September 7 - More Evidence of Russia's Brazen Election Meddling; How Breitbart Helped Shape Election Press Coverage; Facebook's Role in Helping Elect Trump; Trump's About Face Stiffing Mitch and Paul While Embracing Chuck and Nancy

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with growing evidence that the Russian influence attack on the election was more widespread and brazen with Facebook announcing that they had shut down several hundred accounts created by a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin who spent $100,000 pushing divisive fake news attacking Hillary Clinton in order to help elect Donald Trump. Dr. Michael Sulmeyer, the Director of the Cyber Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who was formerly the Director of Plans and Operations for Cyber Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, joins us to discuss the warning by Senator Warner, the Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that Facebook’s Russian ads are ”just the tip of the iceberg”.

Part 2

Then we speak with Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University who is the co-author of a new study “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 Election” which documents how, along with Russian interference, highly partisan right-wing sources like Breitbart helped shape mainstream press coverage and seize the public’s attention in the 18-month period leading up to the election.

Part 3

Then we speak with Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and author of “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information”. He joins us to discuss Facebook’s decision to get rid of human curation of the news because of bogus Republican charges of bias and the role of Cambridge Analytica’s owner Robert Mercer and Stephen Bannon in flooding social media with fake news, possibly in collusion with the Russians.

Part 4

Then finally we try to make sense of the Oval Office about face that stunned Republican leaders as President Trump suddenly embraced his new political allies Chuck and Nancy as he agreed with the Democrats on a 3 month extension of the debt limit instead of the 18 month extension that McConnell, Ryan and the Secretary of the Treasury were arguing for. Lawrence Jacobs, the Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey School of Political Affairs, joins us to discuss if there is a savvy strategy here or whether President Trump has gone rogue.