[music]

Dan Froomkin: While they split hairs over these minor democratic misstatements, instead of exposing the vast gulf in truth-telling between the two parties, they're effectively hiding it.

Brooke Gladstone: Some people are rather vexed by the false equivalence in the coverage of the presidential candidates. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, a Tennessee-based media company was exposed for taking millions of dollars from the Kremlin.

Will Sommer: What it says is how widespread these Russian influence operations are that make me wonder where else that money has gone.

Micah Loewinger: Plus what a slew of Tourette's-like symptoms at an Upstate New York high school revealed about the media and hysteria.

Dan Taberski: Mastectogenic illness is a line-of-sight illness. Basically, the neurologist asks the television stations not to stop covering the story but to stop showing the tics on television.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The conventions are over, Labor Day's passed, temperatures dipped, and so our political orchestra has launched into its final movement starting with a loud solo.

Donald Trump: They are the most dishonest network, the meanest, the nastiest, but that was what I was presented with. I was presented with ABC George Stephanopoulos, you know who?

Brooke Gladstone: That's from Trump's Wednesday night's town hall, hosted by Fox News and specifically Sean Hannity. The former president took the uninterrupted time to lambast everything from the border to polls to what he calls the coup of Vice President Harris' ascension to the top of the democratic ticket, which may be why at one point, Trump seemed to confuse who he was running against.

Donald Trump: I can't imagine New Hampshire voting for him. Anybody in New Hampshire, because they're watching right now, but anybody in New Hampshire that votes for Biden and Kamala.

Brooke Gladstone: One can only imagine now if Biden had done such a thing, but here the media were unbothered by what cognitive issues Trump's flub might suggest.

Reporter 1: We saw a familiar strategy from the former president as he trashed the host network.

Reporter 2: Trump took aim at his opponent as usual.

Reporter 3: During a Fox News interview in Battleground Pennsylvania overnight, Trump brushing off preparing for the debate.

Brooke Gladstone: Aside from MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle.

Mike Barnicle: A false equivalency going on in the coverage of this race in that Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say about submarines and sharks and electric batteries, whatever he wants to say, and it's covered describing who said it, why he said it, and always in that story, in the false equivalency by too many reporters and too many American newspapers. There's also, by the way, Kamala Harris changed her mind on fracking.

Daniel Drezner: As a professor who knows a little bit about grade inflation, trust me when I say the mainstream media is grading Trump on a curve.

Brooke Gladstone: Daniel Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University and author of the recent substack The Very Weird Media Coverage of the

2024 Presidential Race.

Daniel Drezner: Part of this is almost inherent to the nature of how reporting works. If Donald Trump is giving a speech, you're not going to print the speech verbatim, you are going to pluck quotes out that, frankly, make him sound far more coherent. Very often what winds up happening is you might have a sentence saying, "President Trump talked about the high cost of groceries," and then explained that he would be able to lower them by lowering energy prices, which is a very polished way of a bizarre rant he went on about the price of bacon, and then blaming that on wind. There's two different ways you can report that.

One is to be the Trump whisperer, be the Trump interpreter. To be fair, sometimes that probably is what he's trying to say, but it leaves something out, which is how awfully incoherent he can be on the campaign trail.

Brooke Gladstone: I know you cited recently a Washington Post editorial that compared Trump's and Harris's policy positions. The editorial wanted Harris to provide more policy specifics, even though she offered seven policy ideas, whereas Trump only offered five.

Daniel Drezner: The Trump campaign actually does have a tremendous amount of policy specifics, but they are all wrapped up in Project 2025. Trump has more recently denied any knowledge of Project 2025, but again, this is a standard media practice, which is to say, if you mention project 2025, you always have to include the sentence President Trump denies that that represents the campaign. That makes things a little slippery there and it also means that, I think, implicitly, people like The Post editorial writers feel like, "We know what Trump is going to do. What is Harris going to do?" Failing to realize that Kamala Harris only became the general election candidate six weeks ago.

We are in uncharted territory because generally speaking, someone has to go through a long nominating process, and they usually formulate policy then. Another issue in terms of the coverage is that very often covering what Trump is proposing, it's written in what I would describe as value-neutral language. A classic example of this was there was an article comparing what Harris plan on housing was with Trump's plan. The Harris plan on housing is to provide a tax credit for first-term homebuyers, a variety of other normal policy things. Trump's policy plan is to deport tens of millions of immigrants, and that will somehow increase the housing stock.

That was reported like it was a sane policy proposal. The report did note that economists were skeptical of it, but saying that economists were skeptical of the plan is different from saying economists laughed that idea out of the room, which is what I suspect they frankly did.

Brooke Gladstone: You recently highlighted an additional example from Politico. It was about coverage of Harris's foreign policy record or expertise compared to Trump's.

Daniel Drezner: This one was honestly bizarre because essentially, the reporter wrote credulously that Kamala Harris had a relatively thin foreign policy resume compared to Donald Trump's four years of experience as president. Now, to be fair, absolutely, Trump was president for four years. That is some significant foreign policy experience, but if you compare Kamala Harris's record prior to when she would take the oath of office in January of 2025, she spent four years on the Senate Intelligence Committee as an active member of that Senate Senate Intelligence Committee, and then four years as vice president.

If you stack that experience up against any other president, with the exception of Joe Biden that's run in the post Cold War era, Harris has much more experience than the likes of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, or Barack Obama, or certainly Donald Trump when he was elected in 2016.

Brooke Gladstone: My favorite observation of yours concerns the headlines that frame Trump's flubs as Harris's problem. Like this one from the Boston Globe to which Harris faces pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity.

[laughter]

Daniel Drezner: Yes, Politico and others have had similar headlines. I have to say these headlines are truly baffling because you can evaluate Kamala Harris as a candidate, she has her strengths, she has her weaknesses. One of her strengths, at least to me, over the past six weeks has been precisely how she has handled this issue.

Reporter 4: He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes questioning a core part of your identity.

Kamala Harris: The same old tired playbook. Next question, please. [laughs]

Reporter 4: That's it.

Kamala Harris: That's it.

Daniel Drezner: It's a smart way of doing it, because to take offense to this makes the campaign about her, and that's clearly not what she wants to do. She wants the campaign presumably to be about what the country wants.

Brooke Gladstone: How about this tendency to write about Trump without reference to his past behavior, with a conscious amnesia?

Daniel Drezner: Yes, I call this the Lucy with the football problem.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Lucy would hold the ball. Charlie Brown would kick it, Lucy would pull it away, and he'd fall on his butt every single time.

Daniel Drezner: Also, every single time, Lucy would offer an explanation to Charlie Brown of why this time would be different, and every time, Charlie Brown fell for it. The best example of this might be Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. It had happened less than a week after there was an assassination attempt on his life. There was a lot of Republicans saying he's going to unify the country, he's going to try to bring people together as a result of this. I suppose to be fair to Trump, he tried to do that for about 20 minutes, and then he kept talking for another 60 minutes and was typical of Donald Trump.

When he was speaking at campaign rallies, he would say, "The media thinks that I'm a changed person. I'm not a changed person. I'm the exact same person that I was."

Donald Trump: They say something happened to me when I got shot. I became nice. [laughter] When you're dealing with these people, they're very dangerous people, when you're dealing with them, you can't be too nice. You really can't be. If you don't mind. I'm not going to be nice. Is that okay?

Daniel Drezner: I think the thing that triggered me writing the column in the first place was ABC Ipsos came out with a poll last Sunday. There was a national poll and for the last month, essentially after Harris replaced Biden, most of the polling has shown Harris with a slight edge nationally, maybe with a slight edge in some battleground states, but not all of them. Most importantly, everything is within the statistical margin of error, meaning that you can't say definitively that one candidate is ahead of the other. The ABC Ipsos poll showed Harris with a six-point lead.

Brooke Gladstone: This was last Sunday.

Daniel Drezner: This was last Sunday. Six points was outside of the margin of error, which meant that it was a statistically significant difference between Harris and Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: That's newsworthy.

Daniel Drezner: Yes, and yet, when Jonathan Karl talked about it.

Jonathan Karl: 52% for Harris, 46% for Trump. That is just barely outside the margin of error, so that really shows you a race that is very close to statistically tied.

Daniel Drezner: Karl could have absolutely said, "The poll shows that Harris has a lead in the national electorate," but obviously, if we take a look at the swing states and we look at the electoral college, Donald Trump certainly has a chance to win, but that wasn't what he did. He kept treating that poll like it was just like every other poll that showed a statistical dead heat when, if you're outside of the margin of error, that means you actually have a statistically significant lead. It was just such an odd framing. The thing that made the ABC Ipsos poll newsworthy was not that it was close, but that it wasn't.

Brooke Gladstone: You argue that to some degree, this has much ado about nothing. Activists, policy wonks, unusually meticulous news consumers may get mad about the headlines, but they're not likely to influence the election. Not ever?

Daniel Drezner: The people who were outraged by the misleading headlines or the odd coverage, they've already made up their minds who they're voting for. As for the voters who are legitimately undecided or the swing voters, we always tend to forget they are much less interested in this race than we are. They have been barely paying attention. Now it's after Labor Day, so they're going to be starting to pay attention, but their primary source of information is probably going to be in a bar looking at a television screen with the sound on mute. Yes, there's going to be odd headlines or odd chyrons or what have you, but the truth is, most of those things are fleeting.

Maybe the accumulation of them, if they were persistent might matter a little bit, but I confess, as a political scientist, if there is anything I have faith in, it is the American voters not paying too much attention.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Okay. Daniel, thank you very much.

Daniel Drezner: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Daniel Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University, and in his Substack Drezner's World, he wrote the recent piece, The Very Weird Media Coverage of the 2024 Presidential Race. Wednesday at Trump's town hall, he regaled his audience with fantastical visions of his time on the Iron Throne.

Donald Trump: I wanted to say it so much during my term, we went four years without any blowups. We had no World Trade Center blow-up.

[cheers]

Donald Trump: We had no radical Islamic terror.

Brooke Gladstone: The World Trade Center, the new one, is still standing, but the rest of the statement is false. The Justice Department says ISIS and Al Qaeda were behind terrorist attacks in the US in 2017 and 2019, both when Trump was president. Then he spun an odd yarn about the interview Kamala Harris gave to CNN last week.

Donald Trump: If you watch that interview, she had notes. That means she knew the questions and she had notes. She kept looking down, up. Nobody wants to cover it.

Brooke Gladstone: CNN's Daniel Dale debunked that conspiracy theory on air.

Daniel Dale: Nobody wants to cover it because it did not happen. Vice President Harris did not have notes in her interview with Dana Bash. You can look at images, photos, videos from that interview.

Brooke Gladstone: There's no shortage of facts, so-called, to clarify during election time, especially when Trump is running, but Dale senses his colleagues are flagging.

Daniel Dale: You hear old-fashioned football coaches be like, "Keep running the ball. Keep running the ball. They're stopping you now, but eventually they'll get tired." I think Trump has successfully tired out much of the US media saying, "We got a lot of new stuff to cover. This is old stuff," but I think it's incumbent upon all of us that as long as he is

still saying this stuff, we gotta fact-check it just as frequently.

Brooke Gladstone: Dan Froomkin, the editor of presswatchers.org, goes a step further saying fact-checkers at legacy outlets are too often adding to the political confusion.

Dan Froomkin: This one fact-check from Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner got ridiculed soundly on social media. First, she quotes what Biden says.

Joe Biden: Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.

Dan Froomkin: Here's Amy Gardner's voice, but that's not true. Trump just hasn't said that he would accept. [laughter] He has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat. The hairsplitting is that he has not directly said, "I will not respect the results of the election," but he has basically said all but that.

Reporter 5: The question was, will you accept the. results of the election regardless of who wins? Yes or no, please.

Donald Trump: If it's a fair and legal and good election, absolutely. I would have much rather accepted these, but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.

Dan Froomkin: So it's absolutely within the realm of reasonable political speech to say he is not going to respect the results of this election.

Brooke Gladstone: You also mentioned another post-fact-check by their lead fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, who famously gives liars Pinocchio noses.

Dan Froomkin: I hate pinocchios because it's such a euphemism. It's a way of avoiding the word lie. Just call it a lie. Biden talked about how Trump's own former chief of staff, General John Kelly, publicly stated that Trump would not go to the grave sites in France of the service members. He called them suckers and losers. Glenn Kessler, his beef was that Kelly "didn't directly say Trump refused to visit the graves because he thought that the war dead were losers," but neither did Biden say that. It's just an incredible hairsplitting.

Brooke Gladstone: So what about the New York Times?

Dan Froomkin: One New York Times fact-check rated Biden as misleading when he said during a speech that Trump "created the largest debt any president had in four years." The niggle was that the debt rose more under Obama's eight years than under Mr. Trump's four years.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Biden said four years.

Dan Froomkin: They really hurt themselves in their own credibility when they do this sort of stuff.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think's the reasoning behind equally fact-checking both sides even though they're not equally liars and that is demonstrably the case?

Dan Froomkin: From the beginning of the fact-checking movement, these fact-checkers have seen themselves as above the fray, and they feel like being impartial means you have to attack both sides ferociously. What that leads to is that, unfortunately, tons of republican liars go unchecked while they nitpick and split hairs over these minor democratic misstatements, or even sometimes accurate ones. Instead of exposing the vast gulf in truth-telling between the two parties, they're effectively hiding it.

Brooke Gladstone: I just assume that this is part of the general tendency of the traditional mainstream media to reflexively counter the myth of left-wing bias that dates back to at least the Nixon White House. I just think it's all of a piece.

Dan Froomkin: Fact-checking is the ultimate distillation of it because you can see it so plainly. Their greatest fear is that someone will call them liberal.

Brooke Gladstone: You've written that these fact-checking attempts have missed the most important question. Quote, "The right question is nothing, is this one particular assertion exactly and provably accurate? The right question is, are these people lying to you or are they telling you the truth?"

Dan Froomkin: Are you basically dealing with people who are being honest or dishonest? I'd like to see motive addressed. Why are they lying?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, the why behind the lie.

Dan Froomkin: Voter fraud is a great example. Why do they argue that there is voter fraud when there is basically almost none? The answer is, it's an excuse to suppress voters of constituencies they don't like. Readers deserve to know that and who's funding it. These lies are not there by accident. Every lie has a purpose. That is entirely missing from the coverage in traditional media.

Brooke Gladstone: You advocate for making fact-checking part of every major election story, not just a sidebar. You say that reporters should, enthusiastically and repeatedly and prominently, as long as the lie remains part of the discourse, keep calling it out.

Dan Froomkin: It is very hard to keep up with fact-checking Trump, but on the other hand, it's also easy in some ways because he repeats these lies over and over again, but the news media also has a great bias towards what's new.

Brooke Gladstone: Exactly.

Dan Froomkin: When he's lying, it's not new anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: That is the killer. The media just have to face repeating their corrections every time he repeats the lie.

Dan Froomkin: Also, they need to come up with new ways to explain how problematic the lies are. Every day it's still relevant even though it's not new.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a problem of preaching to the converted. Are there any news outlets that are still consumed by both sides of the political spectrum?

Dan Froomkin: I think the network news shows are actually still consumed by both parties. I think elite publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post are most widely read by people who are probably already in the camp of liberal Democrats. The fact is they're incredibly influential. For instance, what the New York Times and Washington Post does influences the network news shows enormously. Their articles also show up as wire copy in local newspapers all over the country. They are the source of cable news shows. They are the engine for news.

Even though you could argue that New York Times subscribers are the choir, and they largely are, there's a much larger group of people out there who are deeply influenced by the coverage of our major news organizations, even in this fractured climate.

Brooke Gladstone: Dan Froomkin is the editor of presswatchers.org. Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Froomkin: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, you're telling me pro-Russia conservative YouTubers were paid off by the Kremlin? No.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Michael Owinger.

Reporter 6: Russia is trying to meddle in the 2024 presidential election and that's according to the Justice Department.

Micah Loewinger: This week, the feds announced investigations into two alleged Kremlin disinformation campaigns. One involves a plot to create and operate 32 bogus sites, some designed to look like real news outlets like Fox and the Washington Post.

Attorney General Merrick Garland: In fact, they were fake sites.

Micah Loewinger: Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland: They were filled with Russian government propaganda that had been created by the Kremlin.

Reporter 7: The other campaign allegedly laundered nearly $10 million into the United States to pay unwitting American political influencers to make nearly 2000 videos. Apparently, the influencers believe they were making videos for an American company based in Tennessee, but the client actually paying for all of this was allegedly the Russian state-run media company RT.

Micah Loewinger: RT, formally known as Russia Today, the unnamed Tennessee company cited in the indictment appears to be Tenet Media. The influencers who appear to have been unknowing recipients of Russian cash include popular conservative YouTubers like Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, and Tim Pool. Here's Poole defending himself on his podcast this week.

Tim Pool: Did you read the indictment? It clearly says that I as well as the other personalities were victims, we were deceived by people intentionally to trick us into licensing our content to them.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a reporter at the Washington Post, where he writes about the conservative media. He's been following Tenet since its early days.

Will Sommer: They had a very strange rollout. It was a lot of very ominous videos like a lot of strong noises and they would say like, "Boom, Tenet." It was unclear to me how it could exist because the viewership was really, really low. Like Dave Rubin, for example, has more than two million YouTube followers on his own channel, but his videos on Tenet would often get just 1,000 views in total, and so it was really unclear to me why it existed and how it made any money.

Micah Loewinger: Did this channel exist before "Russian investors" got involved?

Will Sommer: No. The indictment makes clear that Tenet Media from the beginning was the creation of the Russian government. The founders of Tenet, conservative influencer here in the United States, named Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, they had prior connections to the Russian government. Then at some point, Russians, using very thin, fictitious Personas to claim they weren't Russian, got in touch with them and said, "We want to launch this thing called Tenet Media. We need you to recruit influencers to be the face of that."

Micah Loewinger: Just to clarify, Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, what evidence, at least from the indictment, points to whether or not they understood that they were working with, not just Russian investors, but the Russian government?

Will Sommer: Lauren Chen and her husband haven't been indicted. The indictment does allege, though, that the founders were very clear on the fact that the money was coming from Russia. There's one funny anecdote where one of the founders basically emails the investors who are ostensibly Western Europeans and says, "We need more

money for Tenet." When they don't hear back for a while, googles, "What time is it in Moscow?" to find out if any of the people funding this operation are awake.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Oh, God. Chen, Donovan, they set out to recruit big-name conservative influencers. What did those deals look like so.

Will Sommer: So lucrative they couldn't refuse them? Dave Rubin was paid $400,000 a month, plus some additional, additional side benefits for making 16 videos per month, so roughly $25,000 per video. These were not exactly documentary-quality videos. This was like he would watch a video of some like triggered leftist for a few minutes, and then he'd say like, "This guy's completely owned by Trump."

Micah Loewinger: You're talking about his show for Tenet Media called People of the Internet, where he reacts to viral content with other right-wing influencers and then they just riff.

Will Sommer: Yes, exactly.

5Dave Rubin: What's your name?

Fid: My name's Fid.

Dave Rubin: What's your nationality?

Fid: Yes, I'm an American citizen. I was born in Los Angeles. I spent most of my life in Upstate New York.

Dave Rubin: Are you proud to be American?

Fid: Not particularly.

Dave Rubin: Sorry, not sorry. That is just so pathetic and I'm so sick of these people and the systems and institutions that led to that guy from upstate New York not being proud of America. .

Will Sommer: Dave Rubin and all these influencers have claimed that they didn't know this money was coming from Russia and there's no evidence in the indictment that they did. On the other hand, there perhaps were some red flags. Both Tim Pool and Rubin had asked, "Who's paying for all this?" The Russians invented a persona named Eduard Gregorian who purported to be a belgian banker. They blundered around. It was misspelled a lot. At one point in his resume, it said he was interested in social justice and Dave Rubin said, "Hey, I'm not sure I want to get into business with that dude."

Micah Loewinger: That was the thing that he zoomed in on.

Will Sommer: Yes, but ultimately, it was not enough to stop Dave Rubin from taking $5 million a year. Tim Pool, similarly, was making $100,000 per week just for hosting a one weekly show.

Micah Loewinger: Can you tell me a little bit about the background of some of the influencers who were handpicked by Tenet Media?

Will Sommer: Sure. Dave Rubin is a online talk show host. He started on The Young Turks, which is a progressive online video network. He drifted right, and then used his credentials as a disaffected centrist to then remake himself as a guy who is so convinced by Trumpism and the right that he left the left. That's his background. Tim Pool, to me, I think just a fascinating character. He's a guy who started as an on-the-street reporter for digital media sites like Fusion and Vice News. He rose to prominence during Occupy Wall street covering that.

Tim Pool: We've got police vehicles straight down Broadway. I've walked about a block so far. Does anybody know anybody? Were you guys in the park at all?

Bystander: Yes, we were at the time.

Tim Pool: What happened?

Will Sommer: Since 2016 has made a real pivot towards Trumpism. He hosts a nightly talk show. He's very into skateboarding. He has this omnipresent beanie on his head that he even wore to the White House and to Mar a Lago. It's like a conservative punk rock ethos. Then in the case of Benny Johnson, actually, again, another guy who transitioned out of journalism. He worked at Buzzfeed in Buzzfeed's heyday, and then he got busted for being a serial plagiarist. Then he washed through some other sites and faced more plagiarism allegations, and then he just went full-on and became a republican activist at Turning Point USA. Now he has his own YouTube show.

Benny Johnson: That is precisely the meltdown that we are about to witness on the Internet when Tucker Carlson gets his Vladimir Putin interview. Oh, yes, baby.

Micah Loewinger: Did these people know that they were being funded by the Russian government? Do we have any evidence of that?

Will Sommer: We don't. The influencers themselves, they all have come out and said, "We didn't know there was Russian money here." In fairness to them, the indictment has very few examples of the Russians successfully influencing any of these influencers coverage. There's one example where basically they said, "Can someone cover this terrorist attack in Moscow and blame it on Ukraine?" One of the influencers said, "Yes, sure, I'll do it," but otherwise, it seems based on the indictment that the Russians were really frustrated by how little they were getting from the Americans.

There was one point where one of the Russian operatives who's using an alias to work at the company in a chat room, said, "Gosh, these influencers are never posting our stuff. They aren't promoting Tenet." Then people ignore her, so then she creates a new alias, a second person to come in and say, "Yes, I agree. They need to promote Tenet more."

Micah Loewinger: There's this fascinating moment captured at the indictment where it appears that a producer for Tenet Media was in a discord chat with one of the Russian investors and the investor was saying, "Can you post this video of Tucker Carlson walking around a grocery store in Moscow?"

Tucker Carlson: Coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost anf how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That's how I feel anyway, radicalized.

Micah Loewinger: The producer's like, "I don't know if we should put this out there. It just feels like over [unintelligible 00:29:23]." Then one of the founders

allegedly replied that their partner thinks we should just put it out there, and then the producer agreed. That's a small example of pushing pro-Russian messaging, in this case, from a prominent, conservative media personality, Tucker Carlson, but there was at least a little bit of it going on. No?

Will Sommer: There definitely was. How much of this was, "We're going to pay these influencers to repeat the Moscow line"? I don't think it was a lot of that, as it turned out. A lot of it perhaps was to build up Tenet Media as its own thing, using these influencers, and then pushing out videos within Tenet that didn't really have anything to do with these influencers that had a pro-Russia line.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to pro-Russia, you could look to some very strong language from the influencers themselves like Tim Pool, for instance. Since the news of the indictment this week, this clip from Pool's show has been floating around social media.

Tim Pool: Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy, being funded by the Democrats. I will stress again, one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine.

Micah Loewinger: Again, no proof that Tim Pool was paid by Tenet Media or by the investors of Tenet Media to say this specifically. Let's just assume he believes it, but clearly, they see a useful messenger here, right?

Will Sommer: Perhaps there's not a smoking gun email saying, "Hey, Tim, you need to say this on a video for Tenet Media." On the other hand, you could also imagine Moscow saying, "We just see these people as useful for us and we would like to subsidize their other activities. The excuse for us sending them this money is going to be this make work site called Tenet Media that no one watches."

Micah Loewinger: I want to zoom in on another part of Tim Pool for viewers who are not familiar with him. He earned a reputation for repeatedly invoking the threat of an imminent civil war.

Tim Pool: The only thing I see that makes a civil war not happen is that conservatives tend to be cowardly and just flee. when Antifa shows up to their city and firebombs, they flee to Florida, where it's safe because they have a better leader.

Will Sommer: It'll be pretty bland things that happen. Like it'll be some advancement in a Trump criminal case or something like that and he'll say, "Oh, no, the civil war is upon us. America's falling apart at the seams." This is the trope that he returns to over and over.

Micah Loewinger: He's also known for hosting some pretty extremist rhetoric from other people on his show. Even if a guy like Tim Pool isn't spending most of his time spouting Russian propaganda on his podcast, he is a chaos agent.

Will Sommer: Yes. We know the Russian goal is to ramp up tensions in the United States and to create these bizarre political flashpoints. I suspect Tim Pool would be doing this anyway, but certainly, someone who's constantly saying there's going to be a civil war or hosting people who are saying Americans should be executing other Americans over politics, I think if I was Vladimir Putin, I would say, "That seems like a good guy to go into business with."

Micah Loewinger: Russia Today, the pro-Kremlin government-run media company is named right at the beginning of the indictment, and they're allegedly behind this operation. What was their role in all of this?

Will Sommer: Sure. Russia Today, after the invasion of Ukraine, was banned from operating in the United States, and so they appear to have then decided to launch subterranean operations instead. Russia Today provided a lot of the infrastructure for Tenet. They would have employees who were not acknowledged as Russians in chat rooms, who were providing editing support, deciding what videos would get posted.

Micah Loewinger: How has Russia Today reacted to the indictment? I've seen some colorful quotes from news outlets that have reached out to them.

Will Sommer: Yes, well, I saw one news outlet who asked them for comment, and Russia Today responded just with a series of ha-ha-ha's.

Micah Loewinger: I saw this statement that they gave to Reuters; "Three things are certain in life, death, taxes, and RT's interference in the US elections."

Will Sommer: [laughs] They maybe just be telling the truth there.

Micah Loewinger: Unfortunately, whenever Russian interference is invoked in the American political media conversation, it tends to push people into some predictable

camps on conservative media. The Russia hoax was this political weapon that was wielded against Donald Trump among liberal media personalities. Donald Trump was a Russian asset and is under Putin's thumb. Where would you situate these revelations into our current election news cycle?

Will Sommer: I think on one hand, we should keep them in perspective, and we shouldn't say Russia is running all of conservative media or Russia is going to sway the election. On the other hand, I think they're pretty significant. Perhaps what it says is how widespread this foreign money and these Russian influence operations are that a relatively prominent YouTube channel and social media company turns out to be a Putin front. Certainly from my perspective, it makes me wonder where else that money has gone.

Micah Loewinger: Will, thank you very much.

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a media reporter at the Washington Post. He wrote the book Trust The Plan.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a new series explores mass psychogenic illness in the modern world. Who's to blame? This time it really might be the media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On The Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Michael Owinger. Last April, I took a look at a mysterious phenomenon affecting us diplomats in Havana, Cuba, and beyond.

Reporter 8: A new assessment by us intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon.

Micah Loewinger: Theres still a heated debate about the cause of Havana syndrome. Some patients, journalists, intelligence workers, and medical experts say that it was an attack from an unidentified weapon, maybe from Russia. Others argue that the culprit is more likely the human mind, whats known as mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria. Thats where I landed when I looked into it last April, and I had so many more questions about mass psychogenic illness that we didn't have a chance to answer in that piece, which is why I was so excited to listen to a new docu-series called Hysterical hosted by Dan Taberski.

The podcast focuses on a curious story in Leroy, New York, in 2011, when a group of high school students started exhibiting the same like symptoms.

Dan Taberski: It all started, by most accounts, when a junior from Leroy High School woke up from a nap with a stutter-

Micah Loewinger: Dan Taberski.

Dan Taberski: -and the symptoms got worse. It became tics and verbal outbursts and twitching, things that you would normally associate with something like Tourette's syndrome. A couple weeks later, a friend on the cheerleading squad came down with the same symptoms, tics, jerks, vocal outbursts, twitching. Two became three, three became five, and it just took off from there.

Micah Loewinger: By January 2012, 12 students at the school were showing symptoms. The high school started working with the state and an outside health contractor. They ran a bunch of tests on the students who were showing symptoms. They also did some environmental tests at the school. Then they held a town hall with parents and students.

Dan Taberski: The state basically held a town hall and said, "We know it's not environmental. We know it's not a virus or a bacteria. That's all you need to know." Basically they said, "We know what it isn't, but we're not going to tell you what it is." The reason behind that was because of HIPAA laws. They were concerned that by revealing the diagnosis for the group, they would also be revealing diagnosis for the individual girls, which violates the law.

Micah Loewinger: One parent got very sick of all this HIPAA deflection he walks up to the microphone and he says that the diagnosis that's been given to his child is conversion disorder.

Dan Taberski: In general, conversion disorder is stress or trauma in the mind that exhibits itself as physical symptoms in the body. Generally, you know it's conversion disorder because there is no explanation for what's going on, so you have a limp, but the X-rays are normal, or you're having seizures multiple times a day, but the MRIs show nothing. It's not faking it. The patients aren't faking it. They are real symptoms that they can't control, but they're coming from a place and they're unconscious that they can't access.

Micah Loewinger: Conversion disorder is just the first part of it. Dr. Jennifer McVige, the neurologist working with the students, says--

Dr. Jennifer McVige: Each case, uniquely, is a conversion disorder independently, but when you mush them all together and they all have the same symptoms and they all know each other, then it's a mass psychogenic illness.

Micah Loewinger: Some of the students and parents were not convinced at all. We hear from a student named Jessica who said--

Jessica: My mom and me were just so outraged to hear everybody just say that's what it was. After all of this, that's all it is? I just don't know how to believe that.

Dan Taberski: In particular, I think the thing that people found most offensive about the diagnosis was the suggestion, or the implied suggestion that they were faking it, and that's how a lot of people took it, that these weren't real. That's not the case with mass psychogenic illness. They are real symptoms, they are uncontrollable, but it's just a real hard thing to make people believe.

Micah Loewinger: The parents did not want to stop investigating it, and so they started to bring in a string of outside investigators. They brought the story to the press, and it became a national news story, an international news story. Camera crews from Sweden and Japan started showing up. The New York Times was on the scene.

Reporter 9: We have new information tonight on a medical mystery that's centered in western New York.

Reporter 10: The number of victims displaying involuntary Tourettes-like syndrome has grown.

Reporter 11: What could be the cause of all this?

Reporter 12: Is it a disorder or a mass hysteria?

Micah Loewinger: Dr. Drew, the TV and radio personality, picked it up.

Dr. Drew: Let's everybody calm down and let's try to figure this thing out. You guys feel comfortable?

Student: Yes.

Dr. Drew: Okay.

Micah Loewinger: One of the students went on a show called The Doctors, which was hosted by a former Bachelor contestant.

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Doctor, doctor, give me the news.

Doctor: 16 year old Alicia and her dad, Randy, are here with us now.

Dan Taberski: The Doctors thing was crazy. People weren't talking to the press cause they thought it'd be fun. People were talking to the press and going on these really strange shows and almost exploiting themselves because they were looking for an answer. This is the way that they could get attention and this is the way that they could get doctors. most of their insurance didn't cover this stuff, so not only just doctors, doctors they didn't have to pay for. It's not a small thing.

Micah Loewinger: When Alicia, the student who went on The Doctors, got the answer from the doctors, it was that she was suffering from conversion disorder.

Dan Taberski: She's on stage with her father in front of this audience, and they're giving her this diagnosis basically saying that all her tests are normal, which sounds like a good thing, but the implication is that, therefore, if your tests are normal but you're still having these symptoms, that's conversion disorder, that's psychogenic illness. It feels insulting. It's a hard thing to accept, especially from a doctor who used to be a former contestant on The Bachelor.

Micah Loewinger: It got more complicated. The coverage got kicked up another notch after an anonymous note was slipped under the door of one of the parents in the community.

Dan Taberski: Anonymous note and some documents and they were anonymously given to one of the affected families. It reminded people that in 1973, there was a train derailment 3 miles from the school that dumped 35,000 gallons of trichloroethylene solvent into the ground and that it was still there. 50 miles away in Niagara Falls, New York, was where Love Canal happened, which was one of the greatest environmental disasters in American history. Very similar circumstances with mysterious symptoms that were unexplainable and turned out to be caused by the chemicals that had been dumped into the ground decades before and that was now poisoning their children.

The fear that this train derailment and Leroy might have something to do with it. It wasn't just some made-up media thing. It was a real possibility, and it was something that the people in this area had seen before.

Micah Loewinger: This theory became even more plausible when Erin Brockovich got involved. The Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist played by Julia Roberts

in the movie from 2000.

Erin Brockovich: We have more than 400 plaintiffs in. They may not be the most sophisticated people, but they do know how to divide, and $20 million isn't [beep] when you split it between them.

Micah Loewinger: Did she and her team solve the case?

Dan Taberski: They investigated six fracking wells that were situated on the high school. They investigated other environmental problems that were happening in the community. They went to that train derailment to see how the cleanup efforts were and realized that there were still over 150-gallon drums of toxic waste from the site that had been cleaned up back in the seventies that had never been removed. Apparently, those steel drums had decayed and the toxins in those drums had seeped back into the ground. They were not able to show through any tests that that was the source of the cause of the symptoms for the girls.

Micah Loewinger: And something interesting happened following the environmental investigation, following Erin Brockovich's involvement when the press coverage was at a fever pitch. Many of the girl's symptoms actually got worse. Here's Dr. McVige.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: It got crazy because, first, everyone starts with tics, and so we're managing these tics and we were worried about motor issues, then it turns into, which I think is so interesting, syncopal events. Syncope is when we pass out.

Dan Taberski: People start passing out.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: They'll start passing out right and left. Now we're passing out.

Dan Taberski: Dr. McVige charted when there would be what she called exacerbation, so anytime that symptoms would get worse in a patient. An ER visit, if they would start passing out, if their symptoms evolved, she would keep track of that. Then she basically put that up against a calendar of when the big events in the mass hysteria happened to see if she could pinpoint what was causing these symptoms to worsen. She basically found out that the week that the press attention got the absolute most cacophonous, the symptoms got markedly worse that following week.

There were eleven exacerbations in the week after the Erin Brockovich team came, which was by far the worst week. she was able to show that there was at least some connection between the attention we give a situation like this and the potential for it to get worse.

Micah Loewinger: One way to treat mass ecogenic illness is to stop giving it attention. That's exactly what some doctors did when they reached out to some local TV stations in Leroy, and the journalists listened.

Dan Taberski: Basically, the neurologists asked the television stations not to stop covering the story, but to stop showing the tics on television. Masticogenic illness is a line-of-sight illness. What the doctors feared was going on was that by covering this story so incessantly and by showing the girls ticking and having symptoms on television so incessantly, that was a vector for spread. They asked the television stationists to stop showing it and a couple of the local stations did. They didn't stop covering the story, they just stopped showing the tics, which I think is commendable.

Micah Loewinger: You compare what happened in Leroy to another case, a similar case in Danvers, Massachusetts, shortly after. How did that episode differ from Leroy?

Dan Taberski: The difference here is that there were no town hall meetings, nobody talked to the press. There was no media attention because of that, and eventually, it went away. Of course, the ultimate irony of that is that Danvers, Massachusetts was not always called Danvers, Massachusetts. In 1752, they changed their name to Danvers from what it was before, Salem, Massachusetts, which is where the original Salem witch trials happened, which a lot of people think was a mass psychogenic illness.

Micah Loewinger: Let's return to Leroy. Some of the cases were ultimately resolved. Some of these young women got over their symptoms.

Dan Taberski: Yes, most of them did.

Micah Loewinger: How?

Dan Taberski: If you believe it was a mass psychogenic illness, the traditional trajectory of mass psychogenic illness is to flare up, is to cause havoc, and it's to fade away, and so eventually, as the news value of these dies down, as the media tiptoes away, it's almost like you're starving hysteria from the attention that it needs. Eventually, the symptoms faded away.

Micah Loewinger: For the patients who never believed that it was mass psychogenic illness, how do they say they were healed?

Dan Taberski: Basically, what happens is that another doctor shows up in town and gives an alternate diagnosis. He believes it's more likely something associated with an illness called PANDAS, which is pediatric autoimmune neuroscience psychiatric disorder associated with strep. People who have a lingering strep infection can sometimes begin exhibiting symptoms that are similar to the symptoms that the girls in Leroy are experiencing. Unfortunately, if you ask me and if you ask the neurologists in Leroy who were treating the other girls, this did not line up with PANDAS. PANDAS is a pediatric disorder, first of all, and this what's happening to kids who were past that point, they were in their teens.

PANDAS is something that tends to happen mostly to boys and this was happening mostly to girls. There are a host of reasons that PANDAS does not work as a diagnosis for this, but a lot of the families in the town believed it, and they took the treatments that he recommended.

Micah Loewinger: And they say that the treatments work. As you say in the show, belief gets you out of the psychogenic illness just like belief is what got you there in the first place.

Dan Taberski: Yes. I guess it's important to say I don't mean this as a knock on the parents who believe this. It's just one possible theory is that because the parents believed the diagnosis and because the parents believed the therapies that he was suggesting, that that is what made it work, that's what made the symptoms go away. It's fascinating.

Micah Loewinger: Zooming out a little bit. The podcast is more than just this mystery. It's a show about attention. It's a show about groupthink. It's a show about belief and how we conceive of ourselves. You've described mass hysteria as "the defining disorder of our time". Why do you think that, outside of these medical examples, this is a useful metaphor for thinking about our culture?

Dan Taberski: In the process of doing this, one neurologist we talked to that treated many of the girls, he was talking about something that they had pinned to the wall in his medical school. It's a quote that I think is pretty common among doctors and it's, "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." I love the logic of that. Just the idea that we think we know what's going on in our brains, that we know it all is hubris. There's sometime in the podcast where I feel like I never quite go as far as to make the connections to how we're all feeling, even though I feel like this is how we're all feeling.

Micah Loewinger: What do you mean by that?

Dan Taberski: I feel like we're all feeling at the mercy of our feelings and our thoughts and our brains and what we hear around us and all the information saying, "Could it be this or could it be that?" I feel like we all feel like we're at the mercy of not understanding what's going on because it's just so incredibly complicated. For me, a certain sense of giving yourself over to that creates a little more sanity.

Micah Loewinger: Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Taberski: Thank you so much, man. I love doing it.

Micah Loewinger: Dan Taberski is a documentary podcast creator. His latest series is called Hysterical.

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On The Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On The Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Michael Owinger.

 

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