Freakonomics Radio - Why the Left Had to Steal the Right’s Dark-Money Playbook
Episode Date: October 31, 2020The sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh spent years studying crack dealers, sex workers, and the offspring of billionaires. Then he wandered into an even stranger world: social media. He spent the past five ...years at Facebook and Twitter. Now that he’s back in the real world, he’s here to tell us how the digital universe really works. In this pilot episode of a new podcast, Venkatesh interviews the progressive political operative Tara McGowan about her digital successes with the Obama campaign, her noisy failure with the Iowa caucus app, and why the best way for Democrats to win more elections was to copy the Republicans.
Transcript
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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
Welcome to this special bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.
As you probably know, we've been expanding the Freakonomics Radio network, adding new shows now and again.
And you are about to hear the pilot episode of what we think might be another new show worth adding.
We would love to hear what you think.
So when you're done listening, drop us a line at radio at Freakonomics.com.
The first thing you'll hear is a brief segment in which I interview the host of this new show,
a person you may recognize if you've read his amazing book, Gang Leader for a Day,
or the chapter in Freakonomics called Why Do Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms?
That was based on research done by the host of this new show, Sudhir Venkatesh,
who during graduate school in Chicago spent several years embedded with a gang whose main
business was selling crack cocaine. I hope you enjoy this special episode. And again,
we would love to hear what you think. I'm Sudhir Venkatesh, and I'm a sociologist at
Columbia University. So you're a sociologist at Columbia University.
So you're a sociologist, but you also call yourself an ethnographer. What's the difference?
An ethnographer is that fancy academic term, and all it really is is that I hung out with people for a long period of time.
So in addition to the crack-selling gang in Chicago,
name some other groups that you've hung out with over the years.
So, I studied sex workers, and I studied gun traffickers. And in New York City,
when I came here to get a job at Columbia, I began studying the wealthy, the children who were inheriting lots of money. For me, a secret world.
And then, around five years ago, if I have the timing right,
you wound up embedding yourself in a very different kind of ecosystem, yes?
I was very surprised to find out that Mark Zuckerberg put Gang Leader for a Day, the book that I wrote, on his monthly reading list in 2015.
And that led to a conversation between me and Facebook, And eventually I went over and went into another
world that was really pretty secretive for me. And what did they want from you?
I was in a part of Facebook called PAC, Protecting Care. And the team there, which is made up of
designers and product managers and engineers, were there to help deal with the 27 or 28 at that time
problems that caused negative experiences on
Facebook. There are some areas where we were better and some areas where we didn't do so well.
So, bullying, harassment, hate speech, you know, I'm not sure we really moved the needle.
But we were pretty good at spotting terrorist activity. It was really quite amazing.
If you were to rate Facebook on its intentions to address these
systemic problems with the platform, and the scale went from zero to 10, zero being,
we want to do some really serious hand-waving about addressing these problems, and 10 being,
we care deeply about each of these problems and we actually want to solve them, where do you put
them? You know, the view from that bubble is always, we can do it.
We're the smartest people in the room.
And as soon as they find out they need other smart people,
or this is a lot more complicated,
then you start to see their interest wane a little bit.
They also are at a place where the business model
makes it very hard for them to admit vulnerability
once they get that big. There's
just too much working against doing the right thing for society. So you went straight from
Facebook to Twitter. How would you describe Twitter's main problems compared to Facebook's
main problems? So on the one hand, it's a very simple ecosystem, but it's an awfully difficult place to try and really affect change because you're dealing with one of the core issues, which is, I think, you know, how nice do we really want to be with each other?
There has been pretty sizable backlash against social media in particular, but really the entire digital universe.
How deserved would you say it is overall?
I think it's necessary because for 20 plus years, the entire industry has gotten away with
very minimal oversight and regulation. And I think that's a real problem. So I'm really happy that we
care. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like a lot of the voices out there, whether scholars, activists, journalists, etc., are shouting for a podcast that, I guess as I see it,
is a bridge between the two. Why would you say this podcast is particularly important right now?
There are so many ways in which technology has impacted our life. I mean, it's everywhere. It's
dating, it's crime fighting, it's how we pay for the bus. And I actually think a lot of us can be helped and be empowered if we understand a little
bit about how tech works.
I think those kinds of companies created platforms, tools, and products that are just out of their
control.
Tell us a bit about what kind of people you'll be speaking with for this podcast.
Some folks, probably we may know their name and
we may have read their book. I also want to get behind the scenes and talk to the folks that
we may not think about. So the person who's managing what's called trust and safety in a
company, how do they create the policies and enforce them? The designers and the engineers
who try to shape our experiences, how do they think about what we want?
The episode we're about to hear is an interview with the Democratic political operative Tara
McGowan. And as much as I personally try to avoid politics and political operatives,
I found it absolutely fascinating. Tell us why you chose to interview her for this episode. I first met Tara when I left Facebook, and I wanted to try to figure out how technology
is reshaping our political system.
And I was a consultant with Tara, and I thought she would make a really good person to kick
off a discussion of politics and technology, because on the one hand, she was really good
at listening to the opposition
and getting insights. And she was simultaneously very critical of her own team. And I wanted
someone who had that level of awareness, because I think she might be able to help us not only see
the past, but where we're heading into the future of democracy as well.
A lot of listeners won't know Tara McGowan by name, but if you followed the 2020 presidential election
even a little bit, you will know about one of the chief mistakes she was involved in, the app that
was used to tally Iowa caucus votes, yes? Yeah, there was an app that was supposed to magically
transform the political experience, and it just didn't. And when you say transform the political
experience, that includes just counting
votes, which it also failed to do, yes? Yeah, there was a lot of promise there, which is another
hallmark of modern technology is outsized expectations that it's supposed to do the
ordinary things great and supposed to do the extraordinary things as well. And sometimes it
just doesn't do either.
If there's one thing I could change inside a lot of these companies, it's a sign, literally a sign, that appears on the wall when you walk into their offices, which says, move
fast and break things.
I think that's okay if you're playing Legos.
I'm not sure that's really what we want if we're talking about families and democracy
and society in general.
Sometimes what's new about our digital technology is that it makes even the oldest part of human
life feel like uncharted territory. Take politics, as old as human civilization itself, and yet in
the last few years, you can't help but feel we're
in the middle of a revolution, as though we've been transported to another planet where the game
and the rules of that game have been rewritten. Tara McGowan has been at the center of this
revolution, in the US anyway. She cut her teeth as a journalist working with 60 Minutes, and then
she grinded away on various political campaigns. Some think
of her as the real brains behind Obama's digital strategy, what catapulted him to victory.
In recent years, Tara started a multi-headed political hydra, an organization called Acronym.
Acronym's reach is everywhere, though always on the left side of the spectrum.
Tara has built out a massive pack
that executes social media campaigns in key swing states. She's got another consulting group in
there somewhere. I asked Tara to help us understand how politics have changed, where democracy is
heading, and how she got into politics in the first place. I wanted to affect change. Initially, I believed that journalism
was the best way to do that and to hold great powers accountable. I went to NYU for journalism
and political science. I started interning at 60 Minutes, and then they hired me full-time.
I was helping to cover the 2008 presidential election and just became fascinated and very
swept up in that election. And it was, of course, nothing like political science,
learning about game theory and learning about the electoral college and everything. And
I felt so detached from having the impact that I got into journalism to have.
And I made a decision after that race to pick up and move to D.C.
And I interviewed for the most entry level position on the Hill staff assistant for my
congressman, Jim Langevin from Rhode Island.
And the chief of staff was really wonderful.
I remember her saying, look, you're really overqualified.
But Jack Reed, our senior senator, is looking for a deputy
press secretary. Would you want me to put your name in the hat? And I worked in the Senate for
about a year and a half before I got offered a job on President Obama's reelection campaign in
Chicago in 2011. And because President Obama's campaigns were storied for their digital prowess,
I was suddenly a quote unquoteunquote digital strategist,
which absolutely has guided the rest of my career.
When did you start to feel like this is what's on the horizon?
This is what we have to pay attention to.
Was there an epiphany moment?
There were a number of epiphanies about how my understanding
and relationship to digital media, social media,
the internet was quite different than a lot of people I was working with. But it all stems from
the fact that I'm a digital native and probably one of the oldest digital natives. I'm 34.
I was on AOL Instant Messenger and in chat rooms at 10 years old. And I would be asking questions in my role as a deputy press
secretary about why we would spend so much time writing press releases that were not in
conversational language whatsoever for reporters. And no one would read them when we had these tools
like Facebook and email where we could communicate directly to the senator's constituents.
Why are we going through this bubble, essentially? And it turns out, you know, President Trump is the first
president we've had who really ignores mainstream media, frankly. He understands direct communications
and leveraging the tools and channels available to him in very profound ways. And we see the
impact of that, which can be good and bad. So you were reporting on Obama's 2008 campaign, and then
you worked on his 2012 campaign from the inside. And at that time, there was a lot of talk about
the Democrats having this amazing digital strategy. Were they as good and as innovative
as they tended to get credit for? Or were they just the first out of the gate? You know, as early as Deval Patrick's race
in Massachusetts and Senator Kerry's race and Howard Dean's race, all of the stories that I
heard always credited Democrats with being the first movers in terms of really leveraging the
internet and email. And so online fundraising, I think, is the most important piece because that legitimized
at the time it was called new media as a new team and a new department worthy of resourcing
on political campaigns because they could earn their keep. And so that was really what first,
I think, got digital into politics. And Democrats were definitely the first adopters to take advantage
of that. And the common thread with all of the largest, most successful digital first campaigns,
it's that it's bred out of necessity. There was no clear path to victory for a guy named Barack
Obama. And I think that's also true with the really powerful digital first campaigns of Senator
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
And so really, when I came on to President Obama's reelection campaign, the digital team
was the largest team from day one, the most well-resourced.
And years later, when I went to Priorities USA, which is the largest super PAC on the
Democratic side, there really was
a stark difference. They had been a traditional media super PAC, only investing in television
and direct mail until they hired me. I think a lot of people would grasp what you mean by
digital first, but could you just explain a bit more what this means on a do or die political
campaign? For a very long time, television consultants who
write television ads tend to be the chief strategists of different advertising programs
and campaigns. And they had an immense amount of power and influence that put digital folks like
myself at a kid's table. And the most cost effective way to deploy your message at scale has shifted from television and radio to the
internet and social media and frankly, peer-to-peer over text message or WhatsApp. So that's shifted
everything in a campaign. So what it means to be digitally first is, okay, when you need to get
media placed in a local market, are you going to send out a press release to a bunch of journalists
or are you going to target voters in press release to a bunch of journalists? Or are you going to
target voters in that local community directly with your message through digital ads? When you
think about fundraising, are you going to just create a phone list and send that phone list out
to volunteers across the country? Or are you going to leverage Facebook to bring in millions of
dollars in online donations? And I really thought that we needed to blow up this idea of a digital director
and a digital department in order to infuse digital tactics and strategies
throughout all elements of a campaign.
Okay, let's fast forward to 2016.
Now, you were on the SuperPAC side, not on the campaign side,
but I'm still curious to know, what do you think happened there?
There is a for-profit consultant culture that allows for a lot of failing up. It's very driven
by relationships and nepotism. And my understanding of it and deep reflection of it now is that all of
those folks that were at the head of those departments and teams on the Obama campaigns
went on to join or start their own for-profit consultancies to do this work on
behalf of more campaigns. And in the process of professionalizing it, they weren't incentivized
to innovate anymore. There's an extraordinary juxtaposition with creating sustainable business
models and keeping up with the constant innovation of social media and technology platforms.
And you just can't do it, frankly.
You end up selling cookie cutter products or plans. And that was not good enough. When you're
in elections, this is not about just your bottom line or gradual growth of revenue or product sales.
This is a very high stake zero sum game. Every single dollar matters. Every touch to a voter
matters. When I got to Priorities USA,
you know, I was the chief strategist, but I had to rely on consultants to create a lot of the ads
and to actually distribute them. And really, I just wanted to know that my program was effective
and I wasn't getting a lot of answers. And so I was really disappointed and unsatisfied with how
the consultant culture could not really keep up.
So you need to be on the social media platforms where the majority of people are, and you
need to figure out how to communicate your message in a way that's native to those platforms.
It doesn't mean being something you're not.
It means being yourself, but understanding the new medium.
Individuals like Donald Trump, but also AOC. They have the largest audience because they're
authentic. And the way that they use social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is
authentic to the way that they are designed to be used and how most users use them.
Could you maybe tell us a little bit about what it's like to be on the PAC side as opposed to
on the campaign side? When you work in super PACs, your role and responsibility is to
monitor what the campaign is doing in the public sphere because you cannot legally coordinate
and work to fill gaps that the campaign cannot or should not be filling. Whether that means,
you know, reaching voters in a state that they don't have the budget to reach, because clearly
you can tell from filings they're not reaching voters there, or if it means taking on harder issues or communications that would be
too risky for a campaign. And so, of course, I had access, as anyone did, to the information that was
put out by the Clinton campaign in 2016. Our team was watching carefully where they were spending on what mediums. And so they did have a huge digital team and program,
but I did not see very much in the way of innovation. You know, Facebook opened up so
many different ways of thinking about running a smart digital program. And I didn't see that
their playbook for reaching voters was markably different than it was when I was on the 2012 campaign.
It must be an almost uniquely frustrating experience to have this knowledge. And you
also have personal relationships with so many of the people. And yet you're legally barred from
sharing that knowledge with them. To add a personal element to that, my husband was very
senior on the Hillary Clinton campaign, and we got married
during that election. And our lawyers actually had a conversation, the campaign's lawyer and
the Super PAC's lawyer, about our wedding. And it actually came up, should we have everyone sign
NDAs at the wedding? We thankfully did not need to do that. We just did not talk, as we never did
that year, about strategy. And frankly, even if we wanted to, I never saw my husband. We lived in
different states the entire campaign and very rarely spoke. I can recall some of the early
discussions we had working together where you were always very sensitive and attuned to
your opponent or the people who were doing things differently? Were you always borrowing from them or observing them?
I've always focused on not just the other side, but what tactics have been successful in building power, whether they are something I would morally agree with or not. And I still feel
that Republicans and Democrats approach building power in very different ways.
You know, I have always had a very high threshold for risk, and I really felt more not aligned with how Republicans did it, but basically understanding that if we were ever going to really compete and win, we needed to play the game as they were playing it and not just hope that we could win playing it the way we
always had. So just after Trump's victory in 2016, you wrote this white paper called
Rethinking Investing in Media to Build Political Power. If I read it correctly,
it was a wake-up call for the left. It's funny because I sometimes feel like writing
that kind of a paper after spending all my time in the tech industry. What were you trying to tell the left when you wrote that paper and did they listen? since has been to sort of zoom out and say, you know, we're starting from scratch every election
cycle, that talent disperses the infrastructure, the technology they build, the institutional
knowledge, it all gets spread out. Whereas the right had built their own media ecosystem
with Fox and talk radio and Breitbart and thousands of online sites and publishers. And Democrats were relying
predominantly on paid advertising. And that felt so short-sighted to me. And I really felt a huge
gap on the left was a dedicated space or organization that could continually build
and build upon institutional knowledge about how to communicate
messages in a digital age that we live in.
One of the things you've been concerned about for some time is the amount of money the Trump
campaign has been spending on digital advertising.
And basically, it hasn't stopped since his first campaign.
And spending on digital advertising also provides them with a lot of data, which they then use
to refine and improve the performance of their ads.
So it seems like Trump and the Republicans almost have an insurmountable lead in that regard.
As a strategist for the other team, what are your thoughts on this?
So I was one of a number of people raising the alarm bells about Trump's spending online because it was so unprecedented.
Essentially, from the second he was inaugurated, he was running his reelection campaign, and the majority of his spending online
was on data acquisition. It was on petitions to collect email addresses and cell phone numbers
and online fundraising, you know, merchandise sales. And the more information any campaign or any company has
of individuals, the more sophisticated their targeting of those individuals can be.
I was working at Twitter when Jack Dorsey decided to ban political ads,
and people inside the company were really excited and thought it took a lot of courage.
Perhaps so, but I was less sure. I mean, political ads were a small percentage of
our revenue at the time, and a lot of the smaller players around the world really relied on them to
get their message out. I say this because in the last year or so, it might surprise someone to hear
some of the positions that you've been taking. Are you seeing something that some of your
progressive counterparts are not? Political ads on platforms like Facebook
and Twitter have become the scapegoat by journalists and by Democrats and Republicans alike.
And they've really made political ads the culprit of misinformation spreading online,
influencing elections. The vast majority of misinformation that spreads online is organic,
which means it is not through paid advertising on these platforms.
It is through individuals. It is through media outlets, especially on the right.
And so when people call for these platforms to ban political ads, they're really misunderstanding where misinformation comes from and how it spreads. And so I have been
outspoken against these political ad bans, not because I run political ads. I do, but I do not
have a financial stake or interest in the political ad programs I run. The reason that I call that out
is because it is a superficial attempt by these platforms to say that they are solving the problem
while they are not actually doing anything meaningful to say that they are solving the problem,
while they are not actually doing anything meaningful to solve that problem.
Facebook recently announced a ban on any new political ads in the final week of the election. And this is something that Democrats were lobbying for. And I very quickly came out against this decision for the reasons I just articulated.
When you ban all political advertisers, what you've done is you have ceded the platform to
the largest pages and accounts on that platform. And the largest pages and accounts on Facebook are right-wing media outlets.
So when you ban political ads on Facebook and do not ban the dissemination of quote-unquote
news or information from publishers like Fox News and Breitbart and The Daily Wire, you are essentially saying that right-wing media
is allowed to spread misinformation in the final week of the election,
but the Biden campaign is not allowed to counter that misinformation in real time.
I would agree with you that there are disparate effects and these policy decisions inside the company, they don't
affect everyone the same way. And, you know, I can imagine someone coming back and saying, okay,
well, we shouldn't punish one group for having more subscribers or more followers, etc.
The tricky part is that algorithms on a lot of social media platforms really do prioritize and
scale the distribution of salacious content
because it tends to get more engagement. Once your video gets a thousand views, it's more likely to
get a million than a video that gets a hundred. So that's really the dangerous part that I think
is the responsibility of social media companies and platforms to solve for because that does add gasoline to the fire when there is misinformation
or lies that spread because the truth can be boring. And frankly, Facebook should be able
to curb the spread of lies and misinformation in a more effective way. I don't care if it's
got money running behind it or it's just organic. It's the rapid spread of lies that can have real world impacts
that I have a problem with. Okay, so you're against banning political advertising, but you've
also noted that those who spend the most can acquire more data, which puts them at a distinct
advantage. What are your thoughts then on changing the way that data can be acquired or used in the
first place, perhaps making it so that
ads can't be targeted quite so finely and limiting it to just broad demographic categories like age
or location, etc. I believe that effort should be put elsewhere simply because if you take away
the ability to micro-target, which is a very controversial concept. It just means that political campaigns
and advertisers will need to spend more money on the platform because they will have to reach a
broader audience. So digital advertising will more similarly operate as television advertising does,
where you buy at a broader level. So the folks that stand to gain the most by eliminating micro-targeting
are the social media platforms themselves
that benefit financially.
You are listening to the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh
in conversation with the political strategist
Tara McGowan.
They will return right after this.
I want to talk to you about ACRONYM, which is the organization you founded with the explicit
goal of filling some of the
gaps you've identified on the left side of the political spectrum. Before we dive in,
can you give us just a quick explanation of Acronym? Because it's a pretty complex ecosystem.
It's got a super PAC. It's got a number of other companies. And so how do you
explain the structure of how it all works for the uninitiated and why you decided to structure it
that way. So again, taking a page out of a conservative's playbook, I read Jane Mayer's
book, Dark Money, on the Koch brothers, who have invested heavily for years in building
for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations and infrastructure on the right. Their money and
their efforts were the force behind the Tea Party movement after Obama was elected. And they'd created an ecosystem of different types of
entities to do this kind of work. And so I wanted to really create a space that looked at the world
as it was, not as we wanted it to be, and think about what the modern playbook was.
Yes, some things taken by what Trump's campaign did. They really built their campaign in 2016 around Facebook, which is, I believe, the most powerful platform for information dissemination in the world, for better and for worse, and often now for worse. And so I made what's called a 501c4 organization. It's a nonprofit. And yet 49% of the work that it is able to do is able to
influence politics and elections directly. And 51% is social welfare, charitable work.
There were three companies Acronym invested in. Now there are two. One is a digital agency that
runs advertising programs and builds out creative for the programs Acronym runs, as well as other mission aligned progressive organizations. And the other is a for-profit progressive
local news network called Courier Newsroom. And I really did that so I could preserve the mission,
which is to build power and infrastructure for the progressive movement.
Clearly, you've been inspired by how people on the right have been able to organize discussion about politics, civic issues, and channel that into mobilization. to, I want to change the game itself so we can get money out of politics or we can just reform in
ways that we don't have to compete in this kind of polarized way.
Where do you stand when people ask you about the intentions and the motives?
The answer is both. They're very interconnected. I want to build infrastructure and deploy the most effective tactics within the
bounds of the law that build power. And with power, we can then reform. You know, I think a lot about
moral purity tests, which exist on both sides, I'm sure. But I think that there is danger in
focusing too much on what we believe is right or wrong and losing in the
process. Okay, I'll get to the Courier Newsroom in a bit, but I want to quickly touch upon those
other companies that Acronym invests in. One in particular, Shadow, received a lot of attention
this year. If I understand it correctly, Acronym was an investor in Shadow and
Shadow was the company that helped to design the app that was going to do all these wonderful
things around the Iowa caucus, make it easier to count votes, give people a better experience.
So we helped incubate Shadow Inc, which was a progressive technology company. And we did that because they were
essentially going to go out of business. They built a peer-to-peer texting app that was on
the Hillary Clinton campaign where this team worked in 2016. And Gerard Namira, the CEO,
preserved the team and rebuilt this technology to serve campaigns. And I am not a technologist.
I do not have technology experience. This is my
first of many rookie mistakes in this process. But what I did have was relationships with investors
who believed in me and my risk threshold. I knew that they would also believe in Gerard's vision.
And so I was able to raise money to retain his team in this new company that would be owned
majority by Acronym. But Acronym was not the sole
investor in the company. So the second rigging mistake I would say was that because I trust and
admire Gerard and his experience greatly, I did not put a great deal of oversight over the company.
And really, their mission and vision was to be able to, similar to Acronym on the digital
advertising side, fill gaps that other companies weren't incentivized to fill because they wouldn't be profitable.
And, you know, that leads to the crisis that we endured with the Iowa Democratic Party, who after the rules changed for the Iowa caucus
with great pressure and demand by Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign after 2016, suddenly every
caucus location needed to report three different numbers. Historically, they only ever had to report
one number in terms of the vote tally. And suddenly they had to report additional tallies
in terms of popular vote count in addition to delegate count. And so the Iowa Democratic Party
wanted to have some sort of app or solution to help them tabulate the results in each of the
caucus locations because they had never done this and understood very
early on that this was going to be a nightmare. And because if anyone has been to an Iowa caucus,
it's already chaos. The question of whether or not shadow should have applied for this RFP or
taken on this contract was certainly never put in front of me. And so sure, maybe I would have said
this feels like high risk, low reward. Maybe I would have said this feels like high risk,
low reward. Maybe I would have said this is exactly why Shadow was created, was to take on
the hard projects that aren't profitable because campaigns and Democratic parties need solutions
and we're not evolving fast enough. So anyway, most people know how the end of the story goes.
There was a coding error in the app and it contributed greatly, but it was certainly not the sole factor to the delay in the reporting of the results of the Iowa caucus.
You've mentioned a few times that you have a strong appetite for risk and you're okay with failure. You learn from failure. I'm curious to know how that plays out after something like this. I find great strength in resilience
through trauma and crisis, and I certainly don't enjoy it or wish it upon anybody. But it became
clear after the fact that I had no business to have oversight of a technology company,
number one. And two, it was a really important learning moment for me that I certainly can't
solve every problem, nor should I, and that I need to do less
and do it better. And so I made the decision along with the acronym board to divest from shadow
fully so it could carry on and have better support and leadership than I certainly could provide.
Okay. I want to talk about this fascinating project, Career Newsroom. If I understand it, it publishes digital newspapers in six key swing states, and you've got reporters and editors.
And on the face of it, the digital sites that you've created look like local news.
But I think the intention is that the sites are helping to promote progressive candidates in
those states. And so I'm curious to know how you think about these sites. Is it news?
Is it marketing? Are they political instruments? And I wonder if this is really the face of so
much of modern media. Courier has seven newsrooms, all staffed by reputable journalists and editors,
many of who lost their jobs as local news outlets have been shuttered across the country. And we have been unapologetically
transparent about our progressive values and mission. The Genesis for Courier Newsroom was
actually that white paper about the power and influence of the right-wing media online and off
and the lack of owned progressive media that espouses progressive values, but maintains and
preserves the integrity of journalism and of fact checking. Part of the genesis was also
my frustration with the billions of dollars that are spent and largely wasted on paid advertising
and election cycles. The majority of Americans do not read newspapers. They do not watch the
evening news or cable news. Their news consumption is incredibly passive. They are getting their news
by scrolling their social media news feeds or talking to their friends. And that allows
misinformation to really have an impact on those Americans because it is targeted to influence
them. And we built Courier to be focused on getting stories and facts and information to
voters on social media news feeds. You know, partisan media is not new. That said, we are
in a murky territory in terms of media and news. And I really prefer to live in the world as it
exists, not the one that I want it to be, and fight like hell to build the power in order to
build the world that I do want. Local news continues to be where the majority of Americans
say they trust their information most, and yet we have a huge void of it in this country that
is only getting worse.
State government is where so many decisions that affect our lives are made.
And yet turnout for state elections is abysmal.
It's far worse than national turnout, which isn't great in America. And there has been a lot of research to show a direct correlation between the presence
of local media and civic participation. So basically, when you don't have local journalism or local trusted news sources,
you are less likely to participate civically in your community.
You've been through a lot of changes over three elections.
An acronym has been through changes.
What does the future hold for you and the organization you've built?
I mean, the things that I know for certain are that I personally have no interest in running
political independent expenditure programs any longer. I believe that they are too short-sighted
and they do not lend themselves to building real communications infrastructure that talks to voters every day, every day, which is what we need.
I don't know if there is a real need for acronym to exist after this election.
And that's something I frankly haven't had very much time to think about.
And I certainly will after the election.
Do I believe that there need to be permanent institutions to drive innovation when it comes
to technology and voter outreach and contact in democratic politics.
Absolutely.
Will the technological and media landscape look different in two years than it does now?
Of course it will.
So what will the needs be?
Courier is a different story.
Courier was always, always built to become permanent progressive media infrastructure.
That, yes, will continue to evolve in the same ways that our communication and media consumption habits evolve.
It is such a critical and essential piece of infrastructure that we've been lacking on the left.
It has also suffered from great reputational damage because of Iowa and
its affiliation to me. And so one thing I can say for certain is that I will be doing everything I
can to make sure that Courier has the opportunity to be as successful as possible. And so if that
means me winding down an acronym or leaving an acronym or leaving Courier, I will do what is
best for Courier. And that's what I'll
really be ruminating on after this election. I want to step back and ask you to think about
where we are headed in terms of democracy and elections in general. And the thought that comes
to my mind is motivated by an essay of a sociologist named Robert Putnam that was written probably 20-some years ago entitled
Bowling Alone. And the thesis is relatively simple in that at that time, Putnam was arguing that
we don't have a healthy civic life because we don't have what he called a healthy associational
life. We don't have healthy politics. We don't have a healthy public discourse because
we're not coming together as we often did. The bowling alley was the metaphor more than the real
place, I think, in his essay. We're not forming community clubs. Some people have thought about
that from the standpoint that we have to go back to a pre-digital way of engaging one another.
We need to do more things in real life.
Other people have said, no, it's just we need to change how we think about technology and use it to foster more of those sorts of healthy interactions. When you step back and you think about the impact of technology in general,
has it been in itself a corrosive force or were you just using it the wrong way?
I think with every technological revolution, you see the worst possible outcomes or
impacts before it sort of writes itself or things like government
regulation or accountability come into play. And there's just not going to be a silver bullet.
If you shut down Facebook tomorrow, which I think a lot of people would applaud,
it wouldn't solve the problem. There would be another Facebook or another thing. And I really do believe that
social media has reinforced and rooted all of us in our existing belief systems and made it more
difficult to empathize with other people. And I think above anything else in this world, we need
empathy right now more than ever in our politics and in our daily lives. And I don't know the solution to bring us back there.
But something that personally I have been really inspired by in this past year is
working with Republicans who have come out against Trump. And I certainly don't share
a number of their values or positions, but we have been able to build friendships and partnerships
and work together and laugh together.
And I really do believe that that's the glue that we need to restrengthen is the ability to see
people for who they are as people and understand that we can have differences, but that we can
work together. And if we can bring that into social media, we can bring that into our politics.
I think that we would be in a much better state.
That was Tara McGowan, the founder of ACRONYM. I have to say, I really like Tara's optimism.
I share a lot of it, at times anyway, but it makes me think of a debate among social scientists who study democracy. There's one school of thought that says, hey, let's really eliminate hate speech and uncivil behavior towards one another.
Another says, you know, we're always going to have that kind of behavior.
We're always going to have conflict.
So let's help people resolve the problems after they occur.
And as someone who works inside tech companies, I thought of this difference in approach after listening to Tara. You need a healthy dose of optimism to make these platforms serve democracy,
for sure. But Tara's organization also faces a conundrum. She's drawing on the same techniques
that create a polarized and often uncivil environment as a means to improve that
environment. Is that really possible or is it just making things worse?
Well, wherever you land on that question,
one thing for certain is that we're all going to learn a lot
in the coming days and weeks ahead.
There's probably a lot of surprises in store for us.
Hey there, Stephen Dubner again.
And thanks for listening to this pilot episode of a new podcast in which the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh would interview the people who make and manage the technology that's got so much influence over all of us these days.
Let us know what you think and if you'd like to hear more.
Also, if you have any great ideas for a name for this show, most of our ideas so far, pretty bad.
So I'm hoping you can do better.
Any and all feedback is welcome at radio at Freakonomics.com.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions.
This episode was produced by Matt Hickey.
Our staff also includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Zach Lipinski, Daphne Chen, Mary Duduk,
and Corinne Wallace. Our intern is Emma Terrell, and we had help this week from James Foster.
You can get Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app. If you want the entire back catalog,
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complete transcripts of every show we've ever made. As always, thanks for listening.