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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we continue to cover the election, our colleagues and On the Media are continuing to cover the coverage of the election. That doesn't just mean what's in the network news stories and things like that. It's about the influencers on social media who answer to no editors or fact checkers. It's about the lies and disinformation spreaders who seek to undermine our democracy, not just persuade people to their candidate or point of view.

If you feel like you're seeing a campaign commercial on TV or on your phones like every two seconds, well, last weekend On the Media did a segment on the overwhelming amount of money making all those messages possible. Here's a short clip of co-host Michael Lowinger asking Rolling Stone political reporter Andrew Perez about a particularly brazen fundraising request.

Michael Lowinger: Then, there was that time in April when Donald Trump hosted a dinner in Mar a Lago with a bunch of oil executives.

Andrew Perez: Trump said raise me $1 billion and he effectively promised them anything they could want, saying that this would be a deal because they would save money on their taxes and he would roll back Biden's clean energy agenda. Trump also promised to fast track oil company mergers which have been slowed by the Biden administration. He's been promising the oil industry a suite of goodies. This is a very explicit test of whether there are public corruption rules.

If you can just say, raise me $1 billion and I'll give you X, Y, Z, are there corruption rules in America if that kind of thing is tolerated? I think it's an open question.

Brian Lehrer: With that, with me now is, what a treat, both of them media co-hosts, the co-host Michael Lowinger and Brooke Gladstone from On the Media. Hi, Micah. Hi, Brooke. Welcome back to this show.

Brooke Gladstone: Hi.

Michael Lowinger: Hey.

Brooke Gladstone: Long time no see.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Brooke was on with us, for those of you listening, helping with Pledge Drive last hour. Micah, why is it uncertain whether that kind of open quid pro quo request for money in exchange for government policies of lowering their taxes and rolling back climate protections for fossil fuel companies, it's kind of shocking on its face, why isn't it obviously illegal corruption?

Michael Lowinger: Well, you'd be hard pressed to find these extreme smoking gun examples of quid pro quo. It's often something that's a little bit more ambiguous. Even if we see the ultra rich donating huge amounts of money to politicians and then seemingly having their ear, a lot of this could be dated back to 2010 after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that basically made dark money and unlimited political spending in our elections the norm.

Both parties have had to use, or they claim they have to use, huge campaign fundraising efforts in order to beat the other side. I do think it's worth asking what compromises are made to the integrity of our governance as a result.

Brian Lehrer: Brooke, the title of the segment was Can a Billion Dollars Buy an Election? Is there more money in the presidential race this year than ever before? Did you document that?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, there is, certainly in the presidential campaign more than ever before, but I think it's something like 20 billion for all the campaigns up and down the ballot too. The question is, how much can all that money buy you? Is it really worth it? There's a lot of research on this, and it sounds like it really benefits the challenger more because they need to introduce themselves, and it benefits the incumbent more to go negative because they're already known, so they need to discredit their challenger.

If, in fact, the research is correct and the challenger is benefiting from this money, then perhaps we shouldn't worry about it. Caps might hurt them. On the other hand, if that research isn't correct and it helps the incumbent a whole lot more, maybe caps would be a good idea. Also, right now we're staring into the hell mouth because research also shows that the impact of ads diminish with time, which is why they're just spurting them out right now and why you can't avoid one no matter what you do.

Brian Lehrer: Here's another clip of Micah and a guest, but this time asking about a supersized donor to the Democrats. We'll hear that guest, Helen Santoro, a reporter at The Lever, after Micah's question here.

Michael Lowinger: Tell me a little bit more about some of the other main dark money groups that Kamala Harris has benefited from. What do we know about them?

Helen Santoro: One of the big ones is the Sixteen Thirty Fund. It's a well-known charitable organization that supports liberal agendas. There's a Swiss billionaire who actually resides in Wyoming who contributes a lot to the Sixteen Thirty Fund along with other multimillion and billionaires.

Michal Lowinger: Actually, the New York Times had a 2022 investigation that found that the Sixteen Thirty Fund had spent $410 million in 2020 to help Joe Biden and other liberal campaigns in that election. That was more money than the DNC spent in that election.

Brian Lehrer: Micah and guest from last weekend's On the Media. Who is the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Micah, that gives so much money to Democrats, and what do they want from government, if anything, or if you know?

Michael Lowinger: To be honest, I'm not that familiar with the ins and outs of their activism. I do understand that they are part of a larger pattern with Democrats to create centralized hubs of dark money and kind of help push that money out in a systematized fashion to liberal candidates and nonprofit and advocacy groups. That was modeled in part after what the Koch brothers have been doing with their activism around advocating for lower taxes, pulling back regulations on fossil fuels and big industries.

What Helen Santoro has been talking about and what we talked about on last week's show is this kind of arms race between the two parties where they look to each other for tactics on how to raise and use this big money, but then also use the other side's fundraising as justification for their own fundraising.

Brian Lehrer: Brooke, one of the things I was thinking, one of the questions I had in my head as I was listening to that segment and I wonder if many listeners might have right now hearing these two clips that we just played, is that maybe these are not morally equivalent. Fossil fuel executives like the Koch brothers giving a lot of money so they can make more money on oil and gas and coal, the future of humanity on this planet be damned, is so much worse than a group trying to preserve women's rights or any cause because they think the cause is right, not to benefit themselves.

Do we need to take that kind of context into account when reporting on so called dark money in politics?

Brooke Gladstone: Brian, you have just so shown your stripes just there. All I can say is that obviously when big oil or other interests, let's talk about the dot com people perhaps and regulation, are doing this, yes, they're doing it for the bottom line, but obviously many in the GOP would say they're doing it because that's free enterprise, and if you interfere with that sort of stuff, then you're messing with the American way, or something like that. I think fundamentally--

Well, for one thing, the top donors-- Micah, is it the top four-

Michael Lowinger: Yes, top five.

Brooke Gladstone: - or five donors, are all still Republicans. The problem a lot with the Trump campaign is I think the small donors have shrunk about 35%, whereas the small donors for Kamala has gone up 45% from previously. That tells you a lot, who is giving the money and why, and that they end up with Kamala doing so much better than Trump. Yes, it does have a lot to do with dark money, but certainly not entirely.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Next topic. Here we are, Micah, in the third presidential election that includes Donald Trump and there are new twists in media technology and media incentives every election cycle. What's an example or two of something that's been different in the media in this presidential election cycle compared to the last two, and I mean the media in the broadest possible sense?

Michael Lowinger: Yes, I mean, I think this election is falling squarely in this short-form video explosion that's kind of hard to avoid, where not just young people, all kinds of Americans are increasingly looking to sites like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for news and information. News organizations have been trying to chase people there, but so have the candidates themselves. We saw, for instance, at the DNC, Democrats credentialed some 200 content creators in addition to journalists to come and cover the convention.

It wasn't just people who are journalists on TikTok and Instagram. It was comedians, it was food reviewers, it was a nurse who specialized in reproductive rights, and so the strategy there seemed to be people are on these sites, everyone's algorithm is different, everyone has different interests, but let's try to flood the zone with content about our candidate by reaching all kinds of creators.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure many people didn't even use the word influencer four years ago. Is there a way for you to gauge, Micah, because I know this is one of your specialties, whether there's more disinformation being perpetrated this year than even in 2020, even in 2016? Is there a Russia 2016 disinformation perpetrator king of 2024, or how are you trying to report on that this year?

Michael Lowinger: It's a good question. There are certainly attempts to quantify this kind of thing. If we're sticking with the influencer new media focus, I would say that one consequence of the candidates going so much to interviewers, podcasters, live streamers who are not journalists and don't have journalistic training, is that when doing interviews with Donald Trump in particular, they've just kind of allowed him to stump speech on their platforms, basically talking about how the election in 2020 was stolen, which we know it wasn't, it's been repeatedly debunked, talking about how he'll end all wars and fix the economy.

Where a good journalist we'd like to think would ask a follow-up question and another follow-up question and fact check him, on interviews with somebody like Adin Ross, a live streamer on Kik, which is a really fringe live streaming website, he kind of just let Donald Trump have his way. I saw a similar thing on the Lex Fridman Podcast, his interview with Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: We don't know who these people are.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Are they young? Do they specialize in sports? I mean, what is it?

Michael Lowinger: It's a good question. Adin Ross, he is a live streamer and gamer who's popular on the live streaming site Twitch, which is mainstream, it's owned by Amazon. There are many huge, huge celebrities on Twitch. He basically had to leave the site because he was gambling so much in front of his viewers, he would often use hateful language, and so he went to this website Kik, where there are much fewer content moderation policies and gambling while live is actually encouraged.

He's a kind of sycophant of Andrew Tate, who's the well-known misogynist who was arrested, I believe, in Romania for human trafficking charges. This is a guy who is popular among a certain kind of young male, which really, when you kind of look at the podcast appearances that Donald Trump has been doing, seems to be a strategy. He's really going after young men and he's reaching big audiences on YouTube and podcasts and the like specifically for this kind of voter.

Brooke Gladstone: Is he the one who gave Donald Trump a Tesla?

Michael Lowinger: He gave him a Cybertruck and a Rolex watch, which many people suggested probably breaks FEC rules around the kind of gifts you can give to a presidential candidate, but yes, it's a new world out there.

Brian Lehrer: Details, details. In our last minute, Brooke, and I'll throw in a promo here, folks, next Wednesday night, week from tonight, Brooke and Micah and I will be sort of tri-hosting a national two-hour call-in special, 8 to 10 PM a week from tonight for public radio stations around the country on the media and the election campaign. One of the things that we're going to be talking about, we agreed in our meeting the other day, that I want you, Brooke, to preview now just a little bit in our last minute. You had a segment recently on election lies fueling voter suppression in particular.

It's one thing to lie about what the candidate believes or what they've done or whatever. It's another thing to lie in ways that actually try to get people not to show up to the polls. Can you just give us one example or another of that?

Brooke Gladstone: I'm going to throw this to Micah for efficiency.

Michael Lowinger: Yes--

Brian Lehrer: Micah [unintelligible 00:14:52], but Micah, go ahead.

Michael Lowinger: Yes, I think in many ways we're really stuck in a post-2020 information environment where conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud, about Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines and software flipping votes for Biden, about mules taking large batches of votes and dropping them off at ballot boxes, stuff that has been debunked so many times it kind of makes you crazy to say that, this stuff is still widely believed by enough of the population.

The majority of Republicans say they believe that the election was stolen, and lawmakers have been using this to been using some of these laws to pass restrictive laws in some key states. There are laws in Florida, in Georgia, where voters will have to face stricter ID requirements to obtain a mail ballot. There's going to be reduced access to drop boxes in those states. According to the Brennan Center For justice, since 2020, at least 63 restrictive voting laws were enacted across 29 states.

That includes a new rule in North Carolina that will reject mail in ballots after election day even if they're postmarked by November 5th. It's really troubling to see in big and small ways people be disenfranchised because of outright disproven lies about the last election.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I was thinking about these AI-generated deep fake audios, and I'm just going to say it and then we're out of time, but deep fake-- unless you want to do it real quick,-

Brooke Gladstone: No, you go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: I'm thinking about they make ones of Joe Biden's voice, they make them of other people's voices who are presumably well known, then they do robocalls telling people, well, election day is a different day than it really is. We will leave it there.

Brooke Gladstone: At least good news in Georgia.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] You mean cause people are showing up in droves?

Brooke Gladstone: They're showing up in droves, but also, the court struck down this thing that these election board people can just disavow the results of an election.

Brian Lehrer: On the Media co-hosts Michael Lowinger and Brooke Gladstone. We'll hear you on the weekend. Thank you both for giving us some time today. Amazing stuff.

Michael Lowinger: Thanks, Brian.

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