Evaluating the Role of Media in the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

A new book that ships this week from Oxford University Press titled simply Media and January 6th assembles a varied collection of experts that aim to shed light on the interplay between the media and the bloody coup attempt that then President Donald Trump led to try to hang on to power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. It delves into the reasons behind the occurrence of January 6th and highlights the pivotal role of media in this context. The book is structured to explore three essential inquiries: What is our interpretation of January 6, 2021? How should research evolve post-January 6, 2021? And what measures can be taken to avert a similar incident in the future?

I spoke to three of the book's four editors: Khadijah Costley White, Daniel Kreiss, and Shannon C. McGregor; Rebekah Tromble is the fourth. Chapter authors include Scott L. Althaus, Joseph Bajjalieh, Megan A. Brown, Cynthia Burack, Meredith D. Clark, Sadie Dempsey, Lewis Friedland, Jay Jennings, Dave Karpf, Christy Khoury, Pyeonghwa Kim, Regina Lawrence, Becca Lewis, Jianing Li, Michael Martin, Alice E. Marwick, Brian McKernan, Anthony Nadler, Buddy Peyton, Whitney Phillips, Dan Shalmon, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Andrew Thompson, Francesca Tripodi, Silvio Waisbord, Yunkang Yang, and Dannagal G. Young.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Daniel Kreiss:

I'm Daniel Kreiss. I'm a professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and also one of the principal researchers at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life, all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Khadijah Costley White:

I'm Khadijah Costley White. I'm an associate professor in journalism and media studies at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University New Brunswick.

Shannon McGregor:

I'm Shannon McGregor. I'm an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and also a principal researcher with the Center for Information Technology and Public Life. And those are both at UNC.

Justin Hendrix:

And you are the editors and I should say in some cases, authors of this new tome on understanding media's role in January 6th with also Rebekah Tromble, who is not with us today. I want to talk a little bit about just the process of writing this book. It's coming out some three years after the attack of January 6th, 2021. Scholarship takes a bit of time. When did this idea first come to you and how long has it been coming together?

Shannon McGregor:

So between UNC CITAP and George Washington's IDPP, we were, to our knowledge only folks, in the research base to host a conference on the one-year anniversary of January 6th. And so we hosted a conference about the events that day, about the role media and communication played in them. Khadijah was one of the keynote speakers and many of the other people that are authors of chapters in this book were participants or speakers at that one day event on the one-year anniversary of January 6th itself.

Justin Hendrix:

I was lucky enough to attend that day and so I'm quite pleased to follow the thread of this research all the way through to this publication. You take up three questions in this book, I should say. First the question of how we should understand January 6th, 2021, and then you ask two related questions. What should research, particularly into media and communications, look like after January 6th and how can we prevent another January 6th? I'm struck by the fact that I'm talking to you the day after the Iowa caucus and there were a couple of exit polls of the caucus goers that really struck me yesterday, both from CNN and also from the Washington Post that were more or less the same, suggesting that 68% of those who entered the Iowa caucus across the state disagree with the statement that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and disagree that it would be an issue if Donald Trump were to be convicted of one of the many felonies that he's been charged with, including crimes related to January 6th.

The public dialogue about what happened on January 6th is still very much a live issue and very much going into 2024, seems like it will be a central theme behind the debate over who should be the next president. I don't want to spend an enormous amount of time on this first question. I suspect more or less we all agree on how we should view January 6th, but you do add, I think a couple of things that are useful here. One is academic look at coup de etat and whether January 6th in fact was a coup. Can you just speak about that and maybe a couple of the other elements of this first section of the book, why they're important to frame out what actually happened?

Daniel Kreiss:

First of all, as Danielle Brown and the Cline Center chapter show, there was at least initial uncertainty around what to call what happened on January 6th. The chapter by, one of the leading research center in the world, the center that has the most developed data set of international coups around the world to me did the definitive work that said, "Look, this was an attempted auto coup by a sitting executive that was meant to frustrate the peaceful transfer of power." They have comparative evidence, they have the strongest argument, and to my mind, they settled the debate. Anyone else who's going to challenge that has to bring comparable data to the table.

I think in Danielle Brown's chapter when she shows very fascinatingly are the ways in which the press struggled at least initially with how to figure this out and what to call it. And I think Danny makes the very key point that labels really matter. It matters for how people think about what happened. And I think that's very much the story where you started off this question with the caucus of last night.

Initially Republicans after January 6th widely denounced it as the act of political violence that it was, but in the years since, have since brought their messaging to their supporters, to Republicans in the electorate that, oh, it was just a piece of Capitol Hill tourism. And that to me is the most destructive piece of this. That also shows you how much media and communication really matter. It changed people's perceptions of the day so that now you see a disproportionately large segment of Republicans basically see January 6th in ways that don't match the fact that it was an act of severe political violence meant to frustrate the peaceful transfer of power. The other thing that I think, the last thing, and this is where I want to tee up Khadijah, the other thing that I think, the opening section in the book does really well is point to the fact that in a lot of media discourse, there was this portrayal of January 6th, of this aberration, whereas a lot of the scholars in that chapter point to America's very violent history with democracy.

So the coup in Wilmington, North Carolina that overthrew a white and black government in the post civil rights era by radical white supremacist Democrats. The ways in which American democracy often has a very bloody history that circumscribed the vote for black and brown people in this country. January 6th is not something extraordinary in our history. It's very much a continuity with our history in the sense of there's always been moments when powerful actors have looked to try to bring the polity back in accord with a certain racial status hierarchy that exists in this country.

Khadijah Costley White:

I would say one of the things we write about in the book is to really wrestle with the fact that the US is actually a pretty young democracy. Not just because of 1776, but actually because of all of the disenfranchisement that we've had in this country and the efforts to keep people from voting that have not ceased. Have not ceased since the bulk of the voting rights acts and protections came into being. And those are some of the protections we've rolled back in the last decade or so. So to Daniel's point, we are thinking about this as not only defined as a coup through the research, but also in the long shadow of the first black president. To the extent that Francesca's piece, for example is also going back to reconstruction, we're also thinking about what it means to have the end of the permanent white male presidency as embodied by Barack Obama and what it means to live in the backlash of that.

And one of the things we take up then is actually white supremacy has to be named and it has to be named constantly and consistently. And part of the failure in identifying the coup is the failure of really talking through, thinking through and being honest about the impact and importance of white supremacist politics and logics, not just in our politics, but also in our media discourse and even the very way we understand what it means to be American. And so, one of the projects that I think, almost every author, if they don't take it up directly but take it up in some way, is wrestling with and really pushing people to think about, is how racial politics informs the very notion of American democracy.

Justin Hendrix:

I love that. In Francesca Tripodi's piece in particular, she talks about the idea that we can trace the origins of the big lie back centuries demonstrating that it is embedded in voting rights and predicated on nefarious falsities meant to deny black people equal rights. Khadijah, I want to ask you perhaps, just to maybe draw out a little more about the connection to the rise of the Tea Party. You already mentioned the kind of backlash or retrenchment following Barack Obama's election. You looked at that in particular.

Khadijah Costley White:

Coming off my book, which is a branding of right-wing activism, the news media and the Tea Party that I wrote several years back and studied as a grad student, I am always thinking about two key things that come out of that, that always is popping up as we talk about right-wing activism today in the media, which is one, Fox News. And Fox News is a thing that Reece Peck writes about Fox News. Lots of people are writing about the impact of Fox News, but for me, it's about the way in which Fox News gets treated as a legitimate media actor, even as we're constantly and consistently calling it out as a source of disinformation of white supremacy and of functioning as state media in a lot of ways. And so in propaganda media.

So even as that happens, we still have Megyn Kelly moving to NBC or Chris Wallace moving to CNN. And so even as we talk about it as a propaganda outlet, we don't treat it as such. And in that way it's really easy for right-wing voices to funnel conservative rhetorics, talking points, ideas through Fox News and then platforming them across all outlets basically, not just in television but in New York Times and all sorts of stuff. So we've seen this recently, for example, with Christopher Rufo, the rise of the anti CRT campaign. He gets a... In my book, what I found was that the Tea Party rises within op-eds first and that's the first way that they get platformed and get treated as a legitimate political entity and even a political party. And you see the same thing happening around Christopher Rufo. In the last two or three weeks, he has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal taking credit for coming after Claudine Gay and getting her fired from Harvard. But you also see that in previous instances.

So for me, the link to the Tea Party is, what's happening with Fox News and what happens with Fox News in the story of January 6th is really critical because at that very moment these people are functioning as his communications team and his team of advisors and they're corresponding with the White House trying to get a handle on what's happening during the insurrection. And so for me there's that kind of straight line, and again, it's in one of my other straight lines is the ways in which not only is white supremacy does it escape being named, but it actually gets treated as useful and important and valuable and also gets, what's another way that I frame this, I think it's not just that it gets mainstreamed actually, it's that white supremacy gets upheld and that's the thing.

So one of the examples I use in my chapter is a white woman who is an insurrectionist who is at the insurrection outside of the Capitol. She's at the Capitol and she is describing the experience of it, but she gets introduced as a lovely grandmother, a former public school teacher. They have all these really nice photos of her with her family and her school and then she says a lie, which is, "It was a very peaceful event that brought people together." So if you only have her version of January 6th on this anniversary, you get a kind of sense that all of the hullabaloo is something that we all invented despite the fact that it's something we all witnessed live across the nation. And that is not followed up with a challenge. That piece. In fact, what it's followed up with is like a Bernie Sanders black woman supporter who doesn't get pictures, doesn't get photographed, doesn't get named in relation to her family or her community. And so in that moment, it repeats to me what I'm constantly trying to say around white supremacy,

Justin Hendrix:

I can connect some of the themes in your answer to some of the other chapters in the book, Yungkang Yang's look at right-wing media, which concludes it's better to move beyond the partisan media idea and understand entities like Fox as political organizations primarily, that quote trade and narratives and symbols and engage in actions designed to achieve political objectives. Certainly one thing that's happened, I assume since you all move forward with this book is, all of the details that came out of the dominion voting case and the literal emails between White House officials and Fox News executives and others that really do bring these ideas to light. Another theme in those comments that you just made that I'm reminded of from the book is, Becca Lewis, her focus on Black Lives Matter, the sort of feedback loop, blaming the left, using Black Lives Matter and the protests that took place in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd as a kind of justification for why it was okay to behave as folks did on January 6th.

Shannon McGregor:

And I think that that justification that's described in that chapter I think is part of, Daniel mentioned earlier how, in Danielle Brown's chapter, and we all saw this, the press struggle in that moment to call what was happening on January 6th, what it was. But I also think there's been a struggle since then to remind people of what that is. I hear or read a lot in the news whenever someone mentions the big lie about 2020, that is very often quickly corrected, right? The journalists will jump in immediately and add the context or we'll even set it up with that context. The same does not happen for the narratives around January 6th. We don't see those same sort of corrections reminding people that it actually was a violent attempted coup and that it was this event like Khadijah just said, that we all saw and there's been this rewriting of a narrative by political actors, but it's not being challenged by the press in the same way that we have seen other similar partisan propaganda lies being challenged.

And I think that's one of the important problems that points to some of this polling that you mentioned, the exit polls. This is something that, there was some polling that came out around the anniversary of January 6th that suggested more Republicans think that it was no big deal now as compared to shortly after it happened, which shows these are not all just people who are only getting their messages directly from politicians. This is mediated and by the press not challenging this and by not correcting the record for the things in many cases that they themselves witnessed, I think is a real failure to hold accountable those who were a part of what happened on January 6th.

Daniel Kreiss:

If I could just add just one thing to that because I think Justin, you were right in pointing to some of those other chapters. I think in a lot of research and a lot of public discourse, we tend to think about people who believe in the big lie, people who see January 6th as peaceful happy moment as being a lack of something, right? These people are just lacking information that the election wasn't stolen, they're just lacking information that the assault on the Capitol was violent. But I think if there's one thing these chapters show is that you are ignorant to something that's actively produced and it's actively produced through a conscious strategy among right wing media to propagate false narratives that benefit them electorally, it benefits them politically, it benefits them economically, to have people be ignorant or to have people hold wrong estimations of what actually happened on January 6th, what happened during the voting in 2020.

These are concerted efforts that take shape through media orchestrated by political elites for strategic political gain. And I think if there's any sort of big takeaway, at least as I see it to the volume, it's that the ways in which media get used as a strategic tool to produce favorable economic and political context for right-wing actors has to be a essential part of the story. This information is a strategic tool. It is a tactic in pursuit of political power and in this context political power by a predominantly white political party looking to secure white political interests.

Justin Hendrix:

And your comments there remind me of Dannagal Young's chapter, which focuses on just how central identity is to acceptance of the big lie and narratives about the stolen election. I have in my notes this quote from that chapter, "What we witnessed on January 6th was the culmination of these phenomena, a complex and uniquely American engine that integrates conservatives, ideological, racial, religious and cultural identities, puts them through a distillation apparatus, then draws upon the resulting emotionally responsive mega identities again and again. That feels like what's going on right now.

Shannon McGregor:

I think so. And I think the important point about that though it is not just happening. This is a concerted effort as I think Daniel just described, that purposely plays on those identities that purposely uses particular media for those gains to maintain a white racial hierarchy, a particular sense of power, and doing it through these extra democratic means that are outside of the ways that a real democracy is supposed to actually function. That this is not something that is just happening. It is a thing that is being done.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to talk a little bit about some of the other chapters in the second part of the book. Sylvio Waisbord, in particular, looks at the degree to which digital organizing has been used by these right-wing movements and I think adds a useful corrective to the still very present narrative around social media that it is fundamentally a democratizing force. I don't know who would like to maybe represent those ideas from Sylvio, but it might be useful to just briefly touch on them.

Khadijah Costley White:

I know that Sylvio talks a bit about digital fascism and the importance of really thinking through the use of social media to mobilize folks to come out during the insurrection and as an important space in public sphere for right wing organizing. And absolutely, Justin. I think that there are a lot of myths around social media that are still pervasive, that it's decentralized, that it allows users to push back at major media messages and dominant media messages, that it allows users to even become figures of their own that are able to speak back and to represent other people in a democracy. And so there are a lot of leftover utopian notions of social media that are constantly being disproven when we see the ways in which right wing media are able to create and generate support. And so I agree, I thought Sylvio's contribution was really important in really laying out exactly how social media was used to become an anti-democratic republic. And I don't even know, counterpublic almost to me is generous to a certain extent.

Every day I actually think it is the public sphere more and more as we see what has happened to Twitter, what's happened to Facebook and other mainstream social media sources. It almost is starting to feel like the counterpublic is the democratic one, but Sylvio is really trying to lay out how we have to think and really treat online media. It's not just a spot where right-wing rhetoric flourishes and not just a key organizing tool, but actually the way in which, high up media actors and political practitioners, politicians and officials are actually able to create another centralized space by which they can disseminate their messages and recruit people into thinking along the same lines. In that it's not just these natural grassroots folks. Which links again to what I tried to talk about with the Tea Party, that it's actually a really strong demonstration of how people are able to co-opt and use social media and other digital tools to centralize a message as opposed to decentralize it.

Shannon McGregor:

I think one of the other things too that's important to point out about this and about some of the implications from Sylvio's chapter is that, I think one of the things that's really hard is that both, I think we, as a research field, but also I think the sort of public and political attention tends to want to engage in what some people's therapists might call black and white thinking, which is either social media is a tool for democratic good, is a tool for justice, or it is a tool for fascists and right-wing organizing and dominant groups to oppress others.

And the complicated answer, especially when we think about how this all eventually translates up to policymakers or people at making policy within some of these very large social media companies, it's really complicated because it can do both. The very same features that can allow anti-democratic and fascist organizers to organize around coup are some of the very same tools that democratic activists can use to organize around movements for racial justice or gender justice, et cetera. And so I think that makes it really complicated, but I think we have to deal with those complications and I think that gets complicated for policymakers. Because we want an easy solution that can say, "Well, if we change this one thing, then it won't be a problem that's just on social media anymore."

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask a couple of questions about another theme that runs through the book in different ways, which is how we understand the relationship between media, information, disinformation and political violence. Alice Marwick focuses on this. She says the links between disinformation and political violence are increasingly clear. This is also Daniel, I think, a subject of your chapter. How do we understand what groups perceive their power and status under threat that they're willing to engage in political violence? I would even tie that back perhaps to Megan's call for more clarity or more access to data from the platforms. Perhaps implicit in that is the idea that there are signals we can draw from platforms that might allow us to see political violence on the horizon. How do we think about the relationship between media, political violence, and I guess our ability to somewhat analyze at great scale the dialogue, the discourse amongst different groups of people that may lead to political violence?

Daniel Kreiss:

I think a number of the chapters of the book, they touch on this and I think the broad way of thinking about media as providing a context for various political struggles to play out. So as Khadijah mentioned before, democracy might've been the counterpublic historically in the US, certainly multi-ethnic, multiracial democracy has been the counterpublic to a much more mainstream, dominant, circumscribed political system that has been the norm for most of American history. I think what you're seeing across these chapters is that you have a set of status hierarchies that exist in the US. If you're talking about religion, you talk about white Christianity, you talk about racial and ethnic groups, you talk about whites in the US. And I think the story really of January 6th is that you have a sense of these groups that they're entitled to this status in the United States.

The media, whether it's social media, whether it's journalism, backs up that historical claim. Khadijah mentioned some examples before, who gets to be represented in certain ways in the media as being a normative ideal, what religion gets to be represented as the religion of the United States, what racial groups are seen as entitled to be citizens in the sense of the inheritors of the nation. And then you have lots of politicians, particularly politicians who represent dominant white interests, white Christian interests who tell a story that their status is under threat.

In a separate project that I have wrapping up now, we've looked at what we call hijacked victimhood, these constant claims on the right, that dominant groups and statuses under threat, and that they are the real victims of marginalized groups who are looking to usurp their power. Now, that's right in some ways because those groups that are under margins are fighting for equality.

And in essence, when you're constantly told that your privileged position is under assault, you start to view normal democratic politics as an existential threat if you want to hold onto your power and privilege, your unequal ill begotten power and privilege. And I think that's really a theme of those chapters is that we get to this moment, Alice calls it the mainstreaming of political violence on the right. It's that idea that we have to be violent in defense of an earlier world that is now under very real assault because there are very real challenges to white and white Christian supremacy in the United States. And I think the visibility of those challenges, Khadijah mentioned, the first black president. Black Lives Matter, was a direct challenge to a dominant racial hierarchy in the United States. The more visible challenges become, the more the dominant status groups engage in backlash to defend their gains.

And I think that's the broader context that led to January 6th. The media is where all this plays out. You see all these groups acting in this way. I think a lot of scholars, I take aim in my chapter building on some of the stuff I've written with Shannon around polarization. Polarization research basically says, "Oh, if you look at social media, we're also polarized or very different from each other." When I think the real dynamic that's going on there is that it's not so much that people are polarized, it's that you have very real fights over political power and that as scholars, we should be valuing struggles for political, social, and economic equality from a normative perspective because those are the very things that democracy requires.

Khadijah Costley White:

Absolutely, and I would add to part of what I talk about is the way in which white violence itself is downplayed and has been historically downplayed. And so again, in my book, specifically looking at the Tea Party, I talk regularly about how there are all these protests where white men with giant guns are showing up to state capitols and calling it a protest and standing outside on the steps of the capitol in states. And to me, those are all practice moments for what we see on January 6th. And the media constantly frames that as legitimate protest, as opposed to potentially killing-

Justin Hendrix:

A threat.

Khadijah Costley White:

Or assassinating ... a threat. You show up with a gun outside of a place where politicians come and make policy, that should be construed as a threat and almost any other racial group if they did such a thing, would be considered a threat. You can't show up to a school with a bunch of men with guns and not be seen as a threat. And so the media framing has mainstream violence. Rebekah writes about this as well, about how even though white men are the biggest domestic terror threat in the US, that kind of violence gets downplayed and minimized on a regular basis. And all we hear about is the border, or we hear about migration.

I just saw a poll today where someone was citing that there's a ton of US migration to Mexico all of the time, and that there are a lot of Americans living in Mexico, for example, without documentation and without approval and legal status. But we don't have that kind of conversation about the border. We don't think about migration as a two-way street. And so there's a lot of ways in which the media fails here to step up and really say, "No, actually white violence is really important and scary and angry."

There's one thing that I always am thinking constantly that I don't often say or I don't often get a chance to say, which is like, Trump in a lot of ways becomes part of the political system and solution because he's seen as an outsider to it. And so there is a lot of reasons for people to be angry and aggrieved. There are a lot of failures and social policies to protect people, to offer more secure wages, more secure jobs, people working in plants that are poisoning them or sickening their children. There's a lack of environmental protections. And so people are feeling all over the country, all of these pressures, and they want to blame someone. And so what we see in the right wing sphere, when you have a whole sphere dedicated to protecting wealthy white men, then you have to have deflection.

And so part of what you see in the January 6th reporting is, it's a ton of different reasons why January 6th happened, right? Anarchists did it. It was actually the FBI who did it. Oh no, it was really conservatives who wanted to defend and protect the state, and they're the victims, right? You don't just see one narrative, you see a kind of stream of them, and that's very intentional as well. With disinformation, you throw so much stuff out there, people don't actually know necessarily what to believe, and so they have to trust what their gut says and in a period of political disaffection, you go with whoever seems like they're not too entrenched in the existing political regime. And that's one of the things that we don't, I think, discuss enough what is Trump's appeal? And it's not just that he's angry and it's not just that he's a rich white guy, we have plenty of rich white guys, right?

It's because he literally held no political office before he was president. It's because he's seen as someone that we all resent because we see him as an outsider to the political system. And actually that framing in of itself helps buttress his support and bolster his standing as someone who is not like all of these other politicians. And which is why he's so forgiven for all of the things that makes him clearly not competent to be president, but it's because he is not one of the kind of mainstream, and that links with a thing that we never talk about, which is, even Bernie Sanders had a lot of right wing support in the 2020 election early on, during the primaries. And part of that, again, I think it's because of the way in which Bernie Sanders is positioned as an outsider politically.

Justin Hendrix:

Some of those ideas that you just discussed also call to mind Meredith Clark's chapter, her call for reparative journalism, which would refocus journalism on laying bare historical injustices and other injustices across American society. Perhaps if journalism were doing a better job at explaining the root causes of the types of problems that you just described, there might be a better recourse. Listen, this is a show about tech policy. We haven't really talked about social media platforms from a policy perspective yet. Got to ask, this last section of the book, you do have a couple of comments on what tech companies should take away from January 6th, probably setting up Daniel here in the last three minutes he's got. But if you are people running TikTok or Facebook or let's say that perhaps someone at X still cares about these types of issues, what should you do?

Daniel Kreiss:

I would say a few things, and this is really building on some of the thinking that I've been doing with Shannon and others around democracy worthy journalism and democracy worthy tech policies. So the first thing that I would say is that tech companies should have very strong democracy protecting policies on the books. That means that people who are running for office should not be able to undermine their own electoral accountability at the ballot box. So just to go back in time and remember, before January 6th, Trump had spent months, if not years questioning the results of the election. This wasn't something that came out of nowhere. It was enabled. It was enabled by Republican elites at all levels of office. It was enabled by journalists who repeated those lies, strategic lies designed to weaken accountability or open the door for his supporters to question the vote, and it was enabled by platforms who let Trump repeatedly violate their policies, in part because they had very interpretively flexible policies, in part because they didn't want to take action from a sitting president.

You saw in 2020, they really struggled with where to draw that line. And then ultimately after January 6th, all the major ones de-platformed Trump. But we never had to get to that point. There could have been months before that when companies took very strong action against him, in part because it was clear that this was part of a strategic attempt to undermine the public's faith in the vote.

So that would be the first thing I would say is that they should have very strong democracy protecting policies that look to have a very low threshold of things that would undermine public confidence in elections and the peaceful transfer of power. The second thing that I would say is that companies should have race conscious, not race blind colorblind policies when it comes to thinking about where do enforced threats to the election.

The reality is that in the United States, we have a very long history of voter suppression targeted at certain groups. And therefore platforms need to police content that's designed to stifle the voices of people of color, that's designed to mislead people of color, or that's designed to provoke certain groups, certain dominant groups into political civil violence. And in essence, what platforms have done before this point is just have this colorblind set of policies that lay out is if everyone's on the same equal playing field, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say that doesn't account for the fact that people's speech has very different consequences depending on where they sit, and its social and political hierarchy.

But I think the big takeaway here is clear policies that are effectively enforced, and there's a clear, bright red line around any attempt to illegitimately undermine public faith in an election or illegitimately fees, power, undermine accountability at the ballot box. And they have to get more comfortable calling balls and strikes. They are not neutral technologies. They're providing a megaphone to certain political elites and social elites. And those elites should have a higher threshold of what they can say because they have outsized effects on the American and other electorates around the world heading into a year when we have an extraordinary number of elections in countries around the world.

Shannon McGregor:

I would just add one thing to that, which is that they need to have really clear definitions, platform tech policy around what is anti-democratic behavior, what is political violence? And then due to it, what Daniel suggested, apply them to not everyone the same way, apply them to those with power, with the strictest way of interpreting it. Khadijah was talking earlier about how the media minimizes white violence and exaggerates the violent potential of folks from other racial or ethnic groups. Very early on in Trump's campaign to become president in 2016, he used violent political rhetoric in his announcement, and then I think it was weeks later, he said, "I could shoot somebody right on Fifth Avenue." I think taking that seriously, whether whatever platform it happens on is what some of these platforms need to do, take seriously the political violent threats that especially leaders make, rather than giving them much greater latitude to express those things in the name of some wild interpretation of freedom of expression, I think is the nicest way I can put that.

Khadijah Costley White:

And if I add anything to what both Shannon and Daniel just said, which is like, some of this stuff is clear. Trump lying consistently over and over again, you can count the lies. People have counted the lies. And so at a certain point, platforms, and I think tech is at this point, is so amorphous as a term because all of these platforms are interacting and producing in all sorts of spaces. But I'd say, if Trump has said 30,000 false claims or lies, he probably shouldn't be platformed or allowed to air whatever he's saying in a way that spreads that kind of disinformation propaganda. And we can apply that kind of a rule to all sorts of political actors because a big part of what's happening now is that these folks know that they can lie and that their messages will get to the people that they want them to get to.

Shannon McGregor:

Daniel mentioned this earlier, but a bunch of these social media platforms, not only de-platformed Trump in the wake of January 6th, but also in the run up to 2020, and then after, had these pretty robust for them, like electoral integrity teams where they were really having teams of researchers and policymakers focused on this. And now all those teams are for the most part gone. And some of the policies that those teams were working on are gone. And this has implications not only for our own country, but in this year where we're having a multitude of elections around the world. And Daniel has written about this with Katie Harbath about how those rules have been rolled back. Those teams have been dispersed at a time when we need them more than ever.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask you just a last question here, and that's about the context in which you're putting out this book. A lot of researchers are under fire for studying right wing efforts to undermine the 2020 election, for studying generally the problem of mis and disinformation on social media and across the media more generally. I like the words of Lisa McPherson from the Civic Society Group Public Knowledge, who says that, "We're seeing every political and legal tool being used to preserve the ability to use network disinformation as a political strategy." Probably there'll be somebody who looks at the transcript for this podcast or reads your book, who says, "This is politically motivated, what you've done here, calling out these things. How do you think about the context in which you're doing this work? How has it been affected by this campaign?"

Shannon McGregor:

I think for me, the way I think about it is that I know that many of the same tools that help us bring clarity in this book around the relationship between media and January 6th, which is taking into account history, taking into account identity, including race, taking into account economic and political power, help us understand that. Those same things help me understand what's going on. That these attacks are not genuine, that these attacks themselves, accusing other people of being partisanly aligned with their research or with their teaching focus, are themselves partisan attacks and that they are part of a long history of anti-intellectual power grabs within this country from the right.

And so that doesn't make them less worrisome. But it does show us that these are not new attacks, that this is a new context for them, and it's been a long project of the right in this country to attack intellectual institutions in the same way that it's been a long project to attack equal representation in terms of voting rights and et cetera. And so for me to contextualize it through that helps me understand it as less of a acute crisis and one that is just another symptom of these very long projects. That doesn't make it less worrisome. It doesn't make it less hard, but it makes it more understandable and make me think about how we can resist that because we are not the first people to have to resist this very particular anti-intellectual attacks.

Khadijah Costley White:

I think that was a perfect answer. Mine would probably be much shorter, which is, if someone is to accuse me of being pro-democracy and to be against white supremacist violence and white supremacist power grabs that exclude the kind of beauty and importance of diversity in our country, then I'm all here for it. And I am fully willing to take on the pro-democracy mantle if that, in fact, is where we are in the current political landscape. Amen.

Justin Hendrix:

That's a good place for us to end. I believe this book's called The Media and January 6th. It comes out as a part of a series from the journalism and political communication unbound, and I would recommend my readers to it. Shannon, Daniel, Khadijah, thank you so much for joining me.

Khadijah Costley White:

Thanks for having us so much.

Shannon McGregor:

Great. Thanks for having us, Justin. This was great