and yet another opportunity to bring you the revvies. happy new year. and good night. >> you've been watching the 2019 revvie awards, brought to you by reverend al sharpton and politics nation. thanks for watching. we'll see you next year. have a happy holiday season. this sunday, alternative facts. the assault on truth. >> charged by our press secretary gave alternative facts to that, but the point -- >> wait a minute, alternative facts? look, alternative facts are not fact, they're falsehoods. we're living in an era where we can't even agree on what the facts are. >> ukraine was not aware of the aid. >> they knew it on july 25th. >> truth is truth. i don't mean to -- >> no, it isn't truth. truth isn't truth. >> who the truth tellers are. >> just remember what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. >> or even the meaning of the simplest ideas. >> it depends on the meaning of the word is.

>> this morning, "meet the press" takes a look at our post-truth society and how a changing media landscape has created chaos out of order. i'll talk to dean baquet and martin baron on the assault on truth from social media, russian acto anatomy of a lie, how a story with just a colonkern kernel of truth can metastasize. we'll look at russian techniques for confusing the public with countless versions of the truth. >> and we'll discuss all of these issues with a panel of experts on media, journalism, and technology. welcome to sunday. and alternative facts. a special edition of "meet the press." >> the longest running show in television history, this is a special edition of "meet the press" with chuck todd. >> good sunday morning. i hope you're having a merry

christmas, a happy hanukkah, and are enjoying this holiday wiig. you have probably never heard of a town in macedonia called vales. this is the town where buzzfeed discovered what was essentially a fake news farm. some 140 websites pushing out not to help elect trump, the candidate, but simply to make money on facebook. well, since then, the idea of fake news has become a growth industry, morphing from simply a get rich quick scheme and a former yugoslav republic to a political weapon in our nationalized alternative facts truth isn't truth debuted here on "meet the press" over the last couple years. but these ideas are not new. russia's government, for instance, now disoriented its populous with so many versions of the truth, it creates what one former russian tv producer called the fog of unknowability. well, this morning, we're going to hear from top players in journalism, diplomacy, and

technology about combatting truth manipulation and how russian tactics have migrated right here to the united states. >> citizens, of course, are complicit in the spread of false facts. we succumb to confirmation bias too often and reject news we simply don't like. the danger is if we become lost in that fog of unknowability. if truth is pushed into a wood chipper, leaving us to say i don't know what to believe, then alternative facts haven't just brought truth to a draw. alternative facts may have already won. >> sean spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. but the point remains -- >> wait a minute, alternative facts? look, alternative facts are not fact. they're falsehoods. >> on the first full day of the trump administration, the president directed his aides to insist on an easily disprovable lie about his inaugural crowd size. a touch point in an era where

facts are under attack. of course, twisting the facts is nothing new in politics. >> it depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" is. >> the truth is truth. >> no, it isn't truth. truth isn't truth. >> the scale is new. as of december 10th, the president had made 15,413 false or misleading claims in office. that, according to "the washington post." what's also new. the scale of the campaign against the press. >> just remember, what you're seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. >> in a pew survey this year, just 30% of republicans had a great dea of confidence that journalists will act in the best interests of the public. compared with 76% of democrats, a 46-point gap. >> idia, it's pretty much slanted left. >> facebook remains the number one social network for disinformation. organized propaganda campaigns were found on the platform in 5

shared the top 100 false political stories over months o. among them, trump's grandfather was a pimp and a tax evader. his father a member of the kkk. and nancy pelosi was diverting social security money for the impeachment inquiry. clearly, both false. >> we don't stop people from posting on their page something that's wrong. >> mr. trump is leveraging the polarized political climate. >> there are four things that disinformation actors do if they want to attack their enemies or defend them sfs against criticism. and you can think of them as the four ds. >> number one, dismiss. attack critics to erode their credibility and invalidate the facts. >> the fake news. fake news. >> i think one of the greatest of all terms i have come up with is fake. >> mr. trump has used the word fake on twitter more than 800 times. number two, distort.

if the facts are against you, make up your own facts. >> in many places, like california, the same person votes many times. not a conspiracy theory, folks. millions and millions of people. >> number three, distract. whataboutism or the i'm rubber you're glue defense. if you're accused of something, accuse someone else of the same thing. >> perfect. the call that wasn't perfect and the words that weren't perfect were joe biden with respect to his son. >> number four, dismay. threats and intimidation. >> we are going to take a strong look at our country's libel laws. >> one real fear, if both sides normalize disinformation as a political tactic. in fact, in the 2017 alabama senate race, a group of democrats did use online disinformation in the campaign against roy moore. circulating false evidence that russian twitter botses were working to elect moore. >> my big concern when it comes to disinformation is that we're going to see more and more

people trying to do the same thing that the russians did in 2016. >> and joining me now is the executive editor of "the washington post," martin baron, and the executor editor of "the new york times," dean baquet. dean, let me start with this. this is what your chief white house correspondent peter baker wrote very recently. there are days in washington lately when it feels like the truth itself is on trial. well, help us make sense of that. >> i mean, it's true. of course, it's ridiculous to say that truth isn't truth. of course, that's a ridiculous construct. i mean, our job, and it's a hard job, but our job and i think our newsrooms have been sort of rebuilt to do this, is to a very aggressively sort out fact from fiction. and to very aggressively work to make sure that people trust us and understand that that's our job. i mean, marty has a very extensive fact checking

operation, as do we. and those things didn't exist three or four years ago. and they're in acknowledgment one of the jobs of the news media is to sort through all of the bs, if i can say that. >> yeah. >> and come to some -- do the kind of deep reporting that we all grew up doing. to come to some sort of understanding of what's actually happening in the world. i think that's one of our largest new jobs. >> marty, you tweeted a quote from a column with a question that i actually think crystalizes the challenge. you did this about a year ago. and the column said this, how do you address beliefs when they're not rooted in reality. how do you tell someone i'm trying to address your fears but the facts don't exist. this is a challenge. this reminded me of sharia law. all these sharia law is coming. you're like, it's not. you would try to reassure, there's nothing like that, and yet you're like, there's no facts here to support it. >> well, look, we live in an environment where people are

able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies. and that's made possible by the internet and social media. and people are drawn to sources of information, so-called information, that confirms their pre-existing points of view. and you know, that's what's contributing to this environment that we have today. >> you, dean pointed this out about the increase in fact checking that both of you as news organizations, we have been doing more of it, but you chronicled over 15,000 false or misleading claims just by the president. why do you believe that's important, and are you concerned at some point, at 15,000, aren't people numb to it? >> they might be numb to's conc. but we still have the responsibility for determining what is true and what's false. and in particular, holding our government officials accountable for what they say, and telling people whether they're telling the truth or not telling the truth. that's fundamental to the responsibilities that we have as journalistic institution. >> but here's a challenge for

both of you. marty, first to you, and then dean. i want to put up this poll number. when folks were asked in a cbs poll, where do they go for trusted information, among trump supporters, they cited the president himself. 91% of trump supporters say that's where they go for accurate information. fact checks be damned here. >> well, that's true. and i think that's the way the president would like to have it. he has described us as the opposition party. that goes all the way back to the presidential campaign. he wants us to be perceived as the opposition party, so that people will dismiss anything that we have to say. he wants to disqualify the mainstream media as an arbiter of facts and of truth. and he wants to disqualify others. he wants to disqualify the courts, he want to disqualify historians, market the truth, and what i mean by this is, you know, he's out there a lot, delegitimizing our

professions. we don't fight back like a candidate. we don't fight back like a campaign. do we need to start campaigning around the country to say no, no, no, here's how facts work. here's what reporting is, here's what journalists are. if i utter a fact on tv on purpose i get fired. >> journalists took for granted and believed people believed everything we said. they believed that if i filed a story from afghanistan, that we were there. they believed, we believed everybody thought we were in war zones and we believed that people trusted us. and we went through generations of just assuming everybody believed us. what i think we're going to have to get very aggressive at is to be really transparent, to assume nothing. and to make sure people know where we are, how we o work, to show our work more aggressively. that's a different muscle for us. >> yes, it is. >> to my mind, that's a fork of marketing our journalism, when the post did their great project i guess last week, about the

build-up to the war in afghanistan and the lies, they put their documents online. they put them online so that i could read them, readers could read them. and could see that it wasn't just three reporters or i guess in this case one reporter sitting in a room making stuff up. the stuff was there. that is not something that we knew how to do ten years ago. we did the same thing when we broke the story of trump's taxes a year ago. we show you the stuff. and i think that's a form of marketing our journalism. i think that's a form, as well as doing what we're doing now, which is to be out, for marty and i and others, to be out in the world talking about what we do and very aggressively defending our institutions, defending the truth, and defending our important role in democracy. >> marty, you go out of your way. i believe you, any time one of your journalists are name checked publicly in a demeaning way, you always publicly go out there and defend them, and it seems as if you don't want to miss anybody that happens to. why? >> i think we have a

responsibility to stand up for our journalists when they're right. if we're wrong, we should acknowledge that as well. but when they're unfairly attacked, particularly when a very powerful individual, including the president, uses frankly vile language to describe our journalists, i think it's something that we have to fight against. and i want to do that. >> i want to read you guys a letter to the editor we found in the lexington herald leader. a fascinating attempt to try to explain why some people support president trump. here's what he says. why do good people support trump? it's because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales. this set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good. the more fairy tales and lies he tells, the better they feel. show me a person who believes in noah's ark, and i will show you a trump voter. this gets at something, dean, my executive producer likes to say, hey, voters want to be lied to sometimes. they don't always love being told hard truths. >> you know, i'm not quite sure i buy that. i mean, politicians historically

have lied to people. i mean, i don't want to keep flogging marty's terrific afghanistan story, but that was about -- that was ibt a generation of political leaders who lied in the most egregious way, which was to say a war that was failing and leading to american deaths was actually succeeding. i don't -- i'm not convinced that people want to be lied to. i think people want to be comforted. and i think bad politicians sometimes say comforting things to them. and our job is to jump into the breach and to jump into those conversations, to do the deep reporting, to say look, i'm sorry. what i have to say may be uncomfortable, but that thing you just heard that made you feel good is a lie. i think that's our job. >> coal jobs comes into my head. we're going to bring coal jobs back. that's not going to happen. right, martsy. >> we have to be careful. i don't want to be dismissive of

people who support the president. they are owed our respect and they certainly have mine, but they feel that the so-called elites in washington have not paid attention to them. that they don't understand their lives, they don't understand their concerns. that they -- and they're not being heard. and they feel that the president is actually listening to them. and addressing their concerns. and so they tend to believe him. and they're deeply suspicious of so-called elites like us. at least people who are described as elites. and so they turn to him. >> you know, dean, this is something frankly my late father was one of those folks, those new yorkers, they think they're better than us. he was -- he would say that every once una while. do you feel that at "the new york times" that because a lot of people don't listen to "the new york times" reporting simply because they say, you don't understand my life, so why should i believe what you report. do you think you have to culturally get "the new york times" as in touch with

manhattan and brooklyn as they are with missouri? >> i will have to say, it's always odd for me to be called a member of the elite. i grew up in a poor neighborhood in new orleans, louisiana, and had never been outside of louisiana or mississippi until i was about 17 years old. whenever i go home and my family teases me that i'm now considered one of the great leaders of the elite, i do think, however, that we have to do a much better job, i agree with what marty said, understanding some of the forces that drive people in parts of america that maybe are not as powerful in new york or los angeles. we have to do a better job covering religion. we have to do a better job understanding why some people support donald trump. i agree with marty. we can't dismiss everybody who supports donald trump. i think we have to get out in america much more than we do and talk to people and sort of figure out ways other than the traditional diner story where people just -- >> yes. >> i think we need to go deeper.

i think both of our institutions, no more diners. i think both of our institutions have gotten better at this, just to stew in and let people talk. i often talk about religion because i grew up in a religious, a very religious family. i think, look, people in new york and los angeles, the places i have lived in, not everybody, but people in the worlds we travel don't always see religion as a powerful force that it is. and i think we have to do a better job understanding that. i think we cannot dismiss everybody who supported donald trump, and we just cannot dis miss them. first off, that's not journalistically moral. it's journalistically moral to reach out, understand the world, and to be read. that's our job. >> marty, what's the correct frame when we describe what our journalism is at these main stream news organizations? is it objective, fair? you hear the word balanced thrown out. what's the term you prefer? what is the correct framing to describe what our journalism is,

i guess, in these main stream news organizations. >> i think we should be fair, open-minded when we approach any story. we should be listeners more than talkers. we should be willing to listen to everyone. and i also think that we need to be fair to the public, which means that when we have done our reporting, when we have done our jobs, when we have been thorough, then we need to tell people what we have actually found. we can't disguise it, we can't muddy it up. we can't, you know, we need to be direct and straightforward and tell people what we have actually learned. and so i believe in being fair in the sense of being open-minded, going into a story. but being fair with the public at the end once we have done our jobs, telling them what we have found. >> a phrase i like to use these days is simply -- go ahead. >> i was going to add mine, too. i agree with all those, but empathetic. i think great journalists are empathetic, which means they listen and they try to understand. that's not pandering. and then i think the most powerful word for me is independent. independent which means independent of everybody, by the

way. except our principles and our readers. >> all good words there. i use a phrase these days around here, don't round the edges. simply say what you see. marty barron, dean baquet, thank you both. much appreciated. have a great new year. >> when we come back, the anatomy of a lie. how a made-up story can quickly gain currency in our new media landscape. quickly gain currency in our news media great riches will find you when liberty mutual customizes your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need. wow. thanks, zoltar. how can i ever repay you? maybe you could free zoltar? thanks, lady. taxi!

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one of the favors he requested involved a cybersecurity firm called crowdstrike. they were hired to look into the hacking of the democratic committee's server and determined that russia was responsible. mr. trump has since suggested that crowdstrike is a ukraine wherein-owned company that has spirited this server to ukraine. all in the service of claiming it was ukraine, not russia that interfered in the 2016 election. the claim itself has no basis in fact. clint watticize a security analyst and the author of "messing with the enemy" and he's going to help us understand how unfounded allegations like this spread. good to see you. we're calling this the anatomy of a lie. all successful lies begin with a kernel of truth. simply, crowdstrike hired to investigate dnc server hack. very quickly, why crowdstrike and not the fbi in something like this? >> crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company, one of the best in the world, and one of the best for america, and they routinely work for groups like the dnc. and many large united states

companies, and even international companies. and they have great cyber forensics and the ability to investigate and attribute attributi attribution, and they're also a resource for our defense. they would all rely on a company like this. >> for six months, this was taken as stated fact. crowdstrike, got it. let's move on to the next one. by the aspring of '17, this was the first time the president started to question crowdstrike. he tweeted something. an a.p. reporter said why did you bring up crowdstrike? he said i heard it's owned by a very rich ukrainian. this is not true. but how do we get to the seed of doubt here? >> what we saw in the first part is you take a fact and use a fact to propel the lie. this is essentially how you make that falsehood move to where you want it to be. the answer, the story that they want out there, is that ukraine meddled in the election. there's also other entities that want that story, too. places like russia where crowdstrike is one of the biggest defensive measure weez have around the world against

russian cyberattacks and aggression. >> this is april of 2017. let's go to the next slide that we have here. this is president trump last month in november on fox and friends, where essentially he starts to put it all together. the democrats, they gave the server to crowdstrike. it's a very wealthy ukrainian. a ukrainian company. that's what the word is. two and a half years later, he's still perpetuating this, and they even asked, you know, there's not a lot of truth to this, but he says it anyway. good if you want to propel your lie, just keep issuing falsehoods. the truth has one voice. but lies are infinite. you can continue to make more and more lies, which then wears out anybody trying to rebut them. >> okay, the president says these things, and it gets covered. donald trump ten years ago, this doesn't get covered. >> that's right. you can do all of this on social media. you can write 1,000 stories, but the thing that powers all of these narratives the most is when a very influential real human being uses those narratives and advances them. >> all right, and it's not just

human beings. it's news organizations or we can put news in quotes here. i want to single out two in particular. rt and sputnik. they seem to be the launching pad for this specific conspiracy. >> that's right. there are four attributes you look for in terms of spreading some sort of propaganda. one, be there first. two, repeat it over and over and over again. the human mind actually can't resist repetition. three, it's got to come from a trusted source. these are trusted sources. >> for some people. >> and black out all rebuttals. if you can narrow people in, if you can say these are fake news and these are not, you can put people in an information cocoon push back and don't have the facts, then you can do this. let's go to the next slide. simply ask questions. what is going on? we're not really sure what the deal is. maybe where are those servers, clint? i have never seen them. you know, why are they looking at that? why didn't the fbi go into the dnc offices? and here we are. >> you can make lies faster than

you can refute them. if you're a propagandist, you know that. continue to ask questions. question more. also, the motto of the certain russian state-sponsored outlet is exhaust the audience with so many possibilities you can't know the truth and they'll walk away. >> two facts. fact number one, as of november of this year, the nrcc, which is the republican campaign arm for house races, used crowdstrike to protect the constant contract. and you said this is a russian effort to sort of smear crowdstrike specifically. why? >> if russia can disable crowdstrike, if they can take away their customer base, or if they can continue to make people say you don't believe what crowdstrike is doing and saying or providing evidence for, they are actually taking away one of their opponents, and they're using the american target audience to do that. >> clint watts, this is amazing what the world that we have to e live in now and have to figure out. >> thanks for having me. >> when we come back, the art of spreading disinformation in putin's russia.

and its echoes right here in good old usa. and its echoes right here in good old usa

welcome back. we've just seen how a russia propaganda technique can be used to get an untruth into the media

bloodstream. it's one of many models from putin's russia that have found their way into the american political system. i sat down with two experts on propaganda. masha gessen is author of future is history, how totalitarianism reclaimed russia. and micc amiccal mcfall is curra professor at stanford university. i began by asking them about one particular russian technique. let me put up something here the rand corporation, one of theuber defense think tanks in america wrote about, the russia propaganda model. i want you to explain how this is implemented. this is how they describe it. they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives. if one falsehood is represented or is not well received, they'll discard it and move on to a new explanation. the combination of high volume, multichannel, and continuous

messaging makes russian themes more likely to be familiar to their audiences. it's almost done in real time. give us an example of how you experienced it. >> i think that the biggest thing to understand about it is that it's not -- it's less about what you would expect, which is pushing some sort of one interpretation, one line. it's more about creating a cacophony. it's -- you're supposed to come out the other end feeling like there's no such thing as truth. >> and that is the point? kind of the way i feel here sometimes. >> i think we're starting to experience it first-hand here. because you know, and trump has a very good instinctual feel for it. sometimes he just says things that are the opposite of the facts in front of us. and sometimes he kind of goes, yeah, whatever. sometimes he says, well maybe that, or maybe this. and then in the end, we feel like, you know, all of these versions of i hesitate to call it reality, are equal, equidistant from the truth.

and there's no -- there's nothing to latch onto. everything is mush. >> mike, i know that -- i want to bring up two examples of just within russia, and i think it was when you were there, both of these. when soldiers without insignia on their green uniforms seized control of crimea in 2014. at the time, vladimir putin repeatedly denied they were russian. a year later, he started to boast that they were there. then of course, there was the malaysian airlines flight 17 shot down over ukraine, and all the various explanations in country that the russian government did. explain how effective it was internally. >> well, internally, i think they have done very well in terms of mastering disinformation, and i agree completely with what masha just said, the goal is not necessarily to present one argument versus the other all the time. it's just to say there are no truths. there are no facts. it's all relative. i have heard vladimir putin say that directly when he met with barack obama, president obama

one time. secondly, however, when there are facts, it's to put out arguments that say those are the wrong facts, and so the two examples you just used are an illustration of that second tactic. and i would call that also related to that, another tactic, whataboutism, to change the channel, to say you did that there, what about this over here? and that is another tactic that they use to confuse the terrain and to make people -- you know, to be confused about the facts that there are no facts. and that there are no truths in the world. >> i want to add something, though, to the crimea story because i think it's a really great example. so when he said after a year when he started boasting, yes, there were russians on the ground, he wasn't admitting something everybody knew. he was saying, i assert my right to say whatever i want whenever i want to. sometimes it will be true, sometimes it won't be. but i'm king of reality. right. and what are you going to do about it? it's a power move when he lies and a power move when he tells the truth because only he chooses when he does what.

as for the media, yes, russia had not an incredibly healthy independent media, but had some independent media when he became president. and the first thing he did was he moved to take control of broadcast television. then he moved on -- national broadcast television, then local television, then newspapers. now 20 years later, we have no independent media. >> all right, and mike, you know this, a lot about putin, here's a quote that was attributed to him that he thinks that said the following when he was asked how he thinks the press works. here's an owner. they have their own politics, for them it's an instrument. the government also is an owner in the media that belonged to the government must carry out our instructions, and media that belonged to a private businessman, they follow their orders. >> well, that's his view. that's most certainly his view and that's why one of the first things he did in the year 2000 was to seize control of two of

the national television networks so that they were completely controlled by the government. he understands the power of media. he has begun to export his ideas through multiple channels, both digital media and television. >> there's a phrase that i was reading in this research that really struck me and it's called toxic cynicism. that that is -- that that is what is in russia right now. and that is what he hopes to export to the west. >> and i think we have a lot of it here native born. we have it in the white house. >> we didn't need help. now he just added an accelerant. >> that's exactly it, an accelerant or an amplifier. i think that he and trump share a basic sense of the world. and their sense of the world is that nothing matters, nothing is true. >> nothing is on the level. nothing is on the level. >> yes. everything is for sale. and money equals power, and power equals money. and it's unitary. there can be no checks and

balances. there can be no systems. any formal relationship is always a lie. >> mike mcfaul, you were involved, you have met with a lot of dissidents that are actively trying to deal with putin in russia. what breaks him, if he breaks? >> well, i think an effective thing is just to keep revealing facts, especially about corruption. people want to know about the facts. and i would say the same thing about our country, too. i think sometimes there is a kind of on the one hand, on the other hand that we present with various political debates in the united states. and here, now, i want to put on my profess orial hat. to treat them as equal is distorting to the truth. if you have one set of hypothesis that has evident to support it and another that has no evidence to support it,

reporting on those two in and of itself is a distortion of the facts. and i think russians have learned that. and they keep going back to the facts as their best weapon. and i think we as a society need to do that itself. you don't get your own facts. you can have your own arguments. you can have your own opinions, but two plus two needs to equal four f democrats and republicans every day, not just mondays. wednesdays, and fridays. >> by the way, you can see my entire conversation with masha gessen and mike mcfaul on our website. >> coming up, choosing the news you use depending on your political beliefs.

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welcome back. as the countrypolitically, it's become more divided in its sources of news. 63% of democrats and democratic leaning voters say they believe journalists have high ethical standards why 36% of democrats say the opposite. 79% of republicans say they think journalists have low ethical standards. voters are choosing news from sources that reflect their own political views. in 2004, 48% of democrats identified themselves as cnn viewers. by 2018, that number gone up to 56%. meanwhile, fewer republicans watched cnn, and viewership has dropped in that time span by 6%. 46% of democrats called

themselves msnbc viewers. republican viewership has dropped 14 points. all of which brings us to fox news. less than a quarter of democrats identified themselves as fox news watchers. but viewership went up 14% among republicans to 58%. this siloing of news sources helps explain why democrats and republicans have become so divided. all politics is no longer local. it's not only been nationalized. it's also been balkanized, and that goes for news too. we're going to try to digest all of what we have heard this morning with a tremendous panel of experts. (sensei) when i started cobra kai,

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welcome back. our panel is here. joshua johnson is former host now of 1-a on npr, and soon to be a bigger part of the nbc news family. kara swisher is co founder and editor of recode, tech news and analysis website, also the author of a growingly popular column in t"the new york times." susan glasser, and matthew continet continetti. good to have you all. kara, i want to start in your world of tech. the one thing we haven't touched on as much as sort of social media. we talked about it on the sides, but sort of the role social media is playing in this

misinformation campaign. mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey are kind of having a debate. let me play a clip from mark zuckerberg. >> i certainly worry about an erosion of truth. i don't think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true. >> jack dorsey, head of twitter, actually seemed to disagree with him. this isn't about free express n expression. this is about paying for reach and paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramification that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. >> yes, well, that's the two sides of it, and google sits in the middle. it's trying to figure out a way between them. mark's idea is he's conflating free speech with paid speech. it's purposely confusing to people. anybody can say anything on their platforms. on twitter, for example, donald trump continues to tweet, as you noticed this week, perhaps, but his campaign doesn't get to do paid advertising. that's a very different thing.

what's really interesting is balkanization has been around forever, and early, you look at george washington, all those days. that was very partisan crowds on every bit of media. the issue is when you get into the social media space, it becomes three things. weaponized, amplifieamplified, becomes anonymous. then you can repeat lies and they take a vierality and create engagement that leads to enragement. do it again, lather, rinse, repeat. that's what goes on. >> this, to me, look, this is not new. i mean, lyndon johnson has always credited with saying i don't know if it's true or not. just say it and make them deny it. the idea of disinformation, but social media makes it where the space between what's first reported and the fake part almost has gotten reversed. >> it's faster. it's amplified. you have to think of amplified and weaponization, because it repeats and repeats itself and it's not controllable in a different way. >> i do think that social media, what you described about engagement and enragement, which is very true, exposes part of the problem and maybe part of

the solution for those of us who consider ourselves journalists. i think one of the issues that i have with the way we're fighting back against this is we're trying to fight back with information. but journalists are not in the information business. we are in the trust business. trust is an emotion. you compete head-to-head. you connect heart-to-heart and the enragement speaks to the fact people are seeing information that provokes an emotional response. trust is emotional too. like love. you don't remember when you fell in love, necessarily. you don't remember when you decided to trust journalism, but that emotion is broken. part of what we have to do is acknowledge there's a heart piece of this, people are trusting these lies and this misinformation, and a lot of them are just damn lies. but they work. they give you comfort. they make you feel like the world hasn't changed in ways you don't understand. and it doesn't mean we affirm the lie. it doesn't mean we don't speak the truth, but if we're ignoring the human part of this, none of

what we're doing is going to work. >> matthew, he's getting at what i wanted you to tease at, which is it's almost the cultural connection that the right has decided it doesn't have with mainstream media, so it doesn't matter what we report. well, you don't understand my life so why should i care? >> that culture disconnect is decades old. what gives us this perfect storm of alt-truth is a few things. one isou technological change, which kara mentioned. another is the institutional breakdown, which i think you showed earlier in the program. confidence in the big institutions is just totally -- >> thank god for congress or woo would be at the bottom. >> then president trump who benefits from both of the change t amplify his message. so what you end up with is this place where no one can really agree on the very basic material governing our democracy. >> i think the important thing, though, is to recognize that this just didn't organically happen. you know, this also comes in the context of a war on the

institution of independent journalism. a war on the notion of truth that has served the political interest of, you know, institutions in the country. i mean, i think fox news has waged a purposeful campaign over decades chemo a. in the next 72 hours, i will leave to talk about the military, but i want to talk about our context in this policy with the islamic republic of iran. iraqis threatened american forces. this has been going on now for weeks and weeks and weeks. this wasn't the first set of attacks against this particular iraqi facility and others where there are american lives at risk. today what we did was take a decisive response that makes clear what president trump has said for.

it's not a battle, we're not fighting against it, the ukraine thing. it's ridiculous. it's very clear this is a lie. i've been there. trust me, they're americans running it. >> and now you have the president of the united states amplifying that. >> you're being targeted. this paid advertising is targeted. so they can whisper a thousand different lies in a million different years. that's what the difference is. you can't get to the heart because they amplify andal al l andalgorhythmically do it so you can't get it right. >> it's the sub of trump, then

it starts inching in the mainstream and the pundit says, what's this about? then they might have a provocative headline link, he says it in a friendly way and then it makes it to your facebook feed. how do you have accountability for basically dealing with propaganda? >> it's hard work. it begins by trying to construct the young conservatives in the annals of jo institutions that's longstanding amongeed no evidence to forward a fact. or they don't believe in certain verified sources, credentialed sources of information. they don't trust any of it. one other change that makes this difficult is it used to be you could go to the supermarket and you see the tabloids and the weekly world news, and the

aliens have predicted who will be the president this year, and you move past it. maybe some people get a chuc maybe some people believe it, but it's the minority of the population. today you can't ignore it because it's everywhere. the second you go on one of these platforms, social media in particular, you're confronted by it. >> i hear you in terms of the distrust among conservatives of institutions right about that. i do, however, know a lot of conservatives who are god-fearing people and who remember that the bible says it's better to tie a millstone around your neck than lead the little ones astray. the bible verse says the truth shall set you free. they know the book of proverbs. they know the first two chapters are all about value of truth and a necessity of personal responsibility. i think it is crazy that there are people who say it's just too hard. there's so much going on up there, there's so much information. we want a world war against the nazis where we invented a new

bomb and planted victory gardens and put women in factories. you mean to tell me you won't subscribe to the local paper? really? is this too hard? >> it goes to what is the responsibility of the citizen here? >> don't be gullible. don't make room for gullibility any more. >> it is hard to fight it. it's repetitive. it is doing things in ways that have never been possible through a newspaper. by the way, nobody is reading newspapers and shouldn't be. this is great to be able to get this information on your phone. with conservatives, there is a great book by andrew merits called "antisocial" that showed this chain. you didn't even need the chain anymore. it's rudy giuliani. it's just a lie now. there's no bother. they go straight to it, then it gets critiqued. >> this ecosystem is so well

embedded now in how one party is communicating with its core people that it's a chain that works. i agree with cara. not only can you not break it, but their design, their goal is to get people to say, i don't care. not even necessarily to say i believe this lie. their goal is not necessarily to persuade the unpe ukraine intervened in the 2016 election. thi their goalbout the 2020 election and we're talking at the very end of 2019, this is going to be the major driver, really, in politics. when you think about persuading people who tilted this last election in 2016, a handful of people arguably who might have voted for barack obama and then somehow also for donald trump. people who aren't necessarily living in the information world that we are. and i fear that group of voters is the group of voters who are

saying, i can't possibly think of objective truth. >> this is also a political tactic, matthew. we are now aware that there is some politicians who want to come on this show because they're hoping to get a borrowed moment to use for fundraising. the minute -- we've caught wind of that and we won't put folks on. >> this has a lot to do with the changing of the nature of our institutions. you used to join our institution to be part of this kind of history that preceded you and will go after you. now institutions are platforms for individuals. and this is what makes -- this is the reason why the platforms are now the locust of so much attention whether it's media attention, cultural attention or government attention, right? they're the new sites of regulatory battles because they are the guardrails. the social media knocked down all the other guardrails, right?

now the platforms themselves are the guardrails and they are going to be the heart of our politics for the next decade. >> and they're unregulated. >> a libertarian society, we're seeing the perils of it, joshua? >> there are a few things that give me hope. one is young people. i think young people are increasingly savvy to the very things you're talking about. they have decided there is certain social media they can trust more than others. and the other, i got to say, in three years of hosting, there's one thing that hasn't failed is telling the audience, if you let this evolve into stupidity, the alien will turn you off. that's all we have for today's special broadbroadcast. thank you for watching. thank you for watching all year. here at "meet the press" we wish you a happy and safe new year. we'll see you next week in 2020. because if it's sunday, it's "meet the press." press. apps are used everywhere...

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welcome to a special year-end edition of kc than 2019, believe it or not. we will preview, if possible, all that lies ahead. sto plus my conversation with boston center enes kanter. and i'll be