is doing in one and not the other. here's the third thing we had. gore ran out of money at the end of that campaign and as a result in key battleground states, including florida, he was underspending bush and we get to look at the effect of message imbalances. when we were looking at those message imbalances, we drew the conclusion that what shifted the votes on the margin and helped gore nationally, helped him win the popular vote, was the difference in messaging and news over a week. what helped bush when the electoral college was the imbalance in advertising. that's one of the reasons when we came into 2008 campaign, again the same model, we were looking at specific messages in advertising and asking when candidate obama outspent candidate mccain, as he did dramatically, could we see that

message pushed up inside our polling data, because again, we are in the field every day and we actually matched up the voting data to the advertising data for cable, for television and for radio. remember social media's not yet a big factor. and we are able to show that as the amount of obama messaging went up, he began to push votes in his direction on the margin, specifically through those issues that he was advertising on. so that's the backdrop for saying when you see these imbalances in 2016, we have a reason to think imbalances matter, and then the question is, were there imbalances in a situation in which we assume all the other things that were going to happen, were going to happen, they're not going to change and was that imbalance created by the russians. i'm going to argue that the russian trolls, those who are marauders in cyberspace, had a sound theory of the election and i will argue the hackers affected the press agenda.

they created message imbalances and changed in the case of news the kinds of things that people were focused on because we have another writing from scholarly literature that says when something becomes more important to you, you are more likely to use it in assessing candidates. we don't use every possible consideration when trying to figure out how to vote. we use the ones that are top of mind, that are most salient to us. those things are put in place in part by forms of communication. so i'm going to argue their theory was sound, hackers affected press agenda. let's start with the trolls. they magnified fears of cultural change, targeted voters they needed to target. that is, they tried to mobilize evangelicals and veterans, they tried to de-mobilize black voters and sanders supporters, and they tried to shift young liberal sanders supporters and those who were disaffected with hillary clinton off rather than their casting a democratic vote to jill stein.

is this theory consistent with donald trump's needs electorally? i started out very, very skeptical of the notion that someone in st. petersburg could figure out how to influence an election here. when "the washington post" asked me to write the op-ed which was actually the genesis of this book, it did so because the social media platforms in late october/early november 2017 were beginning to disclose the advertising content on their site and "the washington post" said you study all this kind of stuff, can you answer the question did this help elect donald trump? that's how i wrote this book. i started out by saying to "the washington post" i'll look at the evidence and see, but i was really doubtful until i looked at the ads and to my surprise, found out they had a theory of what donald trump needed or, on the other side, what one needed to do with hillary clinton, that was really electorally sound. specifically, if donald trump couldn't mobilize white evangelical christians and white catholics, at least roughly to

the romney level, and if he couldn't mobilize military households and veterans, at least to the romney level, then he wasn't going to win the electoral college or the popular vote, and if you look at the statistics in august, he's way below where he needs to be with both of those constituencies. well, the trolls went after those constituencies and tried to swing them against hillary clinton. i was surprised to see that. if you wanted to hurt hillary clinton and depress her vote, the constituencies she needed most were black voters. she didn't need to get to the obama level but she needed to get somewhere in that range. i was surprised to see they spent most of their efforts here, trying to demobilize african-american voters. then you want to demobilize the sanders supporters. you want to make sure she can't get her coalition put back together after the primaries. just to be sure, that you're shifting enough people away from her, so they're not going to vote for trump, there's a move to shift to stein. that also surprised me because

you would expect if they were going to shift some place, they would shift toward gary johnson because he's going to get more votes on average. the libertarians have had the bigger constituency on average than does the green party. so they were pretty savvy in their understanding of what the electoral needs were of donald trump or the potential electoral liabilities they needed to activate about hillary clinton. they also were tied into the trump message structures in ways that were very consistent with donald trump's messaging. they are largely not putting new messages into play through the trolls in cyberspace. they are largely taking existing messages that are already in the conservative and more right wing media-sphere and amplifying it, making it more salient, and doing it in ways that are consistent with what donald trump is saying. they also targeted voters they needed to target and that's the argument i just made. so here's some survey data about a dominant constituency donald trump needed to reach. i'm going to let you read it

because as i tell my students, you can read more rapidly than i speak. my students say they doubt that but i don't. so those who believe the u.s. needs protecting against foreign influence are 3.5 times more likely to favor trump than those who do not share those concerns. nearly two-thirds of white working class say american culture has gotten worse since the '50s. 68% say the u.s. is in danger of losing its identity. 62% say the growing number of immigrants threatens the kun trich country. donald trump didn't create these attitudes. these attitudes are there. the question is, did he harness them. the answer is yes. if you held these attitudes you were more likely to support donald trump rather than hillary clinton. so if the trolls are coming in with messages consistent with this, they are not only being consistent with donald trump, but they are being consistent with his electoral needs to reach these voters. here's 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. in a social media environment, we are highly likely to be talking with people who are like us idealogically. not all of us, but most of us. it's an environment that tends to draw together people who already agree with things, and they don't necessarily live anywhere near each other but they get into communities in which they like and share things in common. so it becomes an area in cyberspace in which people are

likely to relay things to each other that they are already disposed to believe and in the process, they are more likely to share with other people who are just outside that sphere by talking to them in a kind of two-step flow phenomenon. a colleague of mine at the university of pennsylvania with one of his colleagues at northwestern demonstrated that within the past year. so getting materials online doesn't just influence the people who get them. it also influences the people who are talked to by the people who get them. and in cyberspace, you've got a tendency to like and share without really processing things very deeply. we move very quickly when we see an evocative image to hit like, to hit share. if you see that lots of people already like it and lots of people are sharing, you are more likely to think that you like and share it and you are 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? those aren't actually humans liking. those are bots liking. and the bots are creating the sense this is now normative, this is something everybody accepts inside this community. what you're doing essentially is creating an environment that's ripe for anger, fear, prejudice, anger, negative emotions, and that is self-reinforcing and that can in the process increase the likelihood that those just outside those immediate social circles gets some impact, and that's my theory of how the social media environment has changed politics. in the past, when you had something in print, it took time to read it in print and then it 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 the kind of quick, visceral movement that it has right now. you saw something in print and you couldn't say gee, a thousand, 2000, 3000, people

agree this is great content. there wasn't that kind of social structure around the sharing to create a sense we all adapt this. in that environment, you get a kind of persuasive power and you get what some call a contagion effect. so they magnify through cultural change, they target the voters they needed. now let me talk about those voters. i'm just going to show you materials. they started with benign appeals. that helps aggregate the audience. so to the extent that you like this, you probably like this kind of content, you probably identify with jesus, now i've got you identified. now i can use a look-alike function in social media to figure out what other people like you are, so 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 actually

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. it didn't require any coordination. you had to figure out how to get the initial message in, 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 did donald trump need to influence. i wrote 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 media do a great job of making us into campaign consultants. they spend more time telling us things that are useless to voters but helpful to campaign consultants than they do just about anything else. what joe and i showed in "spiral of cynicism" is that tactical structure of coverage activates

cynicism and depresses learning but it does something else. it means that you can read english and you are in st. petersburg, you have got a guidebook for who you have to reach. du you didn't have to be smart, although they did send some folks over here who learned such things as you want to work inside purple states. they didn't really have to come here to find that out. nonetheless, you could figure out by reading our media. so i've got pages and pages in the book in which i just quote literally from media outlets about what you have to do in florida, what you have to do in pennsylvania, who you have to reach, who you shouldn't try to reach, who is already being successfully reached. you have capacity of social media and you have got information you need tactically sitting inside our media structures. then they stole the clinton playbook. they had the turnout models for the key states and for the entire clinton campaign. so we know they hacked it and had it, presumably when the hackers got it they shared it with the trolls. i don't know that for certainty but i will bet given the

centralization of the kremlin, they probably did figure out how they were going to pass that through. so with any of that, there was no need for any coordination in order to accomplish everything that i'm showing you here. doesn't mean there wasn't. just means you didn't have to have it in order to see what i'm seeing as a pattern. now we are going to start moving. clear issue identification. more clear issue identification. mobilizing veterans. this is taking a statement by hillary clinton out of context but it's a commonly used statement in the conservative media. mobilizing veterans. mobilizing veterans. this is an ad that's aired by independent expenditure committee in the united states. this is not russians. >> there is so much at stake in this election and that's why i'm

supporting hillary clinton. hillary clinton is honest and trustworthy and -- >> cut. what's the problem? >> i can't say these words. >> what do you mean? >> i just don't believe what i'm saying. >> you're an actress. >> i'm not that good of an actress. honest and trustworthy. give me a break. >> make america number one was responsible for the content of this advertising. >> okay? the ad was sponsored by defeat crooked hillary clinton pac backed by breitbart. it was shared with share the ad and their tweet was then retweeted by michael flynn. what does this show you? there's a synergy that takes existing content and amplifies it up, tries to expand its reach, in this case to try to demobilize african-american voters.

more demobilization attempts. sanders supporters. sanders obviously didn't say that. i find stein of all of these pieces the most interesting, because once you look back, things become more obvious than they are when you are actually working in the campaign. i would have expected they would have tried to mobilize people and shift them over to try to get the libertarians, but instead, it's to jill stein. here's an appeal. choose peace and vote for jill stein. trust me, it's not a wasted vote. the only way to take our country back is to stop voting for the corporations and banks that own us, grow a spine, vote jill stein. here's the search of rt and

sputnik archives show that hundreds of stories on air and online were friendly to jill stein and the green party. that's interesting. if you think about the picture you have seen of michael flynn with vladimir putin, you look at the rest of that picture, you will see jill stein was at the same dinner. that's an anniversary dinner for rt. so suddenly, the move to stein makes sense, because stein is more hospitable to some russian views than would gary johnson have been so there's some logic behind the move to get people to shift over to stein. that said, if you take the baseline vote for jill stein, and this is convenient, because she was the candidate of the party, four years before, so you've got the same candidate which means you can kind of control what people thought about the candidate, if you take the difference between her vote in 2012 and assume 2012 is her base level of support, given the traditional democratic and republican nominee, and you look at the difference between that

and the vote that she got in the three key battleground states, in two out of those three states, the difference alone would have been enough to shift those states. so there's not an insubstantial increase in support for stein. now, maybe there's something else going on out there that i haven't seen, but i haven't seen it, and if you did, please share it with me. we are really interested to figure out where did that mobilization come from. we do know the russians were trying to help her. this is what i have argued so far, the trolls' theory of the election was sound. what i don't know about the trolls is whether their targeting was precise enough. i know it could have been because they had access to the voter playbook that would have made that possible but i don't know that that happened. so my argument for them is over here on my continuum. it's a more tentative argument. let's look at the hackers. what they were doing at that point was putting out information that suggested sanders supporters should not stay with the democratic ticket.

they affected the news agenda before the presidential debate on october 9th, the second debate. they affected the agenda throughout the month of october and the agenda during the last two debates, then they affected the agenda i would argue, but not through the hacked content but through the illusion of having hacked content in the last 11 days, if they influenced that comey decision. let's first look at the convention. first effect, material that suggests there was a thumb on the scale at the dnc against sanders, hacked content is released and debbie wassermann schultz resigned. that's a disruption. and as hillary clinton is trying to consolidate the democratic base, content from democratic operatives is now being released suggesting that they were inhospitable to bernie sanders and that can't be helping as hillary clinton tries to consolidate that base. you also know there was a real threat by the sanders supporters

at the convention to just simply walk out at one point. also, you began to see hacked 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 point. the debate. sorry, the news agenda before the second debate. october 7th is a really important day in 2016 and i'm sure that one of the things that you will remember, although you may not remember it as october 7th, is some vulgar statements by candidate trump. some language that had never gotten into news before, got into news, including grab them by and i will not repeat the rest of the sentence. the "akccess hollywood" tape breaks on that day 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 an announcement along with homeland security that says the russians were behind the hacking. that's major news.

you would reasonably say that's going to be above the fold and that's going to lead the newscasts for the weekend, and the question would be how do you know that intelligence community? after all, you do work for barack obama. can we really trust this? and presumably, we have that as a debate, and also ask well, if it's accurate, why would they want to hurt hillary clinton? so the first news event of the day is that. the second is the "access hollywood" tape. this is why october 7 is such an intriguing day. now you have an event that under ordinary circumstances would take a campaign very serious, you know, video allegations, remember what it took to end the candidacy of gary hart. we now have a movie about that. within an hour of the time that 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 podesta that are released, first tranche comes out. now, the news folks have a choice.

they have got intelligence community, at least two parts of it, have said russians did the hacking. news story one. news story two, they have got "access hollywood." what's more irresistible than sex and vulgarity. and three, they have got hacked content and what has been hacked and released are segments of speeches that bernie sanders wanted to see all through the primaries. so it's inherent newsworthiness inside the hacked segments, assuming they really are hacked segments and accurately represent what hillary clinton said. importantly, they are segments, not entire speeches. so what would you guess the news media would do? well, i would have guessed that they 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 released. podesta hacked content.

they didn't. they lost the first narrative. so 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. now, i want you to think for a moment what the implications are of saying it's from wikileaks. because wikileaks has put things in public domain that some in this room probably approve of. things that the government probably didn't want us to see. the news has treated wikileaks has a quasi-legitimate news outlet in the past when it released those kind of things, and when you say wikileaks, people don't hear russians as a result. that's a name that's been around for awhile. what people also don't hear is julian assange doesn't like hillary clinton, because hillary clinton wanted him prosecuted for what she considered his misuse of national security data when he released some of that other material earlier. so 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 it tied to the source. some people might say well, i like julian assange, i like russian, at which point they might be more approving of the content. but some people might ask the question, why are they doing this? what is their interest in this? and should some of this be discounted on those grounds because there's nothing comparable being done with donald trump. this isn't like press leaking where the press will find anything it can from anybody and try to get it out there. this is asymmetric, happening only on one side and it's tactical. it's being used in this case to blunt the effects of the "access hollywood" tape which it effectively did that weekend by creating a counterbalanced narrative. we know from the woodward book that inside the trump campaign, there was active consideration of moving pence to the top of the ticket and moving conned

lea condoleezza rice into the vice presidential ticket. it was that serious. what helps to blunt the tape? hacked content dropped strategically and the press drops a counterbalanced narrative that looks like this. >> explosive leaks just before the second presidential debate. more hacked e-mails that show what hillary clinton really told those big bankers. and donald trump apologizing after release of a tape of him making a lewd remark about women. >> they let you do it. you can do anything. >> key republicans are fleeing the campaign and saying he should step aside. we will assess the damage with trump adviser rudy giuliani. and as some of hillary clinton's speeches to wall street banks are leaked, we talk to robbie mook about how she will handle the fallout. >> that's a tactical frame.

what are the implications tactically for the two candidate. 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. so that counterbalance narrative plays some role in helping donald trump survive that weekend. we don't know how big the role is but we know it played some role. imagine that third piece in the narrative isn't there at all. the hacked podesta content is not dropped within an hour of the "akdz hccess hollywood" tap. coming into october 9th, you would have the russians hacked and you would have "access hollywood," two anti-trump stories. instead, first drops and you get a counterbalanced narrative. what use was made of the content? >> what's her real view, crack down on big money or kiss up to them? >> there's now a counterbalanced

narrative and the narrative, what's the real hillary clinton, what are we seeing in these speeches as opposed to the fake hillary clinton, who is saying other things in public, what is the real donald trump. this is a public/private narrative about both. is this merely locker room banter which is what trump and his associates alleged, or is this in fact sexual, admissions of sexual assault which is what clinton supporters are alleging. this is public self versus private self narrative for both but it's counterbalanced. the agenda throughout the month of october. what happens with wikileaks as opposed to what happens with "access hollywood." here's a number of articles mentioning wikileaks in headlines by outlet. you see substantial play in conservative media but you see a respectable level of play in mainstream media and it's during this period that you see between the first two bars that we find

a drop in perception that hillary clinton is qualified to be president. so the question is, what was in the news agenda during this period that might have explained that shift. one possible explanation is, it is the wikileaks content that is getting substantial exposure. clinton scandal coverage, the first two bars in yellow, that's where her drop, the drop in perception of qualification is. this last period with the big jump in green, that's that comey end period where, for 9 of 11 days, you've got negative clinton headlines in news about speculation about what's on the weiner laptop. what happens to "access hollywood"? that's the bottom line. the top line is wikileaks. wikileaks, because it continued to drop tranche after tranche after tranche, managed to keep itself in the news cycle for the rest of the election. here's the effect, unqualified

to be president. here's a change in qualified to be president which i would hypothesize has 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 it was maneuvering and working to get the 13th amendment passed and he called one of my favorite presentdeces, secretary suard, he said i need your help to get this done but if everybody's watching, all the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. so you need both a public and private position. that statement was not a statement that said hey, wall street banks, i'm going to tell you something in private, i'm going to get rid of dodd-frank, when publicly i'm telling

everybody i'm going to be tough on you. this was a statement made in the context of discussion of a "lincoln" film. here's the debate question. >> the question involves wikileaks' release of purported excerpts of secretary clinton's paid speeches which she refused to release and one line in particular in which you, secretary clinton, purportedly say you need both a public and private position on certain issues. so is it okay for politicians to be two-faced? is it acceptable for a politician to have a private stance on issues? secretary clinton? your two minutes. >> as i recall, that was something i said about abraham lincoln after having seen the wonderful steven 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 to use some arguments, convincing other people, he used other arguments. that was a great, i thought, a great display 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 election.

and wikileaks is part of that, as are other sites where the russians hack information, we don't even know if it's accurate information, and then they put it out. we have never in the history of our country been 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. they're doing it to try to influence the election for donald trump. now, maybe -- >> now she's blaming -- she got caught in a total lie. her papers went all to all her friends at the banks, goldman sachs and everybody else, and she says things that wikileaks just came out and she lied. now she's blaming the lie on the late great abraham lincoln. honest abe. honest abe never lies. that's the good thing. that's the big difference between abraham lincoln and you.

that's a big, big difference. we're talking about some difference. but as far as other elements of what she was saying, i don't know putin. i think it would be great if we get along with russia because we can fight isis together as an example but i don't know putin. but i notice any time anything wrong happens, they like to say the russians, she doesn't know if it's the russians doing the hacking. maybe there is no hacking. but they always blame russia. the reason they blame russia 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 don't deal there, have i no businesses, i have no loans from russia. >> and that's how we get to today. to find out what the impact of those statements in debate was throughout polling data, i encourage you to take a look at the book. to find out what the argument is about comey disinformation, encourage you to take a look at the book. the argument is that the hacking affected the debate agenda. the hacking affected the news agenda. the hacking minimized the

likelihood that sanders supporters would be consolidated behind clinton and disrupted the campaign, and the question is to what extent, was the extent great enough to shift 78,000 votes. i would be happy to take your comments and your questions. or not. yes, ma'am. >> what do you think -- >> as we are recording for c-span, if you could speak into the microphone, thank you. >> what do you think really motivated comey to come out 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 july announcement about closing the clinton investigation without charging. ordinarily you would expect they simply would indicate they're not charging, pass some

paperwork. one was the meeting between bill clinton and loretta lynch on the tarmac. the second was information that he's not free to disclose in public which is classified information, which press coverage would suggest is information in russian hands that suggests that loretta lynch gave assurances to clinton supporters in some fashion that the investigation would not go too far. there's no reason to believe, based on press accounts, that loretta lynch knows the person she supposedly communicated with or that the others who were relaying the information had done that, either. there is as a result every reason to suspect that the information that he says he was concerned would be released imminently was, in fact, russian disinformation. so if the second classified factor 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

the investigation of the contents of the weiner 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 plausible that he was trying to protect the integrity of her election by ensuring that the fact of the investigation of the server was not released after she became elected, and the country then says we would have changed our vote had we known that. that was my argument for the information being russian disinformation at time one and if it was being at play as well at time two. otherwise, i don't see why he would make the statement in essence public by going to the congress. yes. >> so 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. their targeting structures are such that you did not need sophistication to know how to engage in sophisticated targeting. i studied political communication 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 buying. it was a very sophisticated arc. they would explain how they microtargeted this and cross-targeted that and the radio relationship to the cable in relationship to the television, after which we would create charts and graphs that

would try to capture it in order to put it into our studies. we don't need to do any of that to understand how you can reach exactly the same people right now because we could have ourselves with the knowledge that was publicly accessible done sophisticated targeting. and a level of sophistication or higher than time buyers when engaging in previous elections. that's how vulnerable social platforms were. and they were because they weren't set up for politics. they were set up for advertisers to target us. so if you're not paying for something, you're the product. essentially they are selling us. in the process they have a highly sophisticated means of knowing that when the ad starts following you around, you notice you search to find one thing and for the ex in coupnext couple o all the ads for those things follow you around? imagine you take all that sophistication and drive it behind some simple instructions to get to evangelicals, to military households, to african-americans, to sanders supporters, et cetera and the structures are just sitting there to deliver. first they fixed that. so it's more difficult to make those kind of targeting moves

right now as an outsider. secondly, you could buy advertising, it's illegal for a foreign national to buy advertising in our elections but you could do it inside these platforms because everything is so anonymous and so digital. so one of the mueller indictments is indicting people for illegal purchasing of identities and illegal bank conduct that ultimately bought the ads. now what they have done is set up a structure so that you have to provide in one case a social security number and in another, a business i.d. number, and there's a verification process to confirm you are buying from within the united states. so they are trying to make moves to shut this down. if you went on to youtube during the election, you would have found all kinds of rt content but you wouldn't have known rt formerly russia today and that it's state sponsored. now when you go on youtube you will find rt is government sponsored content and you will find pbs has government funding and bbc. so what they have done is universalize the disclosure but now we have got more protection

because now we can tie source back to content. as i said, you might say i love the russians. propagandize me all you want. at least you know it's the russians who are doing it. we have those changes in place. there are also now partnerships with fact-checking organizations and ultimately the director of factcheck.org runs it in practice. we are now part of a partnership that takes crowdsourced disinformation, checks it to say is it accurate or not, and we post up content through facebook, when someone searches for it they get our correction over to the right in the search structure. that's an attempt to dampen down the effects of disinformation without infringing on political speech. big issue here is how do you try to get more information in an environment which really privileges first amendment and ought to in every way that is possible. so there are moves that have been made by the platforms. they are not enough but they certainly are there. we are better protected than we were in the past. i'm concerned that 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 actually written editorials to say to us we really made a mistake and here's how we have learned. they haven't said that about their use of the hacked content. in some cases, they simply got the hacked content wrong. that's just bad journalism. but in the pressure of having thousands and thousands and thousands of things dumped on them with all of those resources rushing to find things that they presumed were newsworthy, you can see how they would make that mistake. humans make mistakes under that kind of pressure. so i would like to hear from our reporters and our big reporting companies that this hacking could have been against republicans or against democrats. i would have guessed in the past if you said the russians are going to intervene to disadvantage the republicans, not the democrats, which is on average going to be true of russian relationships idealogically to the two political parties. so instead of people thinking that oh, well, it was just athe

platforms, we have to get that under control, i would like them also to say a big effect of the hackers was mediated by our press. the hackers would have had no real effect if it hadn't gotten that content into news. i would like to see what is done differently. in the comey situation, i think the russians may have effectively checkmated him. if you believe that you are going to have the fbi and justice department discredited by information in russian hands, set up the possibility you are trying to set this up in order to make it really hard for director comey to have any good choices, first you would make sure the hacked content that is released is accurate so that nobody could say this must be inaccurate, if something is dumped and it's disinformation. the hacked content is as far as we know accurate. there may be a couple of exceptions but as far as we know, the major pieces of hacked content that were released to wikileaks are accurate. and you will see at the beginning of my book, i have a statement quoting president

putin that essentially says what's wrong with hacking? it was accurate, wasn't it? we should worry about those people who are trying to manipulate the american people, which i think is one of the funnier statements that i have read in the last two years. but what that says to me is there's a strategy there. protect the accuracy of that so that when you drop the disinformation its accuracy will be assumed. given how polarized we are, if disinformation had been dropped to say that loretta lynch was in the tank for the clinton administration, don't you think a good part of the population would have believed it and we would have called an election into question. so what was the good choice under those circumstances? if that is a circumstance director comey found himself in? and if he thought that hillary clinton was 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 are in fact engaging in the investigation. and the investigation could have come out in a way that was negative for hillary clinton. who knew what was going to be in those e-mails as a result of that investigation? but at least it was public and

as a result, you couldn't discredit her if she were elected. of course, if she weren't elected, you didn't have to worry. there wouldn't discrediting. i think you might have made a different calculation had the polls not suggested strongly she was going to be the victor. yes. >> in an earlier pre-social media day, if one wanted to influence policy makers, the "post" or the "times" or the "wall street journal" depending on the point of view would have been obvious. in this social media world, i come from an earlier day -- >> so do i. >> -- what is the most influential channel or even medium in this new world? >> first, in a campaign environment, the reason i wanted to play the clip for you of the debate, the debates are one of the last venues that democrats and republicans and independents come together to watch in

common. so upwards of 68 million of direct viewers, that doesn't count all the secondary viewing and there is substantial secondary viewing, are all the viewings through news pickup of parts of debates. so to the extent that there is one form that is still there that we get both candidates who have equal opportunity to make the case, moderated by a respected journalist, i would say the most influential form we've got is debates. debates largely reinforce what people already believe, but that doesn't mean that they are not valuable because they increase the level of accurate information we have about both candidates, on average across debates. the reason for that is, it's an interesting finding because those of us who study politics, you think we're not going to learn anything. well, we do because you miss some things. sometimes you know one candidate's position but you have never heard the other. you get the contrasting point of view so they are extraordinarily valuable. i wish we could find more venues like that in which we would come together and give people as much unmediated time to communicate with us as they could unfiltered so we could make our own judgment.

i think i am now out of time. i appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. thank you to folks who 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 the book from the book shop. you can also get your book signed and if there are any lingering questions, we're here until 8:00. thank you. >> we leave book tv as the senate is coming in on day 29 of the government shutdown. a session requested yesterday by democrat tim kaine of virginia.

on wednesday, the house will vote on a bill to fund the government through february 28th. the majority leader mitch mcconnell has said he will not bring up a government funding bill unless president trump approves it. ... er. the chaplain: let us pray. the chaplain: let us pray. internal god, you are holy, the only god and your deed sustain us because of you, we live and move and breathe and have our being turk or lowered remind our lawmakers of the wisdom