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 talk about the right’s dangerous and misleading claims of voter fraud following the media’s consensus that Joe Biden will be the next president, how President Trump’s campaign to discredit the press led a segment of the population to believe in the stolen election claims, and how the president’s attacks on journalists have emboldened authoritarians’ actions all over the world. Listen below for our full conversation (our interview with Suzanne is up until the 12:13 mark).

So here we are—just about a week ago, the networks and news outlets across the country called the presidential race. There’s consensus: Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. How, though, has the narrative of an impossible Trump win taken root on the right? How is Trump and his allies’ ongoing persistence that he could somehow still win this election damaging our information ecosystem?
 Look, before we launch into that, I think there’s something that bears noting, which is that for months, as you well know, we at PEN America and allied organizations across the country put a laser focus on how the media was going to cover the election itself. Particularly, the ways in which this election was unlike any other—in our campaign, What to Expect When You’re Electing. We were seeking to ensure that the media recognize what we were likely to see, in terms of this “red mirage” on election night, where you had the counting of so many of the ballots that were cast that day in-person, whereas the mail-in ballots took days and days to count. Our concern was to ensure that we didn’t get into a situation that happened in Florida in 2000, where premature calls of the race by the media ended up having to be walked back. Even despite this, it had the influence of tilting the table, in terms of how the public looked at that very uncertain period back then, 20 years ago, that followed election night and persisted into December.

“I think it really is going to come down to the Republican leadership, which by all accounts well knows what happened on Election Day, how the votes came out, who’s going to be the next president. But they’re afraid or unwilling to say it, allowing these conspiracy theories to continue to fester. I think it creates a climate where disinformation thrives. Ultimately, conservatives and Republicans need to think about whether that’s the world they want to live in, because there will come a time when they want to convince their own voters of something, and if trust has been so undermined, that becomes almost impossible. People don’t know what to believe, and they stop believing anything.”

I think what we saw this year was a very cautious, measured approach by the news networks to calling the race. It was unbearable for a few days between Election Day on Tuesday, and then that moment when the call was finally made on Saturday morning. I think they handled it absolutely right in really doing a belt and suspenders approach to ensuring that this call, once made, was ironclad and that the numbers were there, that the outstanding volumes of votes that hadn’t yet been counted could not possibly lead to a different outcome. So, they were slow and steady. Many people began to get impatient with them, but I think the professionalism showed, and that awareness that we at PEN America and others had instilled with the momentousness and the need for caution—it paid off.

What we now face, of course, is that despite that—despite this being probably one of the most definitive election calls, and most deeply based in the facts and the data that we’ve ever had—we have a president and a Republican Party that are determined to cast doubt. If you focus on the level of actual claims of any fraud or mishandling of ballots, or any potential error coming into the system, there is nothing there. There’s no substantiation—the one, I suppose, whistleblower for the U.S. Postal Service promptly recanted, and it was revealed that he had been paid to make claims about altering. Yet, in shadowy areas of the internet and Facebook, and elsewhere, there is a highly charged campaign to promulgate a false narrative.

I think it really is going to come down to the Republican leadership, which by all accounts well knows what happened on Election Day, how the votes came out, who’s going to be the next president. But they’re afraid or unwilling to say it, allowing these conspiracy theories to continue to fester. I think it creates a climate where disinformation thrives. Ultimately, conservatives and Republicans need to think about whether that’s the world they want to live in, because there will come a time when they want to convince their own voters of something, and if trust has been so undermined, that becomes almost impossible. People don’t know what to believe, and they stop believing anything. So, I very much hope this election will be a turning point in the battle against disinformation, but it cannot be an ideologically one-sided quest—we’re going to need some help here.

“The problem, of course, is that we have a substantial segment of the population that, due to President Trump’s systematic campaign over the last few years to discredit the mainstream media, isn’t tuning in. I’m not sure they’re even necessarily tuning in at this point to Fox News, which serves them probably more so than CNN or an MSNBC, but there are fringe outlets that are telling a different story.”

You mentioned the “belt and suspenders” approach of the press in the lead-up to Election Day. But now, of course, the press is struggling with how to cover this failure to concede and some of the GOP enablers of Trump. There was even a controversy in the first few days about using the term “president-elect.” Now, it seems a lot of media organizations have come around, but how would you assess the media’s performance so far, post-election? What do you think we need to be doing better in the media ecosystem to make sure that these total falsehoods about voter fraud don’t take root?
 I think the mainstream media is doing a pretty good job contextualizing those claims, pointing out that there’s no evidence for them. The New York Times did its study reaching out to election officials in all 50 states to determine whether they had seen any evidence of fraud or misdealing of any kind—they had not. Even Fox News is reporting on the incoming Biden administration, as more or less, I think, it should be—talking about what the president-elect intends to do, questions of cabinet appointments and the chief of staff, even some of the debates between the center-left and progressives. So, that seems to me perfectly legitimate—I think it’s important that they not oxygenate these false claims.

The problem, of course, is that we have a substantial segment of the population that, due to President Trump’s systematic campaign over the last few years to discredit the mainstream media, isn’t tuning in. I’m not sure they’re even necessarily tuning in at this point to Fox News, which serves them probably more so than CNN or an MSNBC, but there are fringe outlets that are telling a different story. I think the good news is that the pretty fringe media, even something like Breitbart, at this point has gotten with reality and is talking about the future Biden administration.

“There are authoritarians in virtually every region who are on a mission to suppress the voice of critical media in their own countries, and seeing the United States do the same is emboldening to them. They’re used to the United States being the chiding—even at times maybe finger-wagging—buoy saying that international human rights presets uphold the role of a free press, and that governments need to adhere to it and abide by that. When the United States has turned its back on that principle, it emboldened authoritarians all over the world to do the same.”

Let’s stick with journalism, but I want to turn both to the state of it in the U.S. and globally, because for the last four years, the Trump administration—and the president himself—has just persistently attacked journalists, their credibility, their personal safety. And on the global front, we’ve seen efforts to undermine the traditional infrastructure of U.S. government-funded global broadcasters that have a reputation for independence. We’ve just seen a real weakening in those safeguards and in the credibility of those areas. I’m wondering what steps you think the Biden-Harris administration needs to take to help support and uplift a free and fair press in the U.S. and globally?
 Funnily enough, I had a piece out this week in Foreign Policy magazine that outlines what I see as the agenda to restore U.S. credibility on issues of press freedom. I think what we saw over this election is just the degree to which press freedom underpins democracy. A lot of people were really struck by the powerful role that media organizations play in announcing the results of the election and deciding when to report on state-by-state results in a way that makes clear that they are definitive. They’re making those judgment calls, they have the sophisticated data and analysts who are feeding into that. One thing we ought to take away—I didn’t talk about this in my piece, but I probably should have added it in—is that powerful interplay between the press and our democracy. And it’s not just on Election Day, it’s day in and day out: holding government officials accountable, shining a light on the policymaking process, exposing corruption, helping voters understand what candidates stand for and whether they have integrity.

All of that has been systematically undermined over the last few years with the president’s attitude of disdain and hostility toward professional journalism, his threats and acts of retaliation against individual reporters and the news media organizations that they represent—which is the basis of PEN America’s First Amendment lawsuit against President Trump. It’s created this climate where we have attacks on the press in the context of post-George Floyd murder protests that broke out for racial justice across the country. You had hundreds of press freedom violations, including physical attacks on journalists, being knocked over, steamrolled, and being arrested.

That sense of hostility has not gone unnoticed around the world. There are authoritarians in virtually every region who are on a mission to suppress the voice of critical media in their own countries, and seeing the United States do the same is emboldening to them. They’re used to the United States being the chiding—even at times maybe finger-wagging—buoy saying that international human rights presets uphold the role of a free press, and that governments need to adhere to it and abide by that. When the United States has turned its back on that principle, it emboldened authoritarians all over the world to do the same. So, there are a series of concrete steps that I outlined that deal with both how the administration will treat the press from the White House and the role that we need to play globally in upholding the role of journalists and free media, because that support has been undercut—and in some instances corrupted—over the last few years.