Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age with Sasha Issenberg

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the most pressing challenges for candidates and campaigns today is how to win in a world where disinformation is so pervasive. Why is the information environment in this election year so hard to parse? Our guest this week has written about the keys to winning campaigns for more than a decade. Sasha Issenberg is a journalist and author of numerous books including his latest, “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age.” He joins WITHpod to discuss the often insidious nature of disinformation, work to curtail its spread, how we can make sense of a world awash in lies and more.

Transcript

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0:14.4	I think that the most effective tactics to dealing with this disinformation things are the ones that really step back and sort of think about this as a kind of traditional political communications problem, even if it's triggered by
0:18.8	this sort of peculiar digital dynamics that sort of centered in motion.
0:24.0	Hello and Wilkin-Wise is happening with me ever since I read it. and it was a very smart bit of
0:44.8	polling by our pollsters at NBC. They basically broke the race down by where respondents
0:50.5	got their news. So in the battery of questions you ask people what their preferences, who they plan on
0:55.9	voting for, you also ask where you get your news, and then you look at, okay, of the people
0:59.6	who said they relied on newspapers, you know, how are the two candidates doing?
1:04.2	And among voters relied on newspapers, Biden led by 49 points.
1:09.4	Among voters who said they rely on national news networks.
1:13.4	He led by 20 points in the category of digital websites,
1:17.0	which I think is, you know, if people think about like
1:19.4	political.com, right?
1:21.0	Biden led by 10 points. among voters who rely on social media
1:25.2	Trump led by four among voters who rely on cable news Trump led by eight I think
1:30.5	that's largely a fox effect and then this was the one the two that really
1:34.9	got me voters who get their news from YouTube and Google Trump leads by
1:40.4	16 points and voters who don't follow political news at all favor Trump by 26 points.
1:47.1	Now I don't want to establish a causal mechanism here because I don't think from YouTube and Google, therefore they are more
2:00.1	inclined to support Donald Trump. I think actually there's some self-selection going on.
2:04.3	The kinds of people inclined to support Donald Trump
2:06.5	are also the people inclined to get their news from places.
2:09.3	But it also strikes me that the information environment
	...

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