Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Words have power and words have consequences.

Joe and I are honored to welcome our next guest to the show.

Kathleen Hall-Jamison is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication,

the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and program director of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands.

Professor Jameson has authored or co-authored 16 books and her most recent title is Cyberwar.

How Russian hackers and trolls helped elect a president?

Professor Jameson, welcome to Words Matter.

Thank you, it's good to be with you.

Professor Jameson, I'm going to do what some authors hate, but I'm going to go to the back page of the book and start at the back and ask you a simple question.

Did the concerted Russian effort across all fronts and we'll get into each of the fronts that you talk about in your book?

Did it turn the election? Did it push it one way or the other?

When I'm asking in the context of as a political operative, I've looked at this have been highly suspicious but had no data to it.

So it was an argument between me and my Republican friends.

You've actually dug into this the way you have on so many other subjects.

How would you answer that question?

The answer to the question is that it probably did but we don't have the evidence to say that it certainly did.

And the level of certainty of the various answers differs.

The first we've got the trolls in cyberspace, they're pretending to be us.

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