Swamp Notes: Misinformation as a campaign strategy
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2024
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate senator JD Vance have spent the past few weeks pushing a false claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating residents’ pets. The FT’s US national editor, Ed Luce, and New York correspondent, Joshua Chaffin, join this week’s Swamp Notes to discuss why misinformation is a powerful electoral strategy and whether the truth matters to voters.
Mentioned in this podcast:
‘It’s ugly’: Donald Trump’s Haitian pet-eating claim fractures Ohio city
Trump, Vance and American blood and soil
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Swamp Notes is produced by Ethan Plotkin, Sonja Hutson, Lauren Fedor and Marc Filippino. Topher Forhecz is the FT’s executive producer. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson.
CREDIT: ABC News, CNN
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The UK's energy partner. |
| 0:06.0 | Learn more at equinore. |
| 0:10.0 | At Aquinore. |
| 0:11.0 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Springfield, Ohio is a city of around 60,000 people. For a long time, it was perhaps best known as the birthplace of Grammy Award winning musician John Legend. But since the U.S. presidential debate |
| 0:24.6 | earlier this month Springfield has been in the news for a very different reason. |
| 0:29.1 | In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating |
| 0:36.0 | they're eating the pets of the people that live there. This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the F.T. News Briefing, where we talk about |
| 0:49.9 | all of the things happening in the 2024 U presidential election. I'm Sonia Hudson and this |
| 0:56.2 | week we're asking do American voters care about the truth? Here with me to discuss is |
| 1:01.6 | Joshua Chapman. He's the F.T.'s New York correspondent. |
| 1:04.4 | Hi Josh. |
| 1:05.4 | Hello. |
| 1:06.4 | And we've also got Ed Luce, the F.T.'s US National Editor and co-author of the Swamp Notes |
| 1:11.2 | newsletter. |
| 1:12.1 | Hi, Ed. Hello. So. of the the conspiracy theory about Springfield and how it ended up as one of Donald Trump's |
| 1:25.8 | talking points during the presidential debate? |
| 1:28.0 | Sure, this is the cats and dogs, one that originated as so many of these things do with a random Facebook post but |
| 1:38.0 | it got picked up by one of the sort of heavily followed influencers on the far right and then quickly became a meme. |
| 1:46.8 | People like Elon Musk then sort of rocket boosting it with their own endorsements and JD Vance who is you know of the generation of |
| 1:55.8 | online Republicans we should never forget the guy's 40 he's he's really been an |
| 2:00.0 | active online Twitter conservative, |
| 2:03.2 | then you know turning it into an even bigger meme and then it finds its way into |
... |
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