Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2018

⏱️ 113 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly depressing. At any rate, Whitney Phillips did exactly that. She was one of the earliest scholars of online trolling (yes, that’s a job). She was studying trolling when it was a tiny sideshow. And she was there, studying it, as online trolling got amplified by algorithmic platforms and a click-hungry media. As Gamergate made it a political movement. Then, most importantly, she was there, watching, as the media manipulation tactics that she had seen perfected by the trolls became the playbook for how Trump controls the media’s agenda, and the national conversation. I’m in the media. I’m inside this machine looking out. It can be hard, from inside, to understand what the hell is happening. But Phillips is outside the machine looking in. And she understands, better than anyone I’ve talked to, what’s gone wrong, and how hard it will be to fix. Recommended books: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble Custodians of the Internet by Tarleton Gillespie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative.
0:08.0	As state legislatures consider more than 500 anti-trans bills, the latest episode of Into the Mix asks how best to support and protect transgender youth.
0:19.0	Like Ali Aske, a young man who, despite growing up in a loving and supportive home, felt the need for friendship with other trans and queer kids.
0:27.0	At just seven years old, he took initiative and built a lasting community.
0:32.0	That story on Into the Mix, subscribe now.
0:57.0	Most people wouldn't do it again, but when you take those barriers away, it really contributes to a fetishized, decontextualized mode of being on the internet where you really do feel like you are immune.
1:11.0	Hello, welcome to The Zorcranshow on Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:26.0	I want to start today with something that is actually going on.
1:29.0	The Florida Senate election, it's so close it is in a recount.
1:32.0	And ever since that recount came into view, President Donald Trump has been tweeting the storm of, I even know what to call this,
1:39.0	like a liberal, dangerous bullshit. He's been alleging voter fraud, invented ballots, anything he can think of to frame an effort to count votes as an effort to steal the election.
1:49.0	It is honestly disgusting. Now, we in the media, we're covering what Trump is saying. Of course we are. We have to.
1:56.0	Sometimes we're credulously amplifying his tweets and when we do that, that's awful.
2:00.0	But more often, we're skeptically seriously debunking him.
2:04.0	But even while we're doing that, we're filling the airwaves with this idea that actually counting the votes is a democratic position.
2:11.0	And the Republican position is that Democrats are trying to steal an election.
2:15.0	This is the dynamic happening all of the time right now. This is one of the central challenges Trump poses to the media.
2:22.0	He does or says something completely outrageous. He starts up a fear-mongering campaign against a migrant caravan that's more than a thousand miles from the border.
2:30.0	He bars the CNN reporter from the press room. And then we go into negative coverage mode. We go into emergency coverage mode.
2:37.0	Because a president of the United States is talking like a crackpot or acting like an authoritarian.
2:42.0	And when we do that, he turns the entire conversation to the exact thing he wants to talk about.
2:49.0	He crowds everything else out. And he feeds off the spectacle of his war with the media.
	...

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