Suzanne Nossel headshot

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Every Friday, we discuss tricky questions about free speech and expression with our CEO Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, in our weekly PEN Pod segment “Tough Questions.” In this week’s episode, we talked about the way the media should shift focus from Trump’s disinformation to Biden’s transition, how the current president’s campaign sowed doubt about the fast-approaching COVID-19 vaccine, and what the Biden administration is going to do about authoritarianism around the world. Check out the full episode below (our interview with Suzanne begins at the 13:44 mark).

The president this week went on a 46-minute tirade, continuing to spout falsehoods about the presidential election. That came just days after his own attorney general, Bill Barr, said massive fraud claims were, in a word, malarkey. How destabilizing is all of this disinformation? How do we keep all of this from unspooling as we head into the next phase of a presidential transition and into the new year?
 I think there are two ways of looking at it: On the one hand, it’s unprecedented; it’s shocking to have a president of the United States sitting in the diplomatic room at the White House, going over in meticulous detail just completely spurious and debunked claims, having mobilized his way past staff to prepare PowerPoint presentations for him. There’s something profoundly disturbing and inimical to democracy, government accountability, and fact-based discourse. On the other hand, we’ve lived with this for four years, he’s now been voted out of office, he will leave office in six weeks, and that will be at least a point of significant diminution in the influence that this disinformation superspreading has. I think there’s some merit to the Biden camp’s approach, which is basically to ignore it—it’s bloviation; it’s baseless.

The question I have, which I’d like to see more reporting on, is: How is this breaking down in terms of his supporters? You’ve got Republican officials in Georgia, who are quite clearly fed up and angry about the ways in which this messaging is stoking violence. You have other Republicans on the Hill that seem quite ready to nod along politely at every absurdity. So there’s a real spectrum there. I’m interested in the ordinary voters and if they look at this as just a sore loser on steroids, or if they actually credit his claims, notwithstanding all the Republican election officials and Trump-appointed judges who have thrown them out—I think that’s an important question.

“[President Trump would] go on air on all of these cable shows, be given unlimited time and platform. Then, they realized they contributed to the creation of a monster, and I think the question of the media’s role in helping usher Trump offstage is a really important one. The mechanics of transition cabinet appointments, new policies, staffing decisions may seem a little mundane compared to the ranting, raving, and Twitter storms, but I really think it’s important that the media begin to shift focus here.”

As far as going forward, I also have a big question in my mind about how the media is going to cover this. I just worry that they’re so used to Trump as this intoxicating ratings bait that they’ve had now for five years, since the early stages of his campaign—if you remember, at that point he was just absolutely indulged. He’d go on air on all of these cable shows, be given unlimited time and platform. Then, they realized they contributed to the creation of a monster, and I think the question of the media’s role in helping usher Trump offstage is a really important one. The mechanics of transition cabinet appointments, new policies, staffing decisions may seem a little mundane compared to the ranting, raving, and Twitter storms, but I really think it’s important that the media begin to shift focus here.

We’ve focused a lot, I think, in these conversations on disinformation around the election, but one thing that obviously is going to come to the fore is disinformation around the pandemic, especially news this week that Britain is moving forward with a COVID-19 vaccine. The U.S. is probably not far behind, but there’s a lot of distrust about vaccines in the national bloodstream. Do you worry that Americans aren’t taking scientific guidance seriously? Could we see large numbers of Americans refuse a vaccine because of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and other false plots online?
 Of course. To be honest, this is something we worried about and flagged four years ago, when Trump first came into office—that if there was this systemic campaign, which he seemed already then to be committed to waging, it could make it impossible for the American people to tell the difference between a fact and falsehood. It would affect society in a whole range of ways, including impairing public health response. Now we’re seeing just that: We have all these supporters of the president who have been deliberately convinced by him that the mainstream media and credible journalism is not to be trusted, that government scientists aren’t telling the truth or have a political agenda. So of course they now doubt this and are potentially at risk of rejecting the vaccine. I was very glad to see news this week that former presidents—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton—all came together and said they were going to join together and take the vaccine at the front of the line to help, hopefully, build some confidence.

“We would all like to have this vaccine—I would hold out my arm to receive it right now, if it was available—but I also think the more we can build up confidence among the American public, the better this rollout is going to go, and the sooner we can get back to normal, because just about everybody will be vaccinated. I heard yesterday that Kayleigh McEnany, the White House spokeswoman, called it the Trump vaccine—that’s what they’re trying to do, and so they’re putting pressure on the CDC to accelerate the approval. I think that public health leaders are absolutely right to refuse that, because this cannot be seen to be politically driven.”

I almost feel, we had our campaign What to Expect When You’re Electing, and somebody ought to do it—I don’t know that it’s PEN America, because we’re not a health organization—but What to Expect When You’re Being Vaccinated can really inform people about the vetting and scrutiny processes a vaccine goes through, what the tests are like, and help them become confident that the vaccine is effective and safe. There are really rigorous protocols that have been developed over a long period of time, but people don’t know much about them, just because it’s not something you ordinarily focus on.

I think it’s very important for the scientists to resist pressure right now from the White House to further accelerate their timetable—I think it’s okay, let Britain go first. Of course, we would all like to have this vaccine—I would hold out my arm to receive it right now, if it was available—but I also think the more we can build up confidence among the American public, the better this rollout is going to go, and the sooner we can get back to normal, because just about everybody will be vaccinated. I heard yesterday that Kayleigh McEnany, the White House spokeswoman, called it the Trump vaccine—that’s what they’re trying to do, and so they’re putting pressure on the CDC to accelerate the approval. I think that public health leaders are absolutely right to refuse that, because this cannot be seen to be politically driven.

“I think we will see more and more credible emphasis on human rights in the Biden administration. I don’t think we’ll have the president nodding an approval about internment camps and Xinjiang, but the question will be, ‘What are the effective ways to raise this?’ What we’ve seen is the simple fact of ensuring that top officials—whether it’s the president, the vice president, the secretary of state—bring up these cases, say the names when they’re having their meetings, summits, and encounters with their foreign counterparts.”

Let me switch just briefly to what was, I think, a painful week for people who stand in the vanguard of free expression worldwide. We saw pro-democracy activist leader Joshua Wong sentenced this week in Hong Kong to more than a year in prison for his role in a pro-democracy protest. Iranian women’s rights advocate and PEN America honoree, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who was granted a brief furlough from an Iranian prison, now heads back to jail this week. Does the incoming Biden administration have freeing dissidents at the top of its foreign policy priority list? If not, should they?
 I don’t know that it’s ever going to be quite at the top of the foreign policy priority list, but I do think this is an incoming administration that has shown a good deal of concern and commitment about cases like that of Joshua Wong or Nasrin Sotoudeh, being willing to speak out pretty consistently. The question will always become, how do they factor these issues into these highly complex relationships that they’re going to be managing? In the case of Joshua Wong and the relationship with China, I think we will see more and more credible emphasis on human rights in the Biden administration. I don’t think we’ll have the president nodding an approval about internment camps and Xinjiang, but the question will be, “What are the effective ways to raise this?” What we’ve seen is the simple fact of ensuring that top officials—whether it’s the president, the vice president, the secretary of state—bring up these cases, say the names when they’re having their meetings, summits, and encounters with their foreign counterparts.

That’s extremely important in the case of Nasrin Sotoudeh—one has to be cognizant of the larger geopolitical context here. It was interesting to see her furloughed on the day that Vice President Biden was projected to be the winner of the election. Tony Blinken, who is now the secretary of state-designate, had tweeted about Nasrin just a few weeks earlier. So that seemed like a promising sign, and now of course, we’ve had this assassination of one of the most important Iranian nuclear scientists—we don’t know exactly who’s responsible, but there are plenty of theories out there. My guess is that would have something to do with why Nasrin Sotoudeh now is being forced back into prison. I would say, for PEN America, we’re going to have our work cut out for us, in terms of pushing on these cases in an environment of creeping authoritarianism around the world, but I’m also hopeful that we’ll get some more help from Washington.