How to Report on Hacks and Disinformation
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Janine Zacharia, the Carlos Kelly McClatchy Lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Communication, and Andrew Grotto, director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance and the William J. Perry International Security Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.
In 2016, a key part of the Russian influence campaign involved the hacking and leaking of emails belonging to the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Journalists at mainstream news outlets rushed to write up the emails without giving adequate context to how they had been obtained.
So how can the press avoid a similar disaster in 2020? Zacharia and Grotto teamed up in recent months to write a playbook for reporters facing the dilemma of writing about hacked material or disinformation without participating in a disinformation campaign. (They’ve also written an article on the subject for Lawfare.) They spoke with Alina and Quinta about their recommendations for reporters, what the American press might be able to learn from colleagues abroad and how to assess the mainstream media’s response to the New York Post’s bizarre reporting on Hunter Biden.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.1 | The run up to the 2016 presidential election really illustrated how vulnerable our most |
| 0:39.8 | venerated journalistic outlets are to this new kind of information warfare is Andy |
| 0:44.3 | called it that reporters are a targeted adversary of foreign and domestic actors who really |
| 0:49.3 | want to harm our democracy and that they need a plan amid everything else that's going |
| 0:53.7 | on for how to deal with hacking leaks and other disinformation or propaganda campaigns. |
| 1:00.9 | I'm Quinted Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast October 22, 2020. |
| 1:08.5 | It's another episode of our Errbiter's of Truth series on disinformation. |
| 1:12.6 | In 2016, a key part of the Russian Influence campaign involved the hacking and leaking |
| 1:18.8 | of emails belonging to the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. |
| 1:25.1 | Journalists that mainstream news outlets rushed to write up the emails without giving adequate |
| 1:29.4 | context as to how they'd been obtained. |
| 1:32.7 | So how can the press avoid a similar disaster in 2020? |
| 1:36.5 | Jeanine Saharia, the Carlos Kelly McClatchy lecturer in Stanford's Department of Communication, |
| 1:42.3 | an Andrew Grotto, director of the program on geopolitics, technology and governance, |
| 1:47.5 | and William J. Perry International Security Fellow at Stanford Cyber Policy Center, teamed |
| 1:52.6 | up in recent months to write a playbook for reporters facing the dilemma of writing |
| 1:57.3 | about hacked material or disinformation without participating in a disinformation campaign. |
... |
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