The Making of an Election Myth

The FRONTLINE Dispatch

GBH

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4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

More than a year after President Joe Biden's inauguration, around two-thirds of Republican voters believe his election was illegitimate. How did a stolen election myth make its way to the center of American politics? Director and producer Samuel Black and correspondent A.C. Thompson, part of the team behind the 2022 FRONTLINE and ProPublica documentary "Plot to Overturn the Election," sit down with FRONTLINE’s executive producer, Raney Aronson-Rath, to discuss how a handful of people have had an outsized impact on the current U.S. crisis of democratic legitimacy.

The legacy of misinformation extends beyond the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Black and Thompson found. “How is the ongoing battle over the last election threatening the next one?” Thompson asks in the documentary.

"Plot to Overturn the Election" is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video app and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/dispatch-newsletter-subscription/

Transcript

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0:00.0	It is clear in Arizona that they must
0:04.8	decertify the election.
0:06.5	Six months after the 2020 election,
0:08.9	Arizona Republicans are still calling the results into question.
0:13.0	Efforts to undermine confidence in election results began
0:15.8	in hotly contested battleground states.
0:18.1	A report written by Republicans in the Michigan State Senate has concluded there was
0:23.2	no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan.
0:26.6	The talk of desertifying results came with recommendations like
0:30.3	eliminate the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
0:40.0	More than a year after President Joe Biden's inauguration,
0:43.2	around two-thirds of Republican voters believe his election was illegitimate.
0:47.6	And the idea that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump has become a
0:51.8	defining issue in the Republican Party.
0:54.3	Frontline's new documentary plot to overturn the election
0:58.9	made in collaboration with ProPublica examines a role of a handful of key
1:03.9	people in spreading the stolen election myth.
1:06.4	Today I'm joined by the producer and director of the film Samuel Black
1:11.1	and ProPublica Senior Reporter and Frontline Correspondent AC Thompson.
1:15.8	I'm Rainier and Sun Roth and this is the Frontline Dispatch.
1:20.0	The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation
1:24.7	committed to excellence in journalism and by the Frontline Journalism Fund
	...

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