Television News Does Its Part to Add to Conspiracy Thinking About the 2020 Presidential Election Which Will Carry Over for this Year's Election
American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the second year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.
March 1, 2024
I felt devastated the day after the 2008 Presidential election. I was driving home from a TV station where I regularly gave my assessment on political issues. In this case, I was there to address the President election between Barack Obama and John McCain in which Obama was elected President and something kept nagging at me that something I said on television was not right. I started to remember what I had said, and I pulled off the road to think about it and it hit me. On air I had said that voter turnout nationally for 2008 was lower than 2004—that was incorrect and not what I meant to briefly discuss.
I found it interesting that in looking at voter turnout that for Obama from Illinois, McCain from Arizona and their respective Vice-Presidential mates, Joe Biden from Delaware, and Sarah Palin from Alaska, that Palin created the least enthusiasm among Alaskans to vote. In each of the four states, voter turnout had gone up from 2004, but Alaska had the smallest increase for the four states (Illinois-4.9%, Delaware-10%, Arizona-14.3%, Alaska-1.5%). Just an interesting observation since, at the time, Palin seemed to create a great deal of interest and excitement, so this was just a way to look at measuring whether voter enthusiasm in Palin really mattered. By me looking at voter turnout in her home state and seeing a slight, if insignificant increase in voter turnout, all the election fanfare about Palin looked like hype and not much more. Julianne Moore later played Palin in a movie (Game Change, 2012) which was based on a book with the same title published in 2010 (Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin).
I immediately called the station and asked whoever I spoke with to have the people on air correct my error. I wanted them to say something like “Our political analyst, Dr. Cernik, was on earlier and made an error in what he stated about voter turnout in the Presidential election.” Then they could state what I meant to say. The information was passed on but later I found out it was not used. The next time I was on live I referred to my error and just briefly pointed out that it is important to try to be accurate and admit errors, since that is a responsible way to be. I did not go into any detail, I just briefly stated that when I said voter turnout in 2008 was lower than in 2004, I was wrong.
Why do I bring this small incident up? I realized after I reflected on this issue involving me, that I was attempting to be too complex for television news. Here I was thinking I had found a way to try to measure voter enthusiasm and even if I had the time to clearly explain voter turnout in four states comparing 2004 with 2008 and how it related to enthusiasm, I would have lost a few television viewers who were watching me. Imagine if I presented the percentage changes in voter turnout among the four states, no graphics just me talking about the stats, I certainly would have lost a lot of viewers.
I see too much on television news that is worse than useless. Disinformation and misinformation can flourish in a television news environment. Why cannot a television interviewer just look someone in the face and say, “I find your statements utterly useless and clearly do not help people to understand the complexity of an issue.” And then take the time to explain why they made that statement. Well, pipedreams can happen.
Senator J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) was on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos (February 4) and political spin was clearly present. Vance was asked about the E. Jean Carroll trial where Trump already having been found guilty of sexual assault now had to pay $83.5 million for defamation of character (up from the $5 million from his first trial). Vance stated:
I think it’s actually very unfair to the victims of sexual assault to say that somehow their lives are being worse by electing Donald Trump for president, when what he’s trying to do, I think is restore prosperity.
Clearly political spin. The expression lipstick on a pig applies here. Vance obviously hopes that many women voters will buy into his nutty thinking and use it as a reason to vote for Trump (assuming he is the Republican candidate). Stephanopoulos did what is standard TV interviewer procedure—ignore the statement by Vance and move on. Being impressed with asking “tough” questions but showing little interest in pushing the issue—and failing to aggressively follow-up, is the usual on TV news. Substance consists of nothing more than having the interviewer make the right facial expressions and display the right get-tough look.
In this exchange, Vance additionally addressed Pennsylvania and its voting procedures during the 2020 election, I did not see it as the usual political spin, I saw it as the stuff that fuels conspiracy thinking. Addressing the issue of why he supports Trump’s position that he won the 2020 election, Vance stated:
Do I think it’s a problem that Pennsylvania changed its balloting rules in the middle of the election season in a way that even some courts in Pennsylvania have said was illegal? Yes, I think these were problems, George.
This was an issue that required a lengthy discussion—that could have helped viewers begin to understand that beyond the simplicity of statements, like Vance’s, there are ways to address an issue with some depth. Conspiracy theories can easily blossom without substance. Television news through the process by which it creates the impression that it is informing the public but is barely doing more than presenting headlines-only news, helps to create an environment for conspiracy theories.
Pennsylvania changed voting procedures allowing more mail-in ballots in 2019. Changes were not made “in the middle of the election season” as Vance stated. In 2019, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives had 110 Republicans and 93 Democrats, the Senate had 29 Republicans and 21 Democrats. The Republicans were the majority party in both houses of the state legislature. The governor was a Democrat. Pennsylvania was one of 14 states in 2019 with divided government, where the government and the state legislature were controlled by opposite political parties.
What took place in 2019 was that the state legislature allowed for no-excuse mail-in voting in 2020. A court case before the state’s Commonwealth Court in 2022 challenged this rule change. Interestingly, some of the Republican state legislatures who were involved in this court case, had voted to support the no-excuse mail-in voting in 2019.
This case is good to take a close look at since beyond the legal issues raised it helps to explore broader issues. By simply allowing Vance to get in his licks and move on, conspiracy theories received another boost in the arm.
The Commonwealth Court is an appellate court (appeals court) so the ruling there was then appealed to the state Supreme Court. The Commonwealth Court found that the 2019 law was invalid in a 3-2 vote. The court ruled that expanding mail-in ballot voting required a state Constitutional amendment. The president of the state Senate, a Republican, praised the court’s decision. But while in 2022 he stated he had “no confidence” in mail-in ballots, he voted for the 2019 legislative decision to establish no-excused mail-in ballots.
I had to wonder how well the ABC News staff prepared Stephanopoulos for his exchange with Vance. Stephanopoulos was the one asking the questions, he was either not prepared to go into detailed questioning on the Pennsylvania mail-in ballot situation, or he understood that time-honored tradition of not boring the viewers with too many details. The ABC News staff understood the television news procedure well and realized there was no need to provide detailed information on mail-in ballots.
A very logical question to ask is why all these Republican legislators voted for the no-excuse mail-in ballot in 2019. I doubt their votes had anything to do with being magnanimous toward the state’s voters, more likely they saw that their support for no-excuse mail-in ballots was a way to help Trump in the 2020. Suddenly we are led to believe a general amnesia swept through Republican ranks where 2019 and 2022 were different universes.
Studies show that it is not clear if Democrats or Republicans benefit from mail-in ballots. Since there is doubt over which political party benefits from mail-in ballots, it is understandable why Republicans would support it, since they saw potential for Trump to do well and benefit from mail-in ballots. As the study stated:
Claims that vote-by-mail fundamentally advantages one party over the other appear overblown. In normal times, i.e. not during the pandemic, based on our data at least, vote-by-mail modestly increases participation while not advantaging either party.
About a month after the 2020 election, the head of a firm that tracks voting data stated:
I’m fairly convinced at this point that the Democratic strategy and the Democratic advantage in vote by mail was just crucially and critically important to Biden’s win. There’s absolutely no way we would have hit these record levels of voter turnout, nationally, without this massive adoption of mail voting.
But there was no way to have known before the election that the Democrats would benefit from mail-in ballots. Republicans have not given up on mail-in ballots, in fact they are pushing to address it. The Republican who managed the 2004 campaign for George W. Bush in Pennsylvania wrote in 2023, “the most recent results confirm that mail-in voting is becoming a deadly serious problem for the [Republican] party.” He further pointed out, “Compounding matters, in 2020 President Trump and many of his allies actually campaigned against voting by the new mail-in balloting — casting doubt on the integrity of the process.” He concluded, “the [Republican National Committee] and even Trump have come around to recognize the importance of mail-in. It’s time for Pennsylvania to join them and encourage their supporters to ‘bank the vote.’”
Wait, there is a problem. In 2023, Trump was moving to support mail-in ballots, but then again in February 2024 he stated in an interview, “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.” Elsewhere he added, “We no longer have Election Day, we have election periods, some of them last for 45 days. And what they do during those 45 days is very bad. A lot of bad things happen.” Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican Congressman from California, and former Speaker of the House of representatives, sees Trump pushing against mail-in ballots as hurting the Republican Party. McCarthy sees seniors as liking mail-in ballots. He put it succinctly, “if they’re not going to go vote, period, we’re screwed.” Trump may highlight mail-in ballots as a source of voter fraud (at least in his mind), but many Republican leaders do not agree with him.
Trump could end up practicing the age-old art of cutting off your nose to spite your face regarding mail-in ballots. A Washington Post analysis of who voted this year in the early Republican primary states for Trump, showed that voters 65 and older made up a third of his voting base, which contrasts with the 2020 election where voters 65 and older made by a fourth of his voting base. In one study on the demographics of voting by mail, those 65 and older used voting by mail at a rate significantly higher than the two other age groups (18-34, 35-64). Another study looked at seven states in the 2016 election, so pre-Covid and concluded, “Mail voting was used more frequently by older voters in the seven states we examined. Additionally, in each state we studied, at least two-thirds of all mail ballots were cast by white voters.”
A conspiracy only applies to Democrats: Democrats do something weird with mail-in ballots, Republicans play nice. In 2023, as noted above, Trump started warming to the idea of mail-in ballots. As Trump stated at the Conservative Political Action Convention, “Republicans must compete using every lawful means to win. That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and election day votes. We have to do it.” A month after this convention, Trump in a fundraising email showed his support for ballot harvesting as his email stated, “Either we ballot harvest where we can, or you can say goodbye to America!” I wonder if the leader of Clean Elections USA changed her tune and supported Trump’s call for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting and saw it as a clever idea, but then changed her tune this year when he shifted away from supporting mail-in ballots. Clean Elections USA is an organization that sees its job as monitoring drop boxes, believing there is voter fraud going on even if they cannot find it.
Vance in his ABC News appearance simply added to conspiracy thinking with his reference to “I think these were problems,” but Republicans are taking the advice of the Pennsylvania campaign manager in the above paragraph and are pushing a campaign to encourage early voting in the 2024 election. In fact, one of the biggest issues associated with conspiracy thinking around mail-in ballots is ballot harvesting. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules pushed the claim of people (mules) who collected ballots and returned them en masse—ballot harvesting. D’Souza was making the claim that Democrats illegally collected ballots and put them in drop boxes. D’Souza’s movie inspired the group, Clean Elections USA, to monitor drop boxes. In the 2022 Congressional elections, the leader of Clean Elections USA stated, “We’ve got people ready to go in 18 states to go out in shifts and guard these boxes. We’ve got people out there, on the ground and doing the work.” Clean Elections USA saw conspiracy activity as alive and flourishing. I expect them to be active in this year’s Presidential election.
James O’Keefe, former head of Project Veritas, another organization looking under every bed for conspiracies, was recently involved in a court case over the issue of voter fraud. At issue were claims of voter fraud at a Pennsylvania post office. The postmaster of that Erie Pennsylvania location sued the organization. A mail carrier and Trump supporter made the claim and, in fact, signed a statement of facts that the postmaster had been overheard discussing backdating mail-in ballots and this benefitted Biden in the 2020 election. Trump, at the time, referred to the mail carrier as a “brave patriot.” In court O’Keefe stated:
Neither Mr Weisenbach (the postmaster) nor any other [postal] employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots. I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie post office during the 2020 presidential election.
There was doubt about the veracity of the mail carrier’s claim shortly after he made his statement of back-dated mail-in ballots being counted. In an interview the mail carrier made shortly after election day he stated, “I didn’t specifically hear the whole story. I just heard a part of it and I could’ve missed a lot of it. … My mind probably added the rest.” Not exactly the stuff of rock-solid information but conspiracy thinking needs only a thread.
So much for just another peg challenging conspiracy thinking. The information on the postmaster’s court case came soon after the superficial Stephanopoulos-Vance exchange, I wonder if Stephanopoulos will have Vance back on to address the specifics of Pennsylvania and mail-in ballots. I also wonder how Trump would respond about the mail carrier.
Conspiracy thinking has a way of constantly reappearing. A Facebook post that was known to be wildly wrong was posted in February 2022, nevertheless there it was reiterating a false claim:
Pennsylvania had 2.6 million mail in votes that the court of appeals of PA held to be unconstitutional. Umm that alone means Biden lost PA. Will anything be done about this?
Conspiracy thinking is like Wack-a-mole, different conspiracy moles just keep popping up. In the case of the 2020 election, conspiracies look like a convention of moles waiting for more to pop up. For example, the American Thinker, a conservative site, stated, “In 2020, Democrats set up corner mail-in ballot drop boxes, harvested thousands of floating ballots, and live, on video tape, dropped them off at ballot-gathering stations.” This claim made in 2022 was subsequently repeated by American Greatness last month, this is another conservative site, which hyperlinked back to American Thinker stating, “‘floating ballots’ are often gathered and cast as votes illegitimately. These practices, along with many others, are widely practiced around the country.” The term floating ballots is a reference back to a claim Trump made in late September 2020 in which he stated, “It was reported in one of the newspapers that they found a lot of ballots in a river. They throw them out if they have the name 'Trump' on it, I guess.” Trump’s White House Press Secretary then had to correct Trump’s remarks that ballots in Wisconsin were “found in a ditch” not in a river. But then the Press Secretary needed to be corrected that no ballots were found in a ditch. Interesting stories with no substance never seem to lose their shelf life.
In the above paragraph, the quote from American Thinker, with the word “live” in italics, is a reference to the Dinesh D’Souza film, 2000 Mules. The film claims that ballot harvesting was going on and shows a man putting multiple ballots in a drop box. The voiceover for this scene goes, “"What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes." Only it was not a crime. The case was investigated by Georgia, and it was determined the man was putting ballots from family members in the box, allowed in Georgia. The man is now suing D’Souza. The lawsuit partially states, “Defendants knew that their portrayals of Mr. Andrews were lies, as was the entire narrative of 2000 Mules. But they have continued to peddle these lies in order to enrich themselves."
The votes in Pennsylvania were not “unconstitutional,” the court ruled that the no-excused law was unconstitutional but that was separate from the votes cast.
The ruling at the appellate court level went to the state’s Supreme Court and that court, stated that the plaintiffs filed their case more than a year after the no-excused law was passed so they dismissed the case on that basis. The opinion of the Supreme Court was different than the Commonwealth Court.
In the Commonwealth Court case the judges stated that, “no-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient [and if voters get the opportunity they will] likely…be adopted.” The Supreme Court did not address whether a no-excuse voting law had merit.
Television viewers are influenced by how television news is presented, often superficially. This is not the silliness of liberal versus conservative bias, this is about something worse, perfunctory, headlines-only news bias. Stephanopoulos jumped from one question to the next without any substantial development of a specific issue, Vance managed to get in a few sound bites about this and that and the exchange was over.
One study addressed the role social media plays in conspiracy thinking. As this study stated:
Social media is a key player in the dissemination of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Dubious ideas about electoral fraud, COVID-19 vaccine safety, and Satanic pedophiles controlling the government, for example, swiftly navigate social media platforms, oftentimes avoiding censors all the while feeding the algorithms that further promote them.
A legitimate point to make but what I raised here is not social media but television news—that staple of American life for decades. The information that was left out of the Stephanopoulos-Vance slight and very superficial exchange, which is what it really was and not an interview with any substance matters to a public that watched this performance. When Vance said, “I think these were problems, George,” Stephanopoulos needed to stay on just that sentence and not let go. And then he needed to keep it up, forcing Vance to either continue to make vague statements or say precise reasons why there were problems. And if Vance never addressed specifics, then Stephanopoulos needed to address viewers pointing out the lack of specifics. Why not involve viewers in ways where they are presented with questions and statements showing the political theater of a politician’s statements? Help viewers to think critically and ask themselves questions. Above I raised the issue of mail-in ballots and that while Trump may publicize what he sees as voter fraud, supported on film by the Dinesh D’Souza film that lacks credibility, this belief is challenged by Republicans who want to encourage voters to use mail-in ballots. Expanding the meaningless Stephanopoulos-Vance exchange to have added a discussion about Trump versus other Republicans on mail-in ballots could help to contribute to viewers developing some critical thinking skills where they begin, at least, to doubt and question Trump on this issue. Television news needs to change how it approaches public officials who come on and use their appearances to get in a few sound bites or grandstand.
More information can affect how people think and help them to understand issues. I am sure that viewers watching this meaningless exchange felt despair or rage at what they heard. What I wonder is whether more substantial information can affect both the viewer’s thinking and attitude. Information that casts doubt on conspiracy thinking but also presents some insight into the political thinking of those involved in the process, might help to reduce some of the cynicism that unfortunately exists about politics in America. Psychological studies point to fear as a reason polarization is a problem in America. OK, fine, but just focusing on psychology will not address the issue. The nonsense that happened on a Sunday morning news show between a television news interviewer and a United States Senator was simply more fuel added to the fire—that is not psychology just poor television news. Television news matters to how we see the world and think about issues and if all that is addressed is to believe that a struggle is going on between whether there is a liberal or conservative bias than that fails to confront broader and more serious issues with television news.
Notes
Steve Benen, “About those ‘ballots’ that Trump said were found ‘in a river’…” MSNBC (October 2, 2020): https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/about-those-ballots-trump-said-were-found-river-n1241851
Kate Brumback, “Georgia man sues over false ballot fraud claim in Dinesh D’Souza film ‘2000 Mules’,” Fox5 (October 8, 2022): https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/georgia-false-ballot-fraud-dinesh-dsouza-film-2000-mules-lawsuit
Stepanie Burnett, “Do US Democrats really benefit from mail-in voting?” DW (October 312, 2020): https:// www.dw.com/en/us-election-mail-in-voting-biden-trump/a-55433216
Philip Bump, “J.D. Vance would have upended democracy over right-wing nonsense,” Washington Post (February 5, 2024): https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/05/vance-trump-upend-democracy/
Christina Cassidy, “GOP announces plan to encourage early, mail-in voting despite previous messaging,” PBS News Hour (June 8, 2023): https:// www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/gop-announces-plan-to-encourage-early-mail-in-voting-despite-previous-messaging
Guy Ciarrocchi, “Opinion/Mail-in Voting Is Killing Us,” Politico (November 30, 2023): https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/30/mail-in-voting-republicans-00129139
Angela Couloumbis, “Pennsylvania’s mail voting law ruled unconstitutional, but remains in place as Wolf appeals,” Spotlight PA (January 28, 2022): https:// www.spotlightpa.org/news/2022/01/pennsylvania-mail-voting-unconstitutional-supreme-court-appeal/
Adam Enders, Joseph Uscinski, Michelle Seelig, Case Klostad, Stefan Wuchty, John Funchion, Manohar Murthi, Kamal Premaratne, and Justin Stoler, “The Relationship Between Social Media Use and Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation,” National Library of Medicine (July 7, 2021): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8262430/
Maggie Haberman, “The Race Trump Can’t Disappear Behind,” New York Times (February 23, 2024): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/us/politics/trump-voting-message-candidate.html
Gromer Jeffers, Jr., “Donald Trump changes tune on early voting, mail-in ballots, vote harvesting,” Dallas News (March 19, 2023): https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2023/03/20/donald-trump-changes-tune-on-early-voting-mail-in-ballots-vote-harvesting/
Dan Keating, Adrian Blanco and Derek Hawkins, “What the early primaries tell us about Trump’s changing base,” Washington Post (February 29, 2024): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2024/trump-voters-demographics-shift/
Sam Levine and Alvin Chang, “Democrats took risk to push mail-in voting. It paid off,” The Guardian (December 3, 2020): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/03/democrats-mail-in-voting-2020-election-analysis
Kevin Morris, “Who Votes by Mail?” Brennan Center for Justice (April 15, 2020): https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/who-votes-mail
Amy Sherman, “Facebook post wrongly says Pennsylvania mail-ballot court ruling means Biden lost,” PolitiFact (February 3, 2022): https:// www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/03/facebook-posts/facebook-post-wrongly-says-pennsylvania-mail-ballo/
Saranac Hale Spencer, “Pennsylvania Postal Worker Waffles on Election Fraud Claim,” FactCheck.org (November 12, 2020): https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/pennsylvania-postal-worker-waffles-on-election-fraud-claim/
Charles Stewart, III, “Some Demographics on Voting by Mail,” Election Updates (no date): https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2020/03/20/some-demographics-on-voting-by-mail/
Daniel Street, “The Coming 2024 Leftist Election Grift,” American Greatness (February 10, 2024): https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/10/the-coming-2024-leftist-election-grift/
Peter Stone, “US far-right group sparks legal firestorm over drive to monitor drop-box voting,” The Guardian (November 6, 2022): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/06/us-far-right-groups-drop-box-voting-legal-issues
Ramon Antonio Vargas, “Far-right group Project Veritas admits it had ‘no evidence’ of voter fraud in Pennsylvania,” The Guardian (February 6, 2024): https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/far-right-group-project-veritas-admits-it-had-no-evidence-of-voter-fraud-in-pennsylvania/ar-BB1hSeal?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=910823c174df4a1db114468d805701c9&ei=42
Jay Valentine, “Election Fraud 2.0! O.K., So What Are You Gonna Do About It?” American Thinker (November 18, 2022): https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/election_fraud_20_ok_so_what_are_you_gonna_do_about_it.html
Kirk Waldroff, “Healing the political divide: How did we become such a divided nation, and how can psychologists help us bridge the gap?” American Psychological Association (January 1, 2021): https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/01/healing-political-divide