Disinformation and Democracy
What damage does disinformation cause our body politic? On this episode of Now & Then, "Disinformation and Democracy," Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman trace the history of disinformation in America, with an emphasis on how technology has fueled the rise of misleading and outright false political news. They discuss the role of the partisan press in shaping early American disinformation, the development of the telegraph in 19th century information warfare, and the rise of GOP-led dirty tricks campaigns over the last fifty years, and the glut of disinformation shaping our current landscape. How have malign actors used our information technology to wreak confusion and discord? And how can we protect our democracy against disinformation as we move forth?
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The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The editorial producer is David Kurlander. The audio producer is Matthew Billy. The Now & Then theme music was composed by Nat Weiner. The Cafe team is Adam Waller, David Tatasciore, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, and Jake Kaplan. Now & Then is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
REFERENCES & SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS:
DISINFORMATION TODAY
"News: Fake News, Misinformation & Disinformation," University of Washington, 10/5/2021
Peter Wade, "Republican Dismisses Vaccine on Fox News, Praises It on CNN in Breathtaking Flip Flop," Rolling Stone, 11/29/2021
Chris Cillizza, "Have you heard the new Republican conspiracy theory about the Omicron variant?" CNN, 11/29/2021
NEWSPAPER DISINFORMATION
Robert McNamara, "History of Newspapers In America," ThoughtCo, 2/24/2020
Letter from Samuel du Pont de Nemours to Thomas Jefferson about the 1800 Jefferson death hoax, National Archives, 7/6/1800
Harlow Giles Unger, "Fake News and the Founders: Get Used to It!" History News Network, 11/24/2019
Mark Sussman, "The 'Miscegenation' Troll," JSTOR Daily, 2/20/2019
David Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation; the theory of the blending of the races, applied to the American white man and negro, Library of Congress, 1864
Philip Kadish, "The race-mixing hoax that dogged Lincoln," CNN, 2/18/1864
Henry Atwell Thomas, "The Miscegenation Ball," Smithsonian Museum of American History, 1864
Sunset Cox, Miscegenation or amalgamation : fate of the freedman, Internet Archive, 1864
John Binns, "Some account of some of the bloody deeds of General Jackson," Library of Congress, 1828
TELEGRAPHIC DISINFORMATION
Samuel Morse, "'What Hath God Wrought' Telegraph Message," Smithsonian Museum of American History, 1844
Jill Lepore, "Vast Designs," The New Yorker, 10/22/2007
"'What Hath God Wrought': The House and the Telegraph," History.House.Gov
Daniel W. Crofts, "Morse, the Telegraph and the Civil War," New York Times, 5/21/2011
Duncan Geere, "How the first cable was laid across the Atlantic," Wired UK, 10/1/2011
Adam Gopnik, "The Fires of Paris," The New Yorker, 12/2014
Herman Kogan, "The Great Fire: Chicago 1871," University of Chicago Magazine, 1971
Adam Chandler, "The Leak That Helped Push America Into World War I," The Atlantic, 3/1/2017
David Broder, "The Story That Still Nags at Me," Washington Monthly, 2/1987
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, "FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats," The Washington Post, 10/10/1972
Robert Mitchell, "The Democrat who cried (maybe) in New Hampshire and lost the presidential nomination," The Washington Post, 2/9/2020
John A. Farrell, "Watergate Created Roger Stone. Trump Completed Him," Politico, 1/29/2019
Michael E. Miller, "'It's insanity!': How the 'Brooks Brothers Riot' killed the 2000 recount in Miami," The Washington Post, 11/15/2018
John Lantigua, "Miami's Rent-a-Riot," Salon, 11/28/2000
Benjamin Sarlin, "A GOP Dirty Trickster Has Second Thoughts," The Daily Beast, 11/20/2008
Heather Cox Richardson:
From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is, Now & Then. I'm Heather Cox Richardson.
Joanne Freeman:
And I'm Joanne Freeman. Today, we're going to be talking about something, which in a sense will not be a surprise to anyone listening, because I'm sure in one way or another all been thinking about it. We're going to be talking about disinformation. Now, it's worth saying at the outside here that we don't mean misinformation, which basically is wrong information, we mean disinformation, meaning deliberately misleading information, which we've been seeing all over the place really, for really over the course of the last few years, but just in the last week or two, we saw some examples of it that stood out so much that you and I, Heather had to talk about it. And the example that was most obvious in which we were certainly not the only ones to notice involved representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who apparently went on Fox News and talked about how natural immunity had great value, and needed to be taken seriously. And that it, according to her, gives you 27 times more protection against future COVID infection than a vaccination.
Nancy Mace (archival):
One of the things that the CDC has not done so far is taken into account what natural immunity does. And that be what we're seeing in Florida today. In some studies that I've read, natural immunity gives you 27 times more protection against future COVID infection than a vaccination.
And the same day went on CNN and then talked about what a big proponent of vaccination she was and how she's always promoting people to get vaccinations and where masks.
I've been a proponent of vaccinations and wearing masks, when we need to. When we had the Delta variant raging in South Carolina, I wrote an op-ed to my community and I've worked with our state Department of Health. I've run ads encouraging my district to go and get vaccinated. And when we have these variants and we have these spikes, to take every precaution from one washing her hands to wearing the N95 or KN95 masks.
So that, within the same day, she basically looked in two different directions and said two different things and not in a sneaky way at all, in a very open way to the point that lots of people noticed.
And that reminded us quite a bit of how changing technologies and mirror changed the way we interact with information and what it's possible to say in a country where there is, or is not the ability to check what people are saying against reality. But one of the things that made us want to do this was actually, I think you have to tell people this, Joanne. I woke up on, I think it was Sunday morning, or was it Saturday morning to a direct message from Joanne, which is not a common thing. Actually, I got a lot of direct messages, first thing in the morning, but usually not from Joanne.
That's true. I'm not a morning person.
And she was incensed about something.
I was indeed. And I don't know how I came across it, but somehow or other, and it's my mistake. I'm not a morning person, and when I wake up in the morning, if I pick up my phone and look on Twitter, that's just a grave mistake. And we all know this, everyone listening knows this, you this Heather, and I know this and I did it anyway. And what I saw was a tweet from Congressman Ronnie Jackson, Republican of Texas, in which he basically was saying in this tweet, "Now it's time for the midterm election variant of COVID, right? They're inventing another one so that they can take over the election." And I'm going to let you read it. I see you holding up your phone, Heather. Not that it's surprising that this idea is out there. Not that I didn't see something like this in the press all over the place, it was a Congressman on his account saying very authoritatively that this was a fact.
That this new variant of the coronavirus was a plant essentially by the Democrats to try and win the 2022 elections. Do you mind if I read you wrote me?
No, go right ahead.
I'm little nervous, but go ahead.
Okay, Joanne wrote to me, "Look at this congressman's tweets. How does one deal with this kind of dangerous nonsense coming from a Congressman. Beyond irresponsible." Which just goes to show you, you shouldn't get up at 7:12 in the morning.
I don't do it a lot.
But it does raise the question. The next thing though, that that comes to mind when we started talking about this, was that the idea of manipulating information to achieve a political end is hardly new, but there are some new aspects of that in our country nowadays in part, because of technology. So misinformation, as you said, is when people have bad and information, and this is often spread by rumor, you hear something and you say, "Oh, this is happening on such and such a day," when it's really not, that's not, you're deliberately trying to mislead somebody. You just have bad information.
I'll even read the dictionary.com definition, right? "False information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead."
Disinformation though is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is inaccurate. It is somebody who is deliberately providing misleading or biased information, deliberately manipulating a narrative, flat out lying about what the fat are on the ground and deliberately spreading propaganda.
The last word was one that I wanted to focus on, because that indeed the definition is, "Deliberately misleading or biased information, manipulated narrative or facts, propaganda," which is an important word to lay out there.
Let's go back though, to the early days of America. This is hardly a new technique that people are using nowadays. And you have some great stories from the framer and the founders of this country, including people like what's his name?
People already know what it is without you even saying it.
I'm so sorry. Go ahead.
People know who you're talking about. You don't even have to say it. You've made it Heather, so that you don't even have to say Thomas Jefferson's name anymore and people know that that's who you're referring to. But when you look at early America and particularly even the early Republic, when the government is first getting off the ground, Europeans who came to the United States always commented that Americans were a newspaper people, that they were very focused on newspapers. They were spreading them all the time, giving them hand to hand, sending them through the mail, reading them aloud in coffee houses. So newspapers were certainly a vital tool of revolution, but they continued on to be these vital tools of information and really holding in many ways, the Union together, because the states were pretty much spread out to a degree that at people worried about what would hold the nation together, and information and newspapers were seen as a key in that quest.
And let's throw in here that this is one of the arguments for having a United States Postal Service to the idea of disseminating information. And so, having access to good information is central to the idea this nation together.
Right. Information and particularly good information is, is basically the currency of democracy. That was something that was certainly known at the time, it's important, you need an informed populous to choose the proper leaders. So, that was right in the mix from the very beginning. But going along with that fact was that in early America, technology was in many ways not advanced. So first of all, it was hard to spread news reliably and quickly. And even when you were spreading things in newspapers, they were notoriously not objective, right? Objectivity in news was not on the radar screen if there were radar screens. At the time period, it just newspapers were about either serving business in one way or another, or serving a political cause. And they made gestures towards being objective in some way, but you couldn't absolutely believe what you saw in a newspaper.
So put all of that together and then think about high political stakes. Like for example, the election of 1800, right? Big deal election. It ends up being the first election in which power transfers from was essentially one party, the Federalist Party to another, the Republican Party. The Federalists really, really, really don't want to see Thomas Jefferson be President. So there's this article in a newspaper, it starts out in a Baltimore newspaper and then it gets reprinted everywhere. And it has this wonderful headline, which when you're looking at early American newspapers, you always know it's going to be snazzy news when it's headlined, "Melancholy." So this just says, "Melancholy," and I'll read part of it here. "It was last evening reported that the man in whom is through the feelings and happiness of the American people. Thomas Jefferson is no more a duty, which I owed to the public naturally excited me to trace this alarming and truly melancholy report.
It appears to have been first brought to this city by Messrs Garrett, Holmes and Gibson who left Winchester on Thursday." So big accuracy here, right? They're going to track the path of this rumor, "And inform that a gentleman arrived there on that day, who left Charlottesville about four miles from Monticello on Wednesday." And it goes on and on and on. And then it says, "Mr. Jefferson died on the day proceeding after an indisposition 48 hours." And then it goes on to more in the horrible melancholy news.
So basically in the lead up to a presidential election, a newspaper reports, "Melancholy! Tragedy! The candidate has died!" Which is really tricky, right? Because how do you refute that? It's not as though you can go and blast some kind of national message. It's not as though you can follow the path of the article; it's being spread all over the place. What's interesting is, I don't know who wrote this particular article. So I don't know if there was misinformation that becomes disinformation, or what the combination of the two is, but regardless it started out as disinformation, and as a Federalist to smack at the Jefferson campaign for President and in the end, obviously it ends up being proven, not true and life goes on and he wins the election, but that's really deliberate, crafty use of disinformation.
Oh, astonishingly. So, that the candidate is dead and, again, I have visions of him running around going, "I'm not dead, I'm not dead," but while I will confess while we were thinking about this and I was sort of inwardly chuckling a little bit, I'm sorry to say, that idea of attacking candidates by attacking their health is one that has been deployed lately with great success. I mean, remember when candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 stumbled a little bit and there was all the rumors on the right that she was having a stroke, or it was otherwise going to be incapacitated. And similarly, I see this all the time. The idea that president Joe Biden, who in his late 70s, is senile. And my only answer to that is: how do you prove that you are not? And you can sit there and you can say, "Well, he's accomplishing this and this and this," and the list is really quite long, but it's not doing any good.
I was called with a bunch of historians to meet with the president and I had dinner or in the last six months with people who knew that I had been at a table with him and a handful of other people for hours. And what they wanted to know was, "Well, so what's his mental health like?" And I said, "Well, it's perfectly fine. I mean, we had a three hour conversation. We talked history, we talked politics. There's nothing wrong with his mind." And these people were really hard to convince that wasn't the case. And these are informed people; they got that information from reading and listening to various forms of media. And it was interesting to me, the degree to which the fact that I was in a room with the person and could say, "Yeah, no, really." And even that kind of direct evidence was not fully enough to get people pulled away from what, in a sense they maybe needed or wanted to believe
Well, but isn't that the power of disinformation and information, that once the seed is planted, it's really, really hard to get rid of it. And that's one of the things that people who study disinformation say is that, it was that old saying, "The lie travels twice or around the world before the truth gets it's shoes on," or whatever that is. Once that idea is in your head, it's really hard to dispel it. So, Jefferson going like, "No, no, I'm really not dead." Like, "Well, no, I think you are."
"How do I know you're"-
"Now, are you sure you're Jefferson? Because when I saw him all those years ago, he didn't look like you do." It's like, "No." But there's a different kind of story from the early years that I think shows how these ideas get into society and how powerful disinformation can be. And this is a story that a lot of people don't know, but they probably have heard the word miscegenation, meaning the mixing of, especially the Black and white Americans in the middle of the night century. What before 1864 was called amalgamation. And in that case, the word, "Amalgamation" did not have any kind of connotations around it. In the December of 1863, leading up to the 1864 election, two reporters for the New York World, which was a New York city newspaper that was aligned with Democrats, published a pamphlet. It was a 72 page pamphlet called The Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and, in their words, Negro.
And what the pamphlet did is it was a hoax, but it appeared to be a plea for racial integration, both in marriage and in professional life, and said that Republican officials, including Lincoln were in favor of that kind of equality. Now, this is an absolute hot button issue before the election of 1864, when Democrats were arguing that Republicans were forcing white men to die in favor of Black rights or to advance black rights. And so what they do is they take this pamphlet and they don't say it's a hoax. They pretend that it has been written by Republicans, and they circulate it to get people to endorse it. And it becomes a big issue in the 1864 election, to the point that people have come cartoons that purport to show balls that are designed around their word, "Miscegenation," and this idea of white men marrying Black women, but sometimes Black men marrying white women. Their cartoons, their articles about how this is the end of American society, that the Republicans in 1864 want to see.
And a number of abolitionists then get really put on the spot because in fact, they are arguing for racial equality, but at the same time, they recognize that this is a really big deal for the upcoming election, and so they don't want to go ahead and turn white voters, because that's the only people who are voting at this point, against the Republicans in this election. So they kind of try and split the baby saying like, "Well, yeah, we don't have a problem with this idea. We think it's actually kind of not a bad idea, but do you really want to say this before the election?" And repeatedly the anonymous authors of the pamphlet try to rope in leading lawmakers to write that they agree with this pamphlet.
Which is interesting because in the same way that you can't prove that you're undead, here are people sort of being backed into a different corner in which they can't sort of turn their back and denounce something, but they don't want to come straight and approve of something. And again, around election time, any language that you're using is going to be charged language. So as with the Jefferson ploy, this is a crafty hoax.
Crafty hoax that of course has worked its way into American society in ever so many ways, but certainly with the continuation of their made up word, miscegenation, it still is part of our lexicon because of this hoax. And in fact, the hoax was not exposed for many years after they initiated it, after these two journalists went ahead and did it. So there is this ability to go ahead and seed into our political discourse, disinformation that is believable enough and hard enough to refute that it is going to go ahead and affect elections.
And I will mention here only because it brings us back to where we started. We started with a member of Congress talking about a deliberately created variant of COVID by Democrats. We do indeed in February of 1864, Ohio democratic Congressman Samuel Cox ends up discussing this on the floor of the House. That this doctrine, this pamphlet, that it's being urged by the leading lights of The Abolition Party, toward which the Republican Party will and must advance. So once again, it starts out as a hoax and a pamphlet, and they're plying it and sending it to people to try and get them to endorse something that's basically in their mind, a trap. And it finds its way onto the floor of Congress, coming out of the mouths of congressmen. It becomes part of debate, not only in popular culture and cartoons, but in very formal ways.
And have to say on this, this is Samuel S. Cox. Who's known as, "Sunset" Cox because he wrote for the newspapers. And when he was a young man, he wrote a description of a sunset, this very florid description of a sunset that stuck to him. So he became known as, "Sunset" Cox, and he hated that name by the way. And I have never been convinced that he wasn't in on the plot, that he was quite deliberately doing that. And I have never written a book on Cox obviously, but I know him pretty well. And I have my doubts that that wasn't a setup. He wrote for newspapers himself, and he recognized the power of a nickname. I mean, he got stuck with, "Sunset" when he was a kid, basically, a young man. He knew how powerful that would be. And then, all of a sudden this incredible piece of disinformation shows up to attack Lincoln, right? In '63, I just have my doubts.
But if we have this problem with disinformation anyway, and it's not just these two, we picked these two things, but there's the very famous pamphlet with Andrew Jackson where there's coffins, it's called The Coffin Broad Side because they are accusing him of murdering a whole bunch of people. And it's great reading by the way. So people have been doing this, it's sort of one step beyond spin into disinformation in these early years. But you can kind of get away with that in the early 19th century, because you can say something in New Hampshire, and say something entirely different in South Carolina, and nobody's going to pick it up because nobody in South Carolina is reading the newspapers from New Hampshire, but that's all going to change in the 1840s.
If you think about it, think about politically the power that, that grants you. If you are a member of Congress from Massachusetts, and in Massachusetts, you're howling about something that has to do with southerners, but it's in Massachusetts. And then you go to Washington to serve Congress, but that's in Massachusetts, and it's not necessarily going to travel to Washington. And you go back to doing whatever is that you have been doing in Congress, along with southerners before, and you can speak with different voices in different parts of the country. And kind of basically assume that those voices will stay separate until technology complicates things. And in the 1840s, the first thing that comes along and does that in a really dramatic way is the telegraph.
And the telegraph is often when we think about communicating over long distances, we focus on the telephone, which is going to come later, and is itself a really interesting technology. But the telegraph is the first thing that really erases time and space from those sorts of comments, for example, that representative Mace just did where she got on Fox News and CNN and said entirely different things. Until the telegraph, you could do that in America. You could say different things in different states and the tele graph erases your ability to do that. So in May of 1844, Samuel Morse, who was an artist and he turned into an inventor, and he comes up with the idea of what he calls the electric telegraph in 1832. And then in the late 1830s, he figures out that he can come up with a system of dots and dashes to go ahead and put communications over that telegraph, and that is of course Morse code. That's where it comes from.
And in May of 1844, he sends a message over the first commercial telegraph line from Washington DC to a railroad station in Baltimore. And he taps out this amazing line that a friend of his told him to use. He didn't think of it himself. He taps out, "What hath god wrought!" Which of course is indicative of so many things about antebellum America; the focus on religion and so many things, but it is also such just symbol of the opening of a new era. It was really beautifully picked as the first sentence to go across this modern means of communication.
And here's the thing it is sent from the US Capitol. So one of the first things that people realize about the telegraph when you are looking up, and reading in political correspondence and political newspapers of that time, it's hard to exaggerate the degree to which the whole idea of the telegraph was, on the one hand seen as transformative that wow, in 45 minutes, the entire nation can know what's happening in Washington, which on the one hand sounds wonderful, and on the other hand sounds terrifying because before the telegraph you had wiggle room. You could say something, and then you could go to the reporter and suggest that maybe you didn't say it that way, or take it back, or change your words. The telegraph eliminates a lot of wiggle room, and it does this 1844, the late 1840s, and then the 1850s, at a time when the sectional crisis in the United States is really rising to its peak.
So it's spreading news more quickly before, in a more national way than before at a moment when the nation is becoming more sectional than ever before over the issue of slavery. So it has a huge, huge impact. Nowadays, it's sort of, we worry about when news channels start broadcasting the results of presidential elections, because we don't want voting to be swayed by the news that's being announced. The first presidential election in which they began to have that concern, and in which actually, they decided that elections had to all happen on the same day to avoid this kind of complication was 1848. And it was the telegraph that raised that fear, that somehow or other the telegraph might mess up how people were perceiving the election, so the election should happen the same day everywhere, and bulletin was sent out to people throughout the states, telegraph workers throughout the states saying that they should quote, "Avoid any partiality during the excitement." Watch what you'd send out by telegraph, because you just don't know what influence it's going to have. And this is an election.
And you mentioned the rise of sectionalism in this period, but you can also argue that the telegraph contributes to that.
Because no longer can people sort of soothe the other side when they're down speaking wherever, or people forget that Jefferson Davis, for example, actually came and spoke in Maine in this period. No longer can you sort of say things in private that aren't going to end up in public. All of a sudden people have to grasp the fact that they don't agree and that it's in their faces.
And that they're learning this as it's happening. So there's an incident in which there's a Massachusetts member of Congress who goes home and rants in the 1850s about southerners and uses the word, "Barbarians," which is a favorite term that particularly anti-slavery people like to use about the southerners, "Barbarians" and the barbaric practice of slavery. And then comes back to Washington, goes back to Congress to resume doing what he did before. And a southerner stands up and basically says, he has in his hand, a newspaper reporting what had just happened in Mount Massachusetts. He says, "You really think you can say that, and then come back here and shake my hand and work with me in Congress after you've just called me a barbarian?" So suddenly no more two voices. What he said in Massachusetts exists now on the floor of the House of Representatives.
There's also stuff you talk about in Field of Blood. Joanne's second book, Field of Blood, where the imperative to go ahead and make sure that news doesn't spread incorrectly changes the behavior of people in Congress.
And stops them literally in their tracks sometimes. So for example, in 1850 in the Senate, one Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi, who's kind of, what's the word I want to use? Waspish is a good word, really irritating character, and is deliberately bugging Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. This all has to do with the compromise of 1850 and the issue of slavery and how it's going to be treated. But at one point, Benton finally loses his temper, and lunges out of his seat, and lunges at Foote, who pulls a pistol out of his coat and aims it at Benton. And obviously, this becomes a big deal, and someone calls it a stampede, and people are fleeing from the galleries and the Senate. And as happened in a lot of these violent incidents or near violent incidents, ultimately everyone sits down and it seems as though, "Okay, well that's over, let's go back to work."
But a New Hampshire Senator John Parker Hale basically says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. We can't just go back to work, can we? Because there needs to be more, there needs to be an explanation." Someone says, "Let's just close the Senate doors right now and handle this. We'll push it out of the public mind." And Hale says, "No, no, no. We have to explain something because," and this is going to be a quote, "If we don't say anything, due to the telegraph's lightning speed by sundown in St. Louis, it would be rumored quote "That there has been a fight on the floor of the American Senate and several senators have been shot and are weltering in their gore."" And when you read that in the congressional record, you can sense the fact that basically Hale is saying, has said, "This is leaving the room now. We do not have control of this spin. Because of the telegraph, the nation's learning something, and we're going to have to decide what to do about that now." You can feel the whole conversation of democratic politics shift in a dramatic way, and you can sense how politicians do not know how to confront this kind of a change.
And I'd like to add to that with the advent of the telegraph, when it came right before the Mexican American War of 1848, when, and the telegraph lines are going to start going along the railroad lines, and there's going to be communications from the troops that are pushing into Mexico, a lot of Americans get a very skewed idea of what war is going to look like. They feel like they have seen a war because they've been having these daily dispatches, and the Mexican American War, because the command chiefs had gone through and cleaned out a lot of the borderland Mexicans, the war was pretty quick and easy for the Americans. And a lot of Americans think they have seen a war in 1848, because they watched it in the newspapers coming through the telegraph lines. And so, in 1860, when people like Henry Foote are saying, "It's not going to be a big deal to have this war between the North and the South; there'll be one battle. It'll be bloodless." All those sorts of things. A lot of Americans were like, "Yeah, we've been there. We saw this. It's going to be easy." And they're clearly misled by what they understand war to be, in part, because they've had these frontline dispatches.
Had the odor of reality, but were such a partial glimpse, and yet seemed so different from what they'd had before.
So, if you have this idea that you're going to have instantaneous communications through the telegraph, the next obvious step is to go ahead and make sure that you're going to have communications from Europe on the telegraph. And that too is going to change American history, because what happens is, right after the telegraph becomes viable, a guy named Cyrus Westfield who's a New Yorker believes that he can go ahead and put a telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. And this is going to be a somewhat long, complicated process, but finally, in July of 1866, after many tries and failures, when the cable breaks for example, or they try to put too high a signal across it so the insulation rots, they go ahead and they manage to put a transatlantic cable stretching from North America to Europe.
So this cable goes down in 1866. And of course, in order to make that cable viable, it's important that news comes across it. And at first they're going to be able to get a lot of interesting news to Americans who have lived through their own civil war by reproducing news stories about the Franco-Prussian War. But when the Franco-Prussian War ends in January of 1871, the American newspapers that have come to rely on news coming from the Franco-Prussian War really don't have a lot to deliver. And what happens after the armistice in that war in Europe, is that people who live in the city of Paris feel that they've been sold out by their government in the armistice. And so they go ahead and they take control of the city of Paris from March through May of 1871. And they organize, what's known as the Paris Commune. They become known as, "Communards" and the scene from Paris when it's controlled by the commune become headline news in America. And what they're reflecting is not necessarily what's actually happening in Paris. What they are reflecting is what the American newspapers pull off the telegraph as being interesting, and of interest to people at home.
So what Americans see day after day in their newspapers from March through May of 1871 is a story in which workers have taken control of the city of Paris. They are burning it down. They burn the Tuilleries at one point. They're murdering religious figures, and even women have become so wild and controllable that they're filling bottles with this newfangled petroleum stuff, and sticking rags in it and lighting them on fire and throwing them in the bottom of buildings and blowing up the buildings. So Americans come to believe, as they're looking at the news coming across the transatlantic cable that letting workers have a say in their government is hideously dangerous. And beginning in about March of 1871, this idea that America should support workers as they had coming out of the Civil War, gets rewritten to say that, "We don't want organized labor. We don't want to have workers have a say in society because they will burn it down." And that idea of workers being danger is to American society is very much enabled by the transatlantic cable and becomes part of American culture almost immediately.
It's worth noting that the very technology that is allowing this to happen in and of itself has a kind of panache to it, right? The fact that what you're learning it's through this new technology. That in and of itself gives even more credence, and even more significance, and seemingly even more weight to whatever you're learning that way. So in the past, when I've done research in sort of the mid 19th century newspapers, there comes to be a new kind of headline. And in some newspapers, it takes up the entire left part of a front page of a newspaper. And at the top, it'll just say, "telegraphic." And all it's saying is, "This is all stuff from the telegraph." And some of the news is very much the stuff that you see elsewhere in the newspaper. Some of it is barely news, but it's from the telegraph. And so, that's exciting in and of itself. Sometimes things being reported that admittedly, they don't even know if they're true, but they're possibly untrue and yet coming through the telegraph. So that gives it a kind of credence.
And the idea that you're onto something new, that you're part of the new ideas. That's right. And that's something new and exciting, the first cut of something. And, again, in 1871, that translates in America to a fear of immigration, to a fear of organized labor, to the point that when Chicago burns in October of that year, there are a number of people who come out with books saying, "This is the same impulse in our American cities like Chicago, like New York that was in Paris." So when in fact you see the burning of Chicago, because it's all built out of wood, out of dry wood, and a bunch of people are packed together and it catches fire, and there's wind in that city. I believe it has some nickname like, oh, I don't know "The Windy City." They turn around and they blame workers for that, rather than recognizing that this is an urban problem. And you see that nowadays, of course, through that idea that the fire in Chicago was the fault of an immigrant; Mrs O'Leary and her cow. It was not. But that idea that America is danger because of workers, organized workers who want to control society, really is pushed by that new technology of the transatlantic cable.
And maybe even more powerful than that, although that trope from the Paris Commune obviously still informs our daily approach to issues of labor in America is of course the Zimmermann Telegram, which is instrumental in getting America involved in World War I. And that's, again, obviously the Zimmermann Telegram, that was an explosive story that hits the newspapers in March of 1917. So the story shows that a German foreign minister, a guy named Zimmermann had gone ahead and written to the German Ambassador to Mexico with a deal. If the United States declared war on Germany, because Germany was starting unrestricted submarine warfare, if in the case that America declared war on Germany, because of that, Mexico in turn would declare war on America, and Mexico and America had been squabbling before World War I anyway. If Mexico would go ahead and declare war on America, in the event of a German victory, the Germans would make sure that the Mexicans got back all the land that America had taken over after 1848 in the Treaty Guadalupe Hidalgo. This was really an astonishing telegram in which Germany is trying to get Mexico to attack America and get the land back that it lost.
And it was so astonishing that a lot of people didn't think it was actually real. German American periodicals immediately suggested that it had to be a hoax. It was designed to drag the US into the war, so it was probably written by the British. And one of the editors of New York bay German American periodical actually said, "It is impossible to believe that the German foreign secretary would place his name under such a preposterous document." And they go on and say, this must have been a British agent who planted this." And then finally, Zimmermann himself admitted that he had written the telegram, and this interception of a telegram over something as major as a world war exposes what had previously would've been a secret kind of exchange. And it actually is a major factor in convincing Woodrow Wilson to go ahead and ask Congress to declare war on Germany, which he did in April of 1917.
So, we've been seeing in one way or another first, just how generally in politics, hardly surprising, that disinformation, not just misinformation has always been used as some kind of a way to sway particularly elections, but really just to have political influence. Then we've looking at how technology alters, and speeds up and complicates that. And in a way offers more highways and byways for these kinds of hoaxes, and tricks, and misunderstandings to spread in ways that they haven't before. But now, we sort of segue really into the 20th century in full, we move into the category of dirty tricks.
And people doing exactly what we're talking about deliberately.
And combining both the technology of the instantaneous communications with the bad faith of things like the miscegenation pamphlet to create a whole new stew of poison.
So a great example of this takes place in February of 1972, two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, a man named William Loeb. Who's the far right publisher of the Manchester Union Leader publishes two letters that have really negative allegations against democratic mean Senator Edmond Muskie, who's then the front runner in the democratic primary. And the first article-
Okay. Can I just say, "Negative allegations," I think you mispronounced, "Slimed."
Well, yeah, okay, slime. I'm always a little bit too democratic for my own good. Small D.
I remember, I lived in Maine and we were fans of Muskie, and this is really powerful language. It may not sound so powerful if you're not from New England, but this was… Go ahead.
Okay. So the first article is a front page editorial titled, "Senator Muskie insults Franco Americans," and Lobe goes on to accuse Muskie of condoning the use of, "Canuck." A term that sometimes is really meant to be a derogatory designation for French Canadian who make up, or made up at that time, a huge percentage of the voting block among New Hampshire Democrats. And the editorial is based on a letter purportedly sent to the union leader by a person named Paul Morrison, supposedly. And in it, this Morrison person writes that a Muskie aid in Florida had said, quote, "We don't have Blacks in Maine, but we have Canucks," and then says, according to this Muskie laughingly replies, "Come to New England and see." So it's a slur, and then it's a slur that's, according to this article, Muskie is replying to laughingly, like, "Come up and take a look."
The next day, Loeb reprints a two month old Newsweek item, it's brief on Muskie's wife, Jane, and in it there's innuendo that Mrs. Muskie tended to tell dirty jokes at pre-dinner cocktails, and she snuck outside to smoke cigarettes. It's low, low, maybe not slime, but sort of nasty sort of petty attacking of Muskie's wife, Jane. And the point here is that these articles come at a high ebb in Muskie's political career. Because really the prevailing wisdom at the time was, and CBS's newscaster, Eric Sevareid put it really bluntly. He said, "Unless this man steps on a landmine, he'll be nominated," right? So he really is looking like a likely person for this nomination. And Gallup polls also showed musky as the only candidate, either leading or running even in a matchup with Republican President Nixon, who at this point is seeking reelection.
So given the sizable New Hampshire population of French Canadian heritage, Muskie really wants to clear this up. So he appears in front of the Union Leader building, and really says a thing or two about Lobe, really denounces him, particularly for calling out his wife. And as he spoke, he seems to break down into tears. The Washington Post describes him as, "Standing silent in the near blizzard, rubbing at his face, his shoulder heaving, while he attempted to regain his composure sufficiently to speak."
Senator Edmund Muskie (archival):
By attacking me, by attacking my wife, he's proved himself to be a gutless coward. I hope that the people of Manchester find a way to say to the pride of Prides Crossing, that they don't like his kind of journalism here in New Hampshire, and that they say it in a way that they can make it stick. That's the only way he'll understand that here in Northern New England, we respect each other. That's something I don't extend to him.
So it's a pretty strong, straightforward statement.
A straightforward sentiment. He calls him a, "Gutless coward."
Well, that's what I mean. That's pretty straightforward.
And I'm thinking of some of the comparisons more recently of people whose wives were insulted by certain politicians.
I was wondering if someone was going to mention that. Yes, I was indeed thinking about wives being insulted and responses to that. So again, not the only time that that happens for certain, but after that speech, the crying speech, Muskie's standing in the New Hampshire primary polls begins to slip, and he ends up finishing with only 48% of the democratic primary vote, which is far short of what certainly he would've been expected at that point. Ultimately, in October of 1972, FBI investigators revealed that that letter, the initial letter that started this whole mess was part of a dirty tricks campaign against Democrats, orchestrated by the committee to reelect the President Nixon.
Otherwise known as CREP; the Committee to Reelect the President. And so what you're saying is that entire letter was fabricated. It was a lie.
Absolutely. Fabricated deliberately to slash at a threatening candidate who appeared to have a lot of support, and used what you wonderfully called, "Slime" to try and bring this person down.
And later on, Woodward and Bernstein revealed that a staff writer for the Washington Post, a woman named Marilyn Berger reported that the deputy director of White House Communications, a man named Ken Clawson told her in a conversation that he was the one who wrote the letter. And he and Donald Segretti who were also deeply involved in the dirty tricks campaign that Nixon engaged in were ultimately credited with launching that plot.
And just think for a moment about what we just described there, of all that happened; the crying, and the accusations, and the offense, and the people being offended, and the slipping in the polls, just an out and out lying letter sent by someone just trying to tank a campaign.
Yeah. So again, how do you convince somebody you're not dead? That idea of, "Of course he said it." He didn't.
Right. And of course he's going to say he didn't.
Sort of the heart of disinformation, right? And one of the things that's interesting about the Nixon campaign and the system that they used, which they characterized with the term, I don't think we even can use is that one of the people involved as a young man who carries an image of Nixon on his back to this day in a tattoo, and that is Roger Stone, who was a 20 year old operative in that campaign. And he did things in that, like making a donation from a fake organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, to somebody who was opposing Nixon in the primary, using things like that to go ahead and again, slime opponents. And that business of running politics by lying is going to make a huge difference in our lives in the year 2000. Thanks again to Roger Stone.
So Roger Stone, again, cuts his teeth in this idea of running politics by convincing people of things that are not true, by changing the trajectory of reality by creating narratives and creating images. And he is instrumental in, what's known as the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000 after the election of that year. And the way that that played out was that the election of that year was on November 7th. And on that election, it became clear that the outcome of the 2000 election would depend on the electoral votes from Florida. There were a lot of problems with that Florida election; there was a butterfly ballot in which you didn't actually read down one side of the page and then down the other, you were supposed to read page to page, which meant that a bunch of democratic voters get siphoned off to vote for a far-right candidate. There were a number of people kicked off the roles immediately before the election. But after the election, it becomes clear that Bush has a lead in the state, but as they continue to do recounts, the numbers of votes that put Bush in the lead start to drop, and they start up by a lot. Usually recounts don't change the vote very much, but in fact, the recounts in Florida drop Bush's lead in the state from 1,784 votes, to 327 votes,, then to 154 votes.
And finally, attention comes down to Miami-Dade County, which is a democratic stronghold. And there, it seems likely that Gore is going to pick up a lot of votes in a recount. So on November 21st, the Florida Supreme Court authorized a manual recount in four counties and set a deadline for November 26th on that. And then on November 22nd, the Miami-Dade County Canvasing Board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet their deadline. And so, they're trying to hunker down, and trying to avoid the media frenzy that's descending on them. And so in order to go ahead and avoid that they move into a smaller room on the 19th floor of the County Building, so that they can be close to the ballot scanning machine. That day hundreds of people from around the country, including a bunch of Republican staffers descend into South Florida to protest the recount.
There's a New York Congressman, for example, a man named John Sweeney who was working for the Bush campaign, who ordered protestors to shut it down, meaning to shut down the recount. And there's more and more pressure on the Miami-Dade, recount that eventually becomes known as the Brooks Brothers riot, because the protestors who were trying to shut it down, come dressed and buttoned shirts and sport jackets. And they appear at the room outside where the counting is taking place, and they start screaming, "Stop the count, stop the fraud, let us in." And the protestors increasingly accuse the Miami-Dade counters of stealing ballots and of stealing the election. The guy in charge of that was the democratic county chairman, a guy named Joe Geller. And six days after the Brooks brothers riot, Geller told Salon, and this is a quote, "This was not a Miami moment. It was outsiders, Hitler Youth sent in by the Republicans to intimidate the election officials."
And that's actually exactly what it was. It was a Stone operation to go ahead and orchestrate that protest in Miami. He recruited a bunch of Cuban American protestors by warning on the radio, for example, that democratic candidate Al Gore was going to stage a coup, the same way that Fidel Castro had staged a coup in Cuba. He'd organized phone banks to encourage Miami Republicans to storm the counting site. And on the day of the rioting, he actually was in a Winnebago outside, organizing the protests. So there was this sense that by manipulating the media and getting people to think that there was something untoward going on in what was really quite a legitimate recounting, that he could go ahead and orchestrate and end to that recount. And that is exactly what happened.
And think about the layers of impact of that. So first of all, you have the people doing the recount who have the impression there's this mass of people banging down the doors, wanting to end it all, and that there's mass opposition. You're getting an awareness outside of that place that somehow or other there's a mass movement, mass opposition against what, of course, must be some kind of illicit attempt to steal the election. And that the fact that there's that kind of protest shows that things not right down there in Florida. So on many, many levels, this out and out fabrication can spread to voters, can spread to the public, can have an impact in Florida, and in the counting of votes in Florida, it echoes, it resounds out in a lot of different ways. And it's completely fabricated.
Well in a sense, we're talking about information, and how in a democracy, you desperately need to have an informed public, but the manipulation of that information into disinformation that then can be transmitted increasingly quickly over first telegraph lines, then telephone lines, then radio, then television, and now the internet, means that we have a real problem with disinformation, and with its ability to whip people up to an emotional reaction to go ahead and change our history, change our political history. And in the case of 2000, stop a recount that looked as if it were going to put a Democrat who won the popular vote into the White House, rather than a Republican.
To act on impulse and act on emotion rather than to act on real information. So first of all, that in and of itself, not only is it disinformation, it's anti-information. It's trying to get people emotionally riled up. And that kind of emotion is always going to be more effective than plain old, boring truth when it comes to what's being publicized and what's catching the public eye. And as you just said, Heather, different forms of technology are helping that transformation, that spread of deliberately emotion rousing lies, to change the whole political picture and alter American political history.
You know, if you think about it, democracy in and of itself is a conversation of sorts between people who hold power, and the people who have given it to them. And the process of governing has to do with the communication back and forth of people with power, and the people who've given it to them, that's where accountability comes in. But any form of technology that alters the nature of that conversation, alters democracy. It makes perfect sense, if democracy is a conversation between people with power and those who've given it, any technology that changes that conversation is going to transform democracy. And the question then really becomes: how does the nation adjust to that new technology? How is that new technology reigned in or accommodated what happens in that moment when people are trying to figure out in essence, a new language of politics. And depending on what happens there, really depends the direction of the nation's politics.
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