Your 2024 Election Media Guide - CNN One Thing - Podcast on CNN Audio (2024)

Episode Transcript

You might remember Cricket the Dog, a 14 month old wire haired pointer owned briefly by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. I see briefly because Norm said this dog was so horrible as a hunting dog, so untraceable and violent that she dragged it to a gravel pit and shot it to death. And we know all that because she wrote it in her memoir.

Did you bring up the dog with Trump?

Enough, Stewart. This interview is ridiculous, which you are doing right now. So you need to stop it.

That uh, vivid story likely to hang just about any chance she had to be former President Donald Trump's running mate when it broke in late April? CNN reported she had already fallen off the short list anyway, and many of the news stories and outrage social media posts that followed had a picture of cricket, a scruffy black and white pointer. Super cute. Only one problem that wasn't cricket. A report by the journalism organization Newsguard found that the dog in the photo was actually named blue, and it belongs to Reddit user lukewarm 273, who posted that picture on a subreddit more than a year before this all blew up. It's not clear how that image became conflated with cricket, but when it did, it went all over the internet. It even ended up in one of the United Kingdom's biggest newspapers. Even if this was a relatively harmless error, it got spread far and wide without the help of special tools like Photoshop or artificial intelligence. The point is, if that's all it takes for a simple falsehood to spread, what hope do we have when those tools are involved and the stakes rise from the doghouse to American democracy? My guest this week, CNN media correspondent Hadas Gold. She has a guide to navigating all these pitfalls as the election heats up without needing to log off completely from CNN. This is One Thing I'm David Rind.

So, Hadas, I want to preface this conversation that while, yes, we work for CNN and we do hope everyone consumes a ton of CNN content, podcasts, TV, digital stories. I do genuinely hope people read and watch other things. It's like good to have a broad and varied media diet. But as this election really gets going, I want to try and help listeners kind of avoid some of the pitfalls as the information comes out as fast and furious. Is that a noble mission?

Sounds great. Just like your real diet. Your media diet should be very.

'That's right. So I want to start with former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. There has been a lot of hand-wringing amongst journalists over how to handle him and his lies, his threats to democracy, racist rhetoric, and the question of just how much of what he says should be shown on live TV, that kind of thing. So how would you say media is handling that question this time around in 2024?

It's amazing. It's been almost ten years that we've been dealing with Donald Trump as a political, real political candidate, and it doesn't seem like anybody in the media still has the full answer to how to handle this phenomenon. And it's still something to hear journalists grappling with even today. And what we've seen happen is sort of every medium has figured out a way to handle it in their own way. We don't see it really anywhere, including Fox News, in the way we used to in light of the 2016 election, where it was, you know, the kind of nonstop coverage of an empty podium before Trump was going to get up to speak.

We had the whole speech afterward.

And then the whole speech unedited afterwards. We don't see that anymore. And so now what you see is they might air what he says. They might not air in its entirety. They might cut away. If it starts getting a little bit off the rails, they might interject with the fact check.

All right. The defendant Donald John Trump, going through, a litany of issues he has with the trial.

We saw this essentially play out with the trial when Trump would speak outside of the courthouse.

The man for the job is our fact checker. CNN's Daniel Dale. Daniel, a lot there, a lot going on there. Anything you want to correct?

There certainly is, Jake. First, the Groundhog Day fact check. I think I've done like five times on your show. Former President Trump claimed that this trial was all election interference by President Joe Biden.

I think it's still important to note that sometimes you still get complaints from readers of viewers saying you shouldn't be platforming him. You shouldn't have him on air. I'm sorry. He is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. He is a former president, former president who is facing criminal charges. Of course, you're going to have to cover him. You're going to have to hear from him. And again, it's also hard because the media industry has changed so much since when he first came on stage, really, and people are consuming their news in such a different way. And so they're getting their initial introduction to whatever's happening in the day through their feeds, through their favorite influencers, through their favorite podcasts, and not necessarily through the platforms of the news themselves.

Right. And this kind of leads me to my next question. How are the candidates themselves approaching that fragmented media landscape to spread their message, get their points across, and can their approaches tell us anything about their campaigns?

I think the main takeaway is that the old norms and institutions are sort of gone. I mean, we saw this with the debates, you know, within an instant, this institution, the Commission on Presidential Debates, just went poof.

Irrelevant.

And gone. Yeah. And that just goes to show you sort of that would have been sort of unthinkable a few years ago. And we're seeing that with how the candidates are approaching media. None of them, either one of them are really doing the, you know, going down the line and doing the full monty of all the major outlets and sitting down during these major interviews. We have seen them do it. You know, President Biden did it with CNN, with Erin Burnett. Former President Trump did it with time magazine. But what they are doing is they're being much more focused in their approach to the media, because if you think about it, they're not trying to sway the entire country. They only need to sway a very if you think about it proportionately to the rest, the United States, a small population who will decide this election because they are in these certain districts, and those kind of unders.

Like the idea is just target those swing states, the people in those states that can actually swing the electoral.

Count. Exactly. Because everybody else's opinion is essentially either is baked in or is irrelevant because their state is going to be for sure almost going one way or another. And that's why you're seeing both candidates do more local interviews.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, joining us, on the phone is one of the big ticket. One a show. None other than our president, Joe Biden. Good morning sir.

Good morning pal. Thanks for having me.

President Biden has been doing a lot of drivetime, like radio interviews and these specific. Areas.

The great city of Atlanta thanks you for your commitment to this country and all that you do for us. What's at stake for voters this election?

I think our very democracy, the state.

The former president spoke to five Eyewitness News from Trump Tower before heading to court.

Former President Trump is also been doing some more locally focusing. I just saw one he did with a Minnesota station ahead of what was the Minnesota GOP dinner.

Trump lost Minnesota by seven points in 2020, but says he's serious about his chances of winning Minnesota in 2024.

We think we have a really good shot at Minnesota, where we have great friendships up there. We've done a lot for industry.

So much of the focus is they just want they want those viral moments. So they are creating as many viral moments as they can, hoping that they will go viral in those kind of voter places where they need them to.

Well, tell me more about that, because I always it's always a little cringe when you see some politicians try to act online or sharing, you know, memes and that kind of thing. How has that approach kind of panned out thus far?

You hear from people who are on both sides of the coin. They'll be like, you know, President Biden should not try to engage with those these Trump back and forth on social media and be memes and whatever, and do the dark Brandon thing and all that stuff. He's not doing that. They are kind of pulling into Dark Brandon because they have to.

Do this on his official account. Wow. A unified Reich, that's Hitler's language. That's not America's. He cares about holding on to power. I care about you.

Both sides do a lot of. You know, those, like, organic voter interactions.

Tell me about you.

I have a stutter, just like you did.

I did too, but don't let anybody tell you that you can't do anything. You can do whatever you want to do.

President Biden, I don't know, with a kid who had a stutter. And it was like this, you know, behind the scenes moment where he's down on his level and he's talking to him, showing him his speech.

This is a very exciting time for me because the bodegas, the association invited me and I respect them and they respect me.

Former President Trump and his team will post things of, you know, the president going to that bodega in New York before he went to trial there. You know, that's there's a whole team of people who this is what they do is just to film these moments, post these videos. And even if you find a cringe, if you're at least looking at it, you know, that's better than nothing.

So we've covered artificial intelligence and deep fakes on the show before and how that's kind of impacting the media landscape. So what are the various platforms doing to make sure it isn't a problem during this election?

Yeah, this can be sort of scary because it's not just a question of now of like, oh, is this person telling the truth? It's also is is what I'm seeing true to my eyes and ears because I'm seeing I'm hearing it. But this is is this real? And it's not just the images you were talking about. Deepfakes, you know, a voice and an image together. It's also still posting content because if you think about that, you're looking at a post and you check out the comment section, right. What if you were to see a flood of comments that were either negative or positive about a candidate who was in that video? That might sway how you feel about them. But all of those comments might be AI generated that within seconds could have been posted. I mean, think about how quickly you can get AI to generate anything. Just type into ChatGPT and say, please write me 100 positive comments that would appear under a video of Donald Trump outside of his court trial.

Wow.

And that's it. As to what these platforms are doing. TikTok, meta, YouTube have these sorts of rules that they say about how content that might have. I should be labeled. Now, some of this is like goes deep into the metadata that they say is almost like a watermark that will be able to show whether something was AI generated. Twitter X does not necessarily, have these rules. And some of the AI companies themselves, like OpenAI, is partnering with Microsoft to try to combat this. But a lot of the proof will be in what we see happening.

Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.

Now, that sounds like a plea from Joe Biden, except that it isn't.

And we've already seen the deep fakes happening. There was that sort of infamous President Biden robocall.

Sent to more than 20,000 New Hampshire residents, urging Democrats to not vote in last month's primary.

It's important that you save your vote for the November election.

'How easy is all of this for a self-taught guy?

Five minutes.

There's also something to keep in mind about the fake eye news. So I generated news that might not be 100% true. We're seeing this in some local outlets that are having, you know, AI reporters generate articles. And it might seem just like your regular news article, but it's not a real person who wrote it, and it's AI generated and may not be 100%.

You know, this is scary to me because people have a hard enough time distinguishing like between an onion article and, you know, real news. But something like this, it seems like, would, you know, pass pretty easily to somebody who is just not thinking that hard.

About and think about how quickly you scroll through things, unless Americans do care and are worried. There was a very recent Elon University survey that found the vast majority of Americans, believe that artificial intelligence will be used to manipulate social media and influence the outcome of the election, and so people need to be very careful going into this election.

Well, so how do they be careful? Like, are there tips for the average internet user to navigate this better question everything.

I would say, even if it comes from, you know, your neighbor and your best friend who you think is otherwise a very smart person and utilize where you know there are a real humans working, for example, like a news organization that will be able to fact check these and will have the tools to be able to tell whether something was manipulated. You know, CNN has these people or Washington Post has these types of people where you can go in and check whether something that you're seeing circulating around, is actually real or whether it's AI.

It strikes me as like a big theme of this conversation is, is trust, whether whether people can believe what they're seeing. And it sounds like really dystopian to me to think about that like that. You may not be able to trust your own neighbor that you know really well if they're sharing something that is is fake.

Yeah. I mean, not because they're necessarily maliciously sharing it's fake, but because they have been potentially tricked. I mean, listen, Katy Perry's own mom got spoofed when there was that I image of Katy Perry as though she was at the Met Gala in a beautiful, crazy dress. And you would think you're on. Mother would know whether you're going to a major event. And, you know, she, her mom and mom got fooled by an AI generated image. But this has been something that we've been dealing with now for years because there was, you know, malicious actors who might write something that was so obviously fake, but then somebody falls for it or post it because they want to believe it to be true. Now, the problem is this, I think just the sheer volume, and that's what's so important for the voters, is just to be as much as you can. Your own investigator and an informed consumer and, you know, double check everything that anybody sense to you. Unfortunately, that's just kind of the world we live in and we have been living in for many years.

We'll see if people do it. Well it does. Thank you.

Thanks.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Faiz Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. And just one thing before we go, got some cool news about this show. Starting this week, we're going to be posting two episodes a week, one on Wednesday, one on our normal Sunday. So make sure you're following the show wherever you listen so you get that new episode right away. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Wednesday.