Cold War Daily

A recent episode of the podcast Panic World takes up the question of what impact Russia’s interference in the 2016 election had. I agree the host and guest that the media’s [mis]handling of the moment—although perhaps inevitable—forms a big part of the story of that pivotal year.

I remember how local affiliate news stations in the US were absolutely overwhelmed by the violence and chaos of the Trump rallies. Before reporters could unpack one incident, another outrage—another confrontation or spectacle in another town—had already erupted. In this way, the zone was flooded with shit. The firehose of falsehoods simply overran the editorial guardrails of the media.

Host Ryan Broderick and guest Garrett Graff make some sharp points about how social media, Facebook in particular, flattened the media ecosystem. All content became equal; the ordering effect of newsworthiness was replaced by truth- and fact-agnostic virality.

Broderick and Graff also speculate on how Russia’s operatives seemed to grasp this early. It was political technology in the sense I’ve explored in the podcast, Dark Shining Moment.

It’s also interesting how Broderick and Graff frame 2016 as a singular moment—when media, social media, and politics all collided in unprecedented ways. I agree. As I’ve put it, 2016 was the year social media decisively swallowed up democracy.

But I was surprised they used the term “Russiagate” in the title. “Russiagate,” in keeping with the partisanisation of everything, is a slanted label—often deployed to dismiss the possibility (or even reality of) Russian interference. Around 2019, many Trump- and Russia-adjacent outlets began using the term, derisively, as a means of downplaying the history.

Graff, whose work I remember reading in 2016, makes a strong point about the parallels between the Watergate era and our Trumpian one, and how the latter was launched by the legitimacy crisis triggered by Russia’s intervention in U.S. politics.

Crucially, this framing at least offers the hope that we will one day draw a line underneath this chaotic period.