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BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. After Hurricanes Harvey and Irma left their marks on the US and the Caribbean, this week marked yet more devastation.
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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: It is hard to exaggerate what has happened to Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria has left the entire island without power.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: A powerful magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck central Mexico today. Panicked residents poured into the streets, as buildings crumbled.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: This barrage of disaster undermines traditional storm coverage, with its ramp-up and landing and fallout. Now, it seems, the end overtakes the beginning. It’s a stupefying deluge.
Not like the other big story this week, and every week, which resembles the drip-drip-drip of Chinese water torture. I refer, of course, to the ongoing investigations of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in the run-up to the election, where each disclosure drops with a splat and then kind of evaporates, leaving us to wonder, what's it all mean?
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MALE CORRESPONDENT: New reports that Mueller is also zeroing in on Facebook over Russia-backed accounts there.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: What Facebook says is that it got $100,000 from a troll farm in Russia.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: CNN has learned that government investigators wiretapped former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election.
LEYLA SANTIAGO/CNN: And we’re told that there are intercepted communications, Don, that did raise concerns among investigators about whether Manafort was encouraging Russians to help the campaign.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: The Times also reporting that Manafort and his legal team were told he's likely to be indicted.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And on Wednesday?
MALE CORRESPONDENT: The Times and Washington Post both report Mueller wants documents in 13 different areas, all separate categories.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: What were they looking for, and what does it all mean for the Mueller investigation?
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: We don't know. It could lead to multiple convictions, perhaps even the impeachment of a president. Or it may be a maze that concludes in a dead end. Perhaps we’ll understand the significance of every leak, subpoena and revelation, once the puzzle is pieced together but that could take a while, which makes it hard to know just what exactly our responsibility is as savvy news consumers. History tells us that it's the journalist’s responsibility to keep investigating the investigation.
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DAVID BRINKLEY/ABC: The Democratic National Committee is trying to solve a spy mystery. It began before dawn Saturday when five intruders were captured by police inside the offices of the committee in Washington.
DAN RATHER/CBS: Good evening. I’m Dan Rather. As you probably know by now, seven persons were indicted today for trying to cover up the Watergate scandals.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: Incremental news is unsatisfying, both for citizens and journalists, alike. We report and wait, and you listen and wait. But that’s the best. In fact, it’s all responsible actors can do.
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BOB GARFIELD: Russia moves stealthily in media channels and the White House is on alert. Yahoo! reported last week that Russian- run media outlets Sputnik and RT, or Russia Today, are facing pressure from the US government to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, essentially branding their reports as propaganda. Is that a reasonable action or a wild overreaction?
Max Seddon is the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times. He says that there is more to be lost than gained, mainly because the problem is small.
MAX SEDDON: RT has such bad ratings in the US that they don’t even participate in the Nielsen ratings. They paid for their own Nielsen ratings, which they said gave them good numbers but they don't disclose it. They were the first TV channel to get a billion views on YouTube but if you look at the things that are still today the most popular RT videos on YouTube, most of it is stuff that has nothing to do with Russia or with their political agenda at all, videos of the tsunami in Japan and in 2011 memes that you might remember, like the homeless man in America who had a beautiful singing voice and became this viral star. It sometimes strikes me that the only really avid watchers of RT are the people in the US and Europe who are warning about how dangerous it is.
BOB GARFIELD: There have been critics who say even though RT has a relatively small audience, their various lies, outrages and heavily partisan attacks kind of infuse into the fake news ecosystem, get traction and then become part of the relatively mainstream political conversation.
MAX SEDDON: I don't think that's true at all. I think it's quite the opposite. They just try to pick up on things that are already very big on Breitbart and on Alt-Right Twitter and other places where these people get their news. Those are the people who are driving the conversations. It’s not a bunch of Russian guys sitting in some basement in St. Petersburg who are, you know, nefariously pulling the strings from afar.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, putting aside reach and impact, let’s just talk about the naked politics of this. There's this guy called Andrew Feinberg who went to work for Sputnik in Washington as the White House correspondent but he stays there for five months and cites chapter and verse, you know, truly disgraceful [LAUGHS] political interference by his management.
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ANDREW FEINBERG: …as I’m being fed questions top down, it's really pushing a narrative that doesn't comport with reality. Based on my experience there, I would argue that Sputnik is not functioning as a bona fide news agency.
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BOB GARFIELD: He believes that this foreign agent registration solution is just the ticket. Why is he wrong?
MAX SEDDON: It’s a funny notion. The editor has a phone on her desk that goes straight to the Kremlin [LAUGHS] and then you’re shocked to find Russian propaganda going on at this Russian propaganda network.
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But with regards to the foreign agent legislation, it's particularly sad to see America as starting to play Russia's game. I don't know if you saw yesterday, Morgan Freeman released this very strange video.
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MORGAN FREEMAN: We have been attacked. We are -- at war. And we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy and we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.
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MAX SEDDON: And this is exactly the way that Russia has seen the West for many years. They think that America is waging information war against Russia, that Western media are just pawns of their governments, just like Russian media is. And it’s disturbing to see, as this scandal goes on, that a lot of people in the US are adopting this same worldview, that it is information war, that we have to fight back.
BOB GARFIELD: And if the US does something that is perceived in Russia, as it will be, as suppressing free speech, we are going to be immediately called hypocrites for lecturing Russia about human rights and free press and then behaving this way on our own shores.
MAX SEDDON: Absolutely. The Russian Foreign Ministry has already promised to retaliate, in some unspecified way, against American media if there are actions taken against RT and Sputnik. But where it’s really a gift to Russia is on the rhetorical level. And this goes back to an old Cold War tradition called “whataboutism.” Whenever the US would criticize Russia for some human rights abuses, you know, why are you sending dissidents away to be locked up in camps in Siberia, the Soviet response would always be, oh yes but you're violating the rights of black people. And the way that you pushed back against that was by setting a better example, rather than just whatabouting the whataboutism.
BOB GARFIELD: There’s whataboutthisisms but there’s also relative truth, and there can be some truth in the flaws of the Western media and then there is the naked propagandaism of state media, particularly, in Russia. Is that not an issue in considering what to do with RT and Sputnik? In terms of degree, there's no comparison whatsoever.
MAX SEDDON: That is certainly the case. I'm not trying to defend RT and Sputnik in any way. I think the, the issue is that when you start doing that, you're just playing the Russian government’s game. The Russian government already does have the people who sit around and they decide what is media and what is not. The Russian Foreign Ministry even has, on their website, a fake news section where they post screenshots of articles they don't like, put a stamp that says “fake news” on the article and then usually don't even try to refute the, the article on its merits. And it shouldn’t be the business of the US government to decide who is a journalist and who is a propagandist because then we’re just doing the same things that they do.
BOB GARFIELD: There are striking similarities between the modus of Russia Today and Sputnik and our own homegrown right-wing media and of the White House, itself, as far as that goes, with the reflexive dismissal of unfavorable coverage as “fake news.” But those are domestic players and Russia Today and Sputnik are from a relatively hostile foreign government. So is the First Amendment really what is at play here?
MAX SEDDON: I think absolutely. Look, Russia is an authoritarian country that has its own propaganda networks, that how effective they are and how much you allow this to affect what’s happening on your country, it really says much more about what's happening in the country.
All you have to do is look at France. Before Donald Trump came along, France was absolutely supposed to be the big place where they thought they were going to have gains. They were really behind Marine Le Pen. You even had this Wikileaks-style email dump on the eve of the first round of the French election that was called “Macron leaks” that may or may not have been done by Russia, and the effect of it was basically zero. I think it says a lot more about the health of the media atmosphere and the political system, in, in general in France, that there were similar things done in those countries and they’ve had little to no effect.
If Russia, by retweeting a few hashtags and broadcasting this political channel, if you really think that that is what's going to sway your election, allow them to install some sort of Manchurian candidate as president, you have a problem with your own country and your own democracy, more than you do with Russia.
BOB GARFIELD: Max, thank you very much.
MAX SEDDON: Thanks for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Max Seddon is the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, the Russian ads on Facebook were targeted and transitory, but there’s an app for that.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media.
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