Lara Trump: As the co-chair of the RNC, I'm well aware of all the ways that they are trying to sway the election, rig it in every single state.

Brooke Gladstone: The body politic is infected by election lies. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. In the run-up to election day, some members of the Uncommitted Movement have had to make some tough choices.

Waleed Shahid: We've been asked, don't you think the Uncommitted Movement is going to help Trump win? We have so many members who've had family killed by American-supplied Israeli bombs. I think that fact is going to help Trump win more than anything we do.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, did you know that we didn't have an election night until 1848? In the early days, the media would keep people up to date in creative and curious ways.

Ira Chinoy: Sometimes they would have a light on top of a building and codes published in advance shine one way or the other, and people would know who is winning.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Donald Trump: They're allowing criminals from all over the world to enter our country.

Micah Loewinger: Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden this week.

Donald Trump: We're not going to take it anymore. Kamala, you're fired. Get out. Get out. You're fired.

Kamala Harris: We know who Donald Trump is.

Micah Loewinger: Kamala Harris speaking at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.

Kamala Harris: He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.

Micah Loewinger: The media have dubbed these final week speeches as the candidates closing arguments, but if 2020 taught us anything, it's that November 5th won't be a decisive end to the election season, just the beginning of the next phase.

Steven Crowder: Here's another way that they try and steal this election from you.

Micah Loewinger: Far right pundit Steven Crowder in August.

Steven Crowder: And we're allowed to say that on YouTube now, which is great. You're allowed to say steal.

Micah Loewinger: He's referring to YouTube's decision last year to lift restrictions aimed at curbing lies about voter fraud. Since then, according to reports from Media Matters and the New York Times, the site has devolved into a swamp of election disinformation.

Male Speaker 1: The steal is on to actually get people to deliver ballots, early ballots, and they're not American citizens.

Lara Trump: As the co-chair of the RNC, I can guarantee you I'm well aware of all the ways that they are trying to sway the election, rig it in every single state.

Male Speaker 2: The Democrats to me today could show up on the evening of November 5th with 5 billion ballots in a country of 330 million people and, with a straight face, tell us it was a landslide in the freest and fairest election in the history of the world.

Micah Loewinger: We've seen similar claims elevated by X's owner, Elon Musk, who at a recent Trump rally reanimated the conspiracy theory that cost Fox News around $787 million in damages.

Elon Musk: There's always a question of, like, say, the Dominion voting machines. I think they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not in a lot of other places. Doesn't that seem like a heck of a coincidence?

Micah Loewinger: Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter for NBC covering the Internet. She and other reporters are struggling to keep up with the sheer magnitude of election lies, old and new. Brandy, welcome back to the show.

Brandy Zadrozny: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: I wonder if we could just kind of take through some of the big stories that you're seeing. There was that video posted on X recently, allegedly in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that showed a person destroying filled-out ballots for Trump.

Brandy Zadrozny: That was a Russia propaganda operation known as Storm 1516. Operates out of St. Petersburg, the old Russian troll farm reimagined for 2024. They're very video heavy. They were all about Ukraine and anti-Zelensky. Now they are totally focused on Kamala Harris and the campaign. This one was the first that we had seen that was specifically targeting the election. It was this guy, face-off camera, allegedly ripping ballots that were voting for Trump and letting ones that were for Harris go through. It was an obvious fake, but it went super viral super fast before it was debunked.

Micah Loewinger: There was another viral video going around on some QAnon accounts on X alleging evidence of illegal harvesting in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.

Brandy Zadrozny: What it showed was someone hanging out outside the local elections office, seeing someone walk in with one of those white baskets that says post office on it, carrying a lot of ballots. The taper says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Follows this person in and says, "What are you doing with all those ballots?" The guy in question say, "We're with the post office." The guy who tapes it says, "I don't know, seems really suspicious. Look at all those ballots." Then it shows this person who says, "I'm from the post office," shows his face, and basically says, "We need to ID this guy." Then he posts it on X, and soon they're looking up the license plate of this postal worker. They're finding his address. They dox him online; he faces harassment. The Playbook.

Micah Loewinger: It now has a community note on X, but it's still up and it's been viewed 7.6 million times.

Brandy Zadrozny: Yes, I think the community notes actually uses the fact check I did. I think my fact check got like 100,000 views. It's just we don't really stand a chance in terms of eyeballs.

Micah Loewinger: You're outmatched. What about this story out of Whitfield County, Georgia, about a person who apparently was unable to vote for their preferred candidate using a electronic voting machine? Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out this story and later relayed it to Alex Jones on his show.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: They went to vote, and we have the Dominion machines. The machine prints their ballot, a paper copy, and each voter has to review that printed copy, so when this voter printed their ballot and they looked, it had changed.

Brandy Zadrozny: We've seen a couple of versions of this one where it turns out that it's a voter error. The top state election official has confirmed that, that it was not the fault of any machines. It was just voter error.

Micah Loewinger: I believe in that case the voter was ultimately able to vote for the person they wanted.

Brandy Zadrozny: Yes, they gave him another ballot; she was able to vote, and all is right in the world. This happens all the time. The boring, sometimes messy, sometimes error filled, sometimes user error. Work of voting and democracy happens and is real. The problem is that you have these folks who leap onto every single thing as an indicator of this widespread fraud, this nebulous feeling that it's all over. Like, didn't I hear something happen? The same thing happened in Texas. Yes, I remember that. Actually, a similar thing did happen in Texas, and it was again user error.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, here's a bizarre one I've seen floating around on social media. WNEP, a Pennsylvania TV station, appeared to show results on the bottom of the screen showing Kamala Harris winning the state with percentages and vote totals. The TV station said it was just running a test, but naturally it was catnip for the so-called election integrity skeptics.

Brandy Zadrozny: If we just back up and say, why would this television station be in cahoots with the Democrats, I guess? How does this on-screen thing fit into a larger plan to rig? That like somehow Harris has gotten all of these local TV stations to-- I can't even take it to its logical conclusion because there is no logical conclusion. The strategy is chaos, absolute chaos.

Micah Loewinger: Some people in some part of the Internet that most listeners are not going to spend time in are saying some wacky stuff to each other. X/Twitter isn't real life, as a lot of people like to say. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are just conspiracy theorizing. What else is new?

Brandy Zadrozny: I hate that so much. Maybe it doesn't affect most people, but you know who it does affect? It affects election workers who are literally under siege, who are in Maricopa County working in an election office with panic buttons, metal detectors, and police snipers on the roof. That's crazy. There's been warnings from DHS and FBI saying extremists are targeting candidates, politicians, the media, election workers. That's really bad. Beyond the threat to election workers and candidates, we've seen what, for example, the Great Replacement Theory, the harm that that can do.

I did this piece on non-citizen voting and talked to Latino advocates, and I said, "It's hard to do this piece on this particular brand of disinformation because it feels very hypothetical. Something could happen. A new citizen's vote could get purged in this fake hunt for noncitizens." This advocate said to me, "Are you kidding? This isn't hypothetical for us. We remember El Paso, where gunman killed 20 something people in a Walmart," specifically quoting the Great Replacement Theory as motivation. She's like, "We are afraid. The fear is very real for us, so it really matters."

Micah Loewinger: You were reporting on this stuff in the lead-up to the last presidential election. You followed the conspiracy theories that took root following Donald Trump's loss. Does monitoring these spaces feel different this time around than say, four years ago?

Brandy Zadrozny: Yes, I think so. I think alternative platforms are having a real effect in terms of disbursement. There was a time when we watched Facebook and we watched Twitter and we watched YouTube for how something was spreading. That isn't really enough anymore. One, we can't really watch Facebook because they have killed the thing that we used to watch it with, called CrowdTangle. They have fired the group of researchers who once worked with the media to understand what was happening on the platform and how things spread, so that's different. Also, when I'm looking for where a rumor has started, who's behind it, and how it's spreading, now I have to look on Telegram and Rumble, and I have to look on Patriots, the Donald, I have to look at a lot more spaces and it's harder to tell where things came from.

Micah Loewinger: How does it affect you to see the proliferation of these kinds of harmful lies take place? What kind of toll does it take on you to do this kind of reporting?

Brandy Zadrozny: I don't know why I feel like I'm about to cry right now. You're like, Barbara Walter is in me.

Micah Loewinger: Sorry.

Brandy Zadrozny: No. The thing is, gosh, like, debunking this lie about the post office worker delivering ballots legally and lawfully to the election center and watching these folks online just rabidly doxing him, the city commissioner said, harassing him, it's just really. It's a bummer. During COVID we saw it happen with doctors and city officials and health workers. Then, during the culture war, ramp up. The last couple of years, it's been teachers, librarians, I don't know, it's academics, journalists, and now with this election, mail carriers. I just would very much like it to stop. It makes me really sad that normal people who did not sign up for any of this are being faced with threats and harassment. It's awful.

Micah Loewinger: The people who, in many cases, are not paid enough to be the first line of defense against so much political instability.

Brandy Zadrozny: No, man. There was this great piece in the Atlantic where they talked about this election worker, and she said, "This job used to be nice. You would come, you'd have coffee with people, you check off signatures like it was no big deal." Now, she's being faced with these threatening phone calls saying they're going to kill her family. It's so jarring, the juxtaposition of how things used to be with how they are, and I don't know how to stop it.

Micah Loewinger: When our producer, Becca, spoke to you, you gave her, I think, a very vivid image of the two phones that you carry around in your day to day.

Brandy Zadrozny: Yes, one phone is my nice phone. The number that my parents call me on and my real friends. I have some social media accounts that are nice, and it's fine. Then I have another phone I think of as my work phone. That phone is populated with lies, distrust, news that isn't real. The thought of my two phones depresses me, but also gives me hope that most people have a nice phone and aren't really plugged in to the worst of it, but that stuff exists.

Micah Loewinger: Brandy, thank you very much.

Brandy Zadrozny: Thank you, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter for NBC, covering the Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, many Muslim voters in Michigan plan to check the uncommitted box. One Muslim Democratic strategist explains how he's trying to stem that tide.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week in an op-ed, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said his paper would no longer offer presidential endorsements, including the one already on deck for Kamala Harris. He said they create a perception of bias and that "we must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility." He also offered the stunning revelation that, according to Gallup, most people actually do think the media are biased. Wow. Stop the presses, JB. The rest of us have been watching that slow but steady slide in public trust for nearly 50 years. Right now, fewer than a third of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in us. It hasn't been this low since that scary, precipitous dive in 2016. Geez, what happened then? Oh, yes.

Donald Trump: These people are the lowest form of life. This crooked media you talk about, crooked Hillary, they're worse than she is.

Brooke Gladstone: On the 2016 campaign trail in Atkinson, New Hampshire, Trump called journalists horrible people. In Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, he called them scum three times. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, he said that unlike Vladimir Putin, he wouldn't actually murder them.

Donald Trump: I'm totally against that. I'd hate some of these people, but I'd never kill them. I hate them. No, these people, I would never kill them. I would never do that. Let's see. No, I wouldn't.

Brooke Gladstone: There are punitive options short of homicide.

Donald Trump: We're going to open up those libel laws so that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected. You see, with me, they're not protected.

Brooke Gladstone: As for his detested CNN.

Donald Trump: As an example of the power structure I'm fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration.

Brooke Gladstone: Once in the White House, he bore down hard.

Female Speaker 1: The Justice Department is suing to block AT&T's $85 billion purchase of Time Warner, the owner of CNN. President Trump's frequent criticism of CNN is raising concerns about the motive behind the government's legal challenge.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2016, riled by the Washington Post, he threatened Jeff Bezos companies.

Donald Trump: If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They're going to have such problems.

Brooke Gladstone: As president, he pushed the postmaster general to boost Amazon's postal rates.

Donald Trump: The postal service is a joke because they're handing out packages for Amazon and other Internet companies, and every time they bring a package, they lose money on it. If they raise the price of a package like they should, four or five times, that's what it should be, or let Amazon build their own post office, which would be an impossible thing to do.

Female Speaker 2: At closing bell, the price of Amazon shares had dropped by some 5% in the course of the day. That's a loss of close to $50 billion to shareholders. This is a consequence of a report that President Trump is, and I quote, "obsessed with Amazon and angry at its owner, Jeff Bezos."

Brooke Gladstone: What's all this about? The usual take is that Trump is forever smoldering over the snubs he's endured throughout his life, and he's out for blood. The daily newsletter of the Columbia Journalism Review recently recalled that Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, having lived some 10 years in Hungary under Trump's beloved Viktor Orbán, warned in 2017 that Trump was talking openly about using Orbán's media playbook, which marshaled state agencies to attack unruly news outlets with a fusillade of audits and investigations and to direct public ad money only to media that he deemed sufficiently loyal. All of that ultimately drove Hungary's independent media from the field, but not overnight. It happened step by step, out in the open for all to see. For Trump, that outcome's still aspirational.

Donald Trump: ABC took a big hit last night. To be honest, they're a news organization. They have to be licensed. They ought to take away their license. How about 60 minutes? The way they protected Kamala, CBS, they ought to lose their license.

Brooke Gladstone: As Bezos noted, the American news media are in trouble. Now trusted even less than Congress. Can you imagine? Journalism has long since become a largely elitist exercise that struggles to report on people, often overlooked, who have seen their prospects sink while others rise. Now even Democrats, fed up with the false equivalencies, the oft noted double standard in the coverage of the candidates, have joined the Republican naysayers in large numbers. Everything is tribal, and everything gets sucked into its wake. WNYC did a live national call-in on Wednesday about media and the election. Micah and I took part with our colleague Brian Lehrer, and we got calls from all across the country and all points on the political spectrum, but this is the call that made me gasp.

Male Speaker 3: I don't think the media should have a place in fact-checking and trying to determine what lies are and what lies aren't. Why don't we go back to real journalism that reports what people said and what people projected and not try to get into this fact-checking thing? It's all activism now.

Brooke Gladstone: Say what? Walter Lippmann, writing in 1920, grimly observed that the work of reporters had become confused with the work of preachers, revivalists, prophets, and agitators. He worried that if people could no longer sip confidently from a reliable fountain of information, then "anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each man's hope and each man's whim becomes the basis of government," and that would lead inevitably to disaster. I guess he also would have been fine with no endorsements, and to be honest, it doesn't much bother me either.

Let's return to Bezos. He did the nation a great good by buying and reinvigorating the Washington Post, but he is not a journalist, despite his nominal claim to the profession by using the magisterial we. Bezos is a businessman, and as such, he's looking toward the future. Here's a parody TikTok video made about the Post by the Post.

[video excerpt]

Speaker: All right. Our editorial staff has written our endorsement for Kamala Harris here. Time to publish.

Speaker: Wait, stop. Don't publish it.

Speaker: Why not?

Speaker: As you may know, I'm a billionaire, and many of us billionaires own multiple companies.

Speaker: Yes, we know, you own the Washington Post.

Speaker: And Blue Origin, which happens to have billions of dollars in cloud computing contracts with the federal government.

Speaker: So you're worried about retribution if Trump wins?

Speaker: I didn't say that, but many experts have pointed to that, yes. You remember, like, 50 years ago when our editorial section did not regularly endorse candidates?

Speaker: You mean like before Watergate?

Speaker: Oh, so you do remember. Let's do that again to keep a tradition. I'm sure there won't be a massive reaction to this.

[end of video]

Brooke Gladstone: After the announcement, some 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. It's since been reported that Bezos has called for the hiring of more conservatives. Though he concedes the timing of his decision looks bad, the boss of one of his companies met with Trump on the day of his announcement. Given how urgently Bezos seeks to preserve the Post's credibility, he is surprisingly nonchalant about taking a sledgehammer to his own. More worrying is that his actions smell of what historian Timothy Snyder, author of the blockbuster monograph On Tyranny, calls obeying in advance.

Timothy Snyder: Do not obey in advance if what you do is based on your anticipation, as it so obviously is, that an authoritarian might be about to come to power, and what you are doing is making it more likely that that authoritarian will come to power. Since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you're preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power. What's worse, aside from being politically wrong and morally outrageous, this is just simply unfair because it puts the burden on taking action to those who are less fortunate than you, puts them in the position of having to be more courageous than you. Of course, what it really means when someone who's wealthy and powerful obeys in advance is that they think, "Well, I'm going to be fine. When democracy dies in darkness, I'm going to enjoy the shadows."

Brooke Gladstone: Look, by now you've probably heard this before, but I'm going to say it again. We need our newspapers strong. If you're really mad at Jeff Bezos, don't hurt the Post. Make a sacrifice. Do you really need your toilet paper cut rate and delivered overnight? You know what I mean?

Micah Loewinger: As the election nears miles, millions of Americans have already cast their votes, but some are still weighing their decision.

Male Speaker 4: Here in Michigan. It is literally a life or death issue for so many people here who either have relatives and friends who've been killed in Gaza or Lebanon or have neighbors, coworkers, and friends who know people who've died.

Female Speaker 3: You just can't ask us to vote for genocide, and it's a terrible position to be in. I don't want to see Trump as president, but I cannot in good conscience give her my vote.

Micah Loewinger: Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of voters in Michigan and elsewhere checked the uncommitted box on their Democratic primary ballots in objection to US policy on sending arms to Israel. Waleed Shahid is a Democratic strategist who has served as a senior advisor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. He's also one of the co-founders of the Uncommitted Movement, which he helped start in 2023 when he was trying to get the media to pay attention to what was happening in Gaza.

Waleed Shahid: I got a phone call from a TV news producer who was like, "I'm getting your press releases, but we are not going to be covering this as much because we are heading toward Election 2024 coverage. If your pitches don't fit our frame, meaning the election, you're not going to get much traction here." I don't think she realized that that would send me down the rabbit hole of figuring out, well, how can I continue to get the mainstream media to cover this horrific assault in Gaza and all the voters who feel like they can no longer vote for the Democratic Party because they're sending unconditional weapons transfers to Israel? That led to me discovering this uncommitted option that the Michigan Democratic primary ballot has on it.

Micah Loewinger: Let's jump ahead to when Kamala Harris took over the ticket. What kind of requests did you all make to her campaign, and what was the response?

Waleed Shahid: We sent a letter to the campaign asking for a meeting with her and her senior staff, asking to set up a meeting with Palestinian Americans who have had loved ones killed by American-supplied Israeli bombs, asking for a statement that she intends to uphold domestic and international law as it pertains to the use of American weapons abroad. We asked for a statement showing how her platform would be different than Donald Trump's as it pertained to Israel-Palestine policy. We asked for a speaker at the Democratic National Convention.

Pretty much all those requests have been denied. What instead has happened is Donald Trump has done retail politics in Michigan and Arab and Muslim communities across the country, showing up, doing photos, inviting Muslims and Arabs to his rallies. I think Vice President Harris has unfortunately left a vacuum for some of Donald Trump's lies and fraud to take hold in our community.

Micah Loewinger: We'll get to the resonance that some of Trump's campaigning has had. First, I want to ask you about the coverage that you were looking for with the Uncommitted Movement. Were you able to get the type of coverage you were hoping for?

Waleed Shahid: It's been mixed. The number one thing that we've been asked in the media is, don't you think the Uncommitted Movement is going to help Trump win? Recently, so much of the punditry is about how can the Muslim and Arab and young voters who care so much about Gaza be so irrational and vote against their self-interest by voting for a third party or voting for Donald Trump. I've always been baffled by that because in this country there are a lot of white working-class voters who continuously vote for a Republican Party that guts unions, lowers taxes on the wealthy, goes after the social safety net. Very few times is there a public discussion about how white working-class voters are irrational or voting against their self-interest. In fact, the party bends backwards, and the media often bends backwards to relate to those voters and talk about their anxieties about a changing country. That media framing has been particular in the last few weeks because of Trump and Jill Stein's inroads into some of these communities.

Micah Loewinger: Speaking in Philadelphia this week, Barack Obama made this appeal to Muslim voters.

Barack Obama: If you're a Muslim American and you're upset about what's happening in the Middle East, why would you put your faith in somebody who passed a Muslim ban and then--

Micah Loewinger: In September, Trump said he would reinstate the travel ban, and he's added that his administration would turn away refugees from Gaza. Yet you've seen evidence that Trump's campaign is resonating with Arab Americans and Muslim voters. Why do you think that is?

Waleed Shahid: Because he's showing up. Donald Trump is campaigning on lies and despair and misinformation. He's gone on stage multiple times in Michigan talking about how could Muslim and Arabs vote for a candidate who's so cozy with Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, two people who have brought so much destruction to the Middle East. It's obvious that Donald Trump will not bring peace to the Middle East. Trump is often speaking to white working-class and white middle-class audiences. Goes on and on about how he's going to cut taxes, how he's going to protect the little guy. Meanwhile, he's a billionaire landlord.

There are lots of communities that Donald Trump lies to and still wins over many of their votes. I'm someone who's voting for Vice President Harris, but I've seen his politics take root all over WhatsApp. There are photos of imams and different Arab and Muslim leaders taking selfies with Donald Trump in states like Michigan and Georgia. You can't say the same about Vice President Harris.

Micah Loewinger: Your father is planning to vote for Donald Trump.

Waleed Shahid: He told me last Thanksgiving that he couldn't vote for Joe Biden because of Biden's policy to continue sending weapons that were dropping on children whose limbs are being blown apart every day. He was willing to take a bet on Donald Trump to change things. He gave Vice President Harris a shot, but eventually Vice President Harris made clear in many of her interviews that she did not plan to change the policy direction. I've had those conversations with my dad about how Donald Trump would be much worse, how he's anti-Muslim, but my dad's number one issue is stopping these bombs in Gaza. Unfortunately, my dad doesn't see the incumbent party planning to change course on that and sees Donald Trump simultaneously showing up, saying things that are definitely lies but saying he would end the war.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned the inroads that Jill Stein has made in some Arab American communities. She's not polling particularly well, but she has vowed to try to end this war. How has her campaign been received within the Uncommitted Movement writ large?

Waleed Shahid: I think there are a lot of uncommitted voters who will end up choosing Jill Stein in the election. I don't agree with that. I think Jill Stein is someone who's profiting off the misery and despair of many people who are rightfully angry with the Democratic Party. I don't think her presidential campaign that pops up every four years is going to be impactful. Those votes are votes that ultimately do go toward helping a Trump reelection. Many people who are her supporters, including her campaign itself, talks about how their goal is to show the Democratic Party that if they had moved further in an anti-war direction, that they could have won the election.

I don't really think that's how power works. I don't think that's how leverage works. I don't think it worked after Ralph Nader did the similar thing in 2000. I think what has an effect is organizing and building infrastructure and fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party through primaries like the uncommitted primary.

Micah Loewinger: By the time this airs, the election will be just a few days away. Are you all still meeting?

Waleed Shahid: Yes, we're still meeting. Honestly, they're very mournful conversations. They're very somber, solemn. We have a team member who's from South Lebanon, one of the founders of Uncommitted, who every couple hours gets a different update from a family member who has had to leave their home, a family member who's searching for a home. In Michigan, there are funerals happening every day of people who have died in Lebanon. Things just feel much worse than they did a year ago.

Micah Loewinger: Despite all of this, you're still planning to vote for Kamala Harris?

Waleed Shahid: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Can you just talk about that calculation?

Waleed Shahid: I think elections are about which coalition will help you get what you want. I want to be part of the coalition that's made up of union members, civil rights organizations, environmentalists, reproductive rights organizations, because those are the people and the organizations who I believe will help get us an end to unrestricted weapons to Israel and closer to the freedom and dignity for all Palestinians, all Israelis, all Lebanese people. That's what I'm thinking about when I make my choice at the ballot. Most Democrats and all the polling I've seen are not okay with Vice President Harris policy position but are putting that aside for now to defeat Donald Trump. My hope is that we can organize that coalition to stand up to Vice President Harris after she wins.

Micah Loewinger: One of your fellow leaders in the Uncommitted Movement, Lexi Zeidan, put out a video on the Uncommitted Movement's social media accounts.

Lexi Zeidan: As a Palestinian American, the current administration's handling of this genocide has been beyond enraging and demoralizing, but the reality is that it can get worse. Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than Netanyahu, because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map.

Micah Loewinger: But she stopped short of endorsing Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, Layla Elabed, another cofounder of the Uncommitted Movement, told Meet the Press.

Layla Elabed: I have decided that I will be skipping the top and focusing on candidates down ballot that align with my morals.

Micah Loewinger: It seems that among some of the top members there's some disagreement about the best electoral strategy.

Waleed Shahid: We've had hard conversations amongst the leaders of Uncommitted that are often full of tears, and I think we're trying to do a good job of modeling principled disagreement with each other while remaining in community. I disagree with my colleagues who I'm friends with what their plans are, but I don't judge them for it because I deeply understand their pain and anger and grief in this moment. The Uncommitted leadership was able to come to an agreement around how we don't think Donald Trump is the answer, we don't think third parties are the answer, and we're okay with our individual leaders going out and saying how they plan to vote within that framework.

Micah Loewinger: Waleed, what have you learned from the Uncommitted Movement?

Waleed Shahid: I hear all the time from Democratic elected officials, Democratic operatives, pundits, journalists, staffers, people who don't agree with an arms embargo that what's happening in Gaza is horrific. What's happening in Lebanon is horrific. What our government is supplying with weapons is horrific. But you just don't understand the politics, or you don't understand the hell we'll get from our donors and our constituents and from the media if we were to take a stand on this. I have been deeply humbled to learn about how much political power the AIPAC network has in the Democratic Party.

Micah Loewinger: AIPAC, that's the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It's a pro-Israel lobbying group.

Waleed Shahid: In fact, this past year, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in New York and Missouri, who stood up to unconditional weapons aid to Israel, lost their seats. AIPAC outspent Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, and that does have an effect and scares a lot of members of Congress from speaking out.

Micah Loewinger: I don't think it's simply a fear of AIPAC. I think it's that there's a fear probably among the Harris campaign of alienating Democratic voters who support Israel.

Waleed Shahid: That's part of it, but when Joe Biden announced that he might withhold weapons to Israel over Israel's invasion of Rafah, Haim Saban, one of the largest donors of the Democratic Party, sent around an email saying, "How dare Joe Biden cater to the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party?" I think that stuff matters.

Micah Loewinger: What is the message you think Kamala Harris could have struck?

Waleed Shahid: I don't think many of us are expecting Kamala Harris to go down to Columbia University and wear a keffiyeh anytime soon. What we're expecting is for Kamala Harris to apply American values and American law evenhandedly to Israel, as we would to any other country that has committed this much killing of innocent civilians. We're trying to wake people up to the reality that in the same way that we criticize Republicans saying thoughts and prayers, we hear a lot of empty rhetoric from politicians around the suffering of Palestinians that are akin to what it's like to hear thoughts and prayers when there's a mass shooting, and so we want to see a change.

Micah Loewinger: Thank you so much, Waleed.

Waleed Shahid: All right. Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Waleed Shahid is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement. Coming up, the evolving technology of election night. Transformational and yet same as it ever was.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On election night 2020, over 55 million people watch the returns flow in on TV. This year, the most devoted viewers might pull up the Kornacki Cam, a live feed of NBC's Steve Kornacki, who'll be working around the clock while others doom scroll on social media and fretfully refresh their favorite news site's homepage. Have you ever wondered when election night became the anxiety-riddled, high-octane waiting game it is today? You'd have to go back some 175 years.

Ira Chinoy: We didn't even have an election night until 1848.

Brooke Gladstone: Ira Chinoy is the author of Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting.

Ira Chinoy: There was a window of about 34 days up until 1845 when Americans could vote. Congress passed this provision that Americans would vote on one day in November. The next election was 1848.

Brooke Gladstone: Even now, we don't necessarily know at the end of the night who won. It was even longer then, right?

Ira Chinoy: Oh, it was much longer then. The telegraph had started in the 1840s. It wasn't spread throughout the country yet and so returns would really dribble in slowly by telegraph, by horseback, by carrier pigeon, whatever way it took for them to get in. There has never been a national entity that tells us on election night who's won or what's going on. We don't get that until the electoral college meets much later. The newspapers are at the center of the story. It began with just simply making announcements from the front door of the newspaper and then posting bulletin boards. Then they came up with these innovations, and one of them was called the magic lantern, also called the stereopticon. It was like an overhead projector, and they would shine images and words on the side of building or large canvas.

Brooke Gladstone: The Times boasted that it had the most accurate and prompt returns using five stereopticons, casting images on a massive screen mounted in the front of the New York Times building. This was in 1895. They also had a pictorial entertainment.

Ira Chinoy: On election night, you don't get the news right away, and so you have to find a way to hold the audience. One of the ways that the Times and other papers did it was to have a cartoonist, for example, draw images that would be projected on the side of buildings, or they would have bands that would play patriotic songs and that sort of thing.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about 1888. The president of the American Bell Telephone Company and his guests heard election news via a special line at his home in Boston.

Ira Chinoy: The telephone company would send out kind of scorecards, so people could keep track. There were events all around the cities where these returns would come in on a telephone line, and someone would read them out to the public at a dance hall or an auditorium or something like that.

Brooke Gladstone: I particularly loved the way the St. Paul dispatch approached the election of 1896.

Ira Chinoy: Right. The St. Paul paper borrowed a steamship whistle from one of the Great Lakes massive steamships, put it on the top of a building where it could be powered by steam. They published a code ahead of time that said, "If McKinley is winning, it will be a series of sharp toots." Because they were McKinley paper, they said, "If Brian is winning, the other candidate, it'll be a low-wailing moan."

Brooke Gladstone: In those early days, news outlets were trying to devise complicated systems to forecast the election winners. In the 1880s, Charles H. Taylor, the Boston Globe's publisher and editor, was famous for his method.

Ira Chinoy: Yes, Taylor was one of these people who had a system, and he would have books of data, and they had a way of categorizing the returns as they came in, especially from around the state of Massachusetts.

Brooke Gladstone: Precinct-level data?

Ira Chinoy: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Pretty sophisticated stuff.

Ira Chinoy: Yes, bellwether areas. He could tell if a particular area was in line with or was deviating from how it had voted before. He could get a sense of how the election was going. He was able to make some pretty dicey calls. Even when the candidate that would eventually win was behind in the vote count, he could make a call that they were going to win.

Brooke Gladstone: You know what's so interesting is how it seems elections were drivers for all sorts of technical innovations. You noted that in 1928 the New York Times commissioned the Motograph News Bulletin, a 5-foot tall panel that encircled the Times building at the end of Times Square with a zipper, which we are familiar with today in Times Square, featuring moving messages with letters and numbers spelled out in 15,000 light bulbs.

Ira Chinoy: It was Twitter, before Twitter, the so-called zipper would be famous. It would appear in movies.

Brooke Gladstone: Forecasts were shared on the radio in its early days, but it seemed like radio wasn't really set up for the task.

Ira Chinoy: Radio didn't have the kind of news reporters that we think of today, in the 1920s. In 1928, they hadn't figured out how to tell a story of numbers in a medium that was linear and not visual. One of the innovations was to explain the comparative percentages, and that's much easier for people to grasp even today.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's stick with the problems of forecasting on election day. It's a lesson that we've learned many times over, at least how tricky it is. Like in 2000, when the Voter News Service underestimated the absent ballots in Florida. What other election years stand out as teachable moments for the press?

Ira Chinoy: One of the biggest was 1948, when the pollsters had predicted a very close race between Harry Truman and Governor Dewey. Newspaper reporters and TV reporters thought that Truman was going to lose. There's a very famous photograph of Truman holding up a headline that says Dewey defeats Truman.

Brooke Gladstone: That Dewey defeats Truman photograph is invoked to this very day. It was a pretty profound humiliation for pollsters.

Ira Chinoy: It was humiliating for the journalists who followed the lead of the pollsters.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned that the most significant American election night took place in the '50s. The moment that television became an essential part of the election. Could you set the scene?

Ira Chinoy: Well, there had been this crisis of credibility, and then television was supposed to be this great, wondrous new visual medium for news. They got lambasted in the pages of the newspapers for having a very lackluster presentation of returns, and so they needed a way to kind of gussy up the broadcast. One of the things that happened was the brand new computer industry also needed a way to get attention, and they found each other.

Male Speaker 5: Our experts will be aided for the first time by amazing new machines. Scientific brains rallied by NBC Television to bring you the most accurate picture with split second timing.

Ira Chinoy: CBS called what it was doing Project X and talked about how they were going to use this prodigious monster of electronic thought.

Male Speaker 5: This is not a joke or a trick. It's an experiment. We think it's going to work.

Ira Chinoy: The UNIVAC computer weighed 8 tons. It was down in Philadelphia.

Male Speaker 5: Which we have borrowed to help us predict this election from the basis of the early returns as they come in.

Ira Chinoy: NBC was actually able to install the computer. It was using the Monrobot right there in Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, which is the same studio today from which Saturday Night Live is broadcast.

Male Speaker 5: Here is the mechanical brain, the Monrobot, which is being watched now by our man Beatty, who is writing her--

Brooke Gladstone: What exactly happened on election night 1952? That was the campaign between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

Ira Chinoy: CBS had its studios in Grand Central Terminal, and the computer team was 100 miles away in Philadelphia. They didn't send a reporter; they had a cameraman in Philadelphia, where the UNIVAC computer was. The UNIVAC did spit out relatively early, a very, very accurate forecast that Eisenhower is going to win by a landslide. The computer team, because they were expecting it to be a very tight race, didn't believe it. They thought their baby had messed up, and so they did not release that to CBS.

Male Speaker 5: We had a lot of troubles tonight. Strangely enough, they were all human and not the machine. When UNIVAC made its first prediction, we just plain didn't believe it. As more votes came in, the odds came back, and it was obviously evident that we should have had nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place.

Ira Chinoy: If there had been a reporter there and they'd been talking back and forth to the newsroom, they might have heard that there were lots of other signs that Eisenhower was on his way to a romp, but they didn't. They were isolated, and they missed a chance to have a really big, splashy role on that election night.

Brooke Gladstone: At NBC, there were some technical challenges for the Monrobot. They opened up the lid so the audience could see the flashing lights inside, and then--

Ira Chinoy: Little teeny bits of metal solder fell onto the magnetic drum, which was the brains of the computer. A very young recent graduate of the University of Maryland had to spend the night leaning over this thing, picking out those pieces essentially with tweezers, and so it was a heart attack for them too.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, today TV is central to Americans experience of election night, even in the age of push alerts and social media. You think election night is an underrated cultural phenomenon, really? I mean, isn't it widely regarded as the super bowl of politics?

Ira Chinoy: It's underrated as a cultural event. The littlest person has a say in who is going to be running the country with their votes. You can see in coverage over the really almost a couple centuries of newspaper reporters and radio reporters and TV reporters with almost purple language talking about this amazing thing that's happening to boot the peaceful transfer of power. Newspapers will write about the crowds that would surge around their buildings in the 1860s, a spectacle that couldn't be seen anywhere else. We don't appreciate the fact of what a rare thing that was in the world for such a long time.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that that sort of Wonder crumbled in 2020. Now we experience more dread. What would it take to get that wonder back?

Ira Chinoy: To make election night again be this thing that's very special. It's a long-term project, and it's got to do with rebuilding trust in the news media and finding a way to rebuild this robust local news environment that there had been in the country some time back.

Brooke Gladstone: Ira, thank you very much.

Ira Chinoy: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Brooke Gladstone: Ira Chinoy is the author of Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting. On the morning after election night, Micah and I will sit down and discuss what happened and what's to come. You'll find that conversation fresh and raw on Wednesday's midweek podcast.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong, and Katarina Barton. Thank you to Andy Lancet for providing a wealth of archival tape to bring the election nights of years past to life.

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

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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