Offline with Jon Favreau - How to Beat Fox News

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

Andy Kroll, author and ProPublica journalist, joins Offline to discuss the one thing Fox News fears: lawsuits. Kroll’s new book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, recounts how conspiracists co-opted a young man’s tragic death, the role of Fox News in perpetuating those lies, and how the Rich family fought back and won. He and Jon talk about what this means for the Dominion lawsuit, and whether Fox has finally met its match. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Fox, it's important to understand, does not originate these kinds of theories, does not originate these stories, whether we're talking about Seth Rich or we're talking about the great replacement theory that Tucker Carlson loves to talk about. Tucker Carlson did not come up with this. Sean Hannity does not come up with anything. But Fox is the place where if a story, a conspiracy theory like Seth Rich or The Big Lie gains enough traction in the world of Fox viewers, usually online, usually in these forums or on sort of fringier websites like The Gateway Pundit, it goes upward, it goes upward, it goes upward. And then eventually it gets to Fox in some form or another, either on foxnews.com or Fox News, opinion side, primetime. And so Fox is, it's really the center of the conservative media universe.

It is the ultimate megaphone. It is the ultimate validator for these kinds of stories. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Andy Kroll, a ProPublica journalist and author of the book A Death on W Street, which examines the Fox News-fueled conspiracy surrounding the 2016 murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. You may have noticed that our friends at Fox have been in the headlines lately. Thanks to Dominion Voting System's defamation lawsuit against the network,

a trove of texts, emails, and testimony from Fox News hosts and executives have given us an unprecedented look into the right-wing media empire, the way they lie, spread conspiracies, and basically treat their audience like idiots. It's pretty much exactly what I expected, and yet somehow still shocking to see it all laid bare. But this isn't the first time Fox News has been sued for defamation. In May of 2017, Fox News hosts across the network began spreading a disgusting conspiracy about the death of Seth Rich, a promising young DNC staffer who was tragically shot and killed on his way home from a bar in the summer of 2016.

They claimed his death was suspicious and implied that it was Seth, not the Russian government, that hacked the DNC and gave all those emails to WikiLeaks. Fox's story was, of course, bullshit, but the network spread it anyway, until Seth's parents decided to fight back. As we're all watching the Dominion case unfold, I wanted to talk to Andy about his book since he's now an expert in the inner workings of Fox and what it takes to actually hold the network accountable. We had a great conversation about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox,

how the network has become both a megaphone and a validator for online conspiracies, and what it's like to report on the darkest corners of the internet. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please take a moment to share the show with a friend. Here's Andy Kroll. Andy Kroll, welcome to Offline. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I've been eager to talk to you about Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox because you wrote a book about the last defamation case that Fox settled, that with the family of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in 2016 and then became the subject of crazy right-wing conspiracy theories that Fox repeatedly aired without any proof. So I want to start there and then get to Dominion a little bit later.

How did you first become interested in the story of Seth Rich's murder? It's a fittingly weird origin story for an extremely weird and at times unbelievable actual story. You know, a reporter like me bouncing around Washington, D.C., we get stories from sources, from tips, from something we read in the news. That's how this business works. But in the case of Seth Rich, I actually knew the guy. I had met him. We had run in the same social circles, you know, like mid 20 something young guys who come to DC after college, who think they're going to make some big difference in the world. It's just, he went off into politics and I went in to journalism. So when, when he's killed in the summer of 2016, in that fever dream of a moment in recent American history that was the 2016 campaign.

It's this, you know, really sad and tragic moment for people who knew him well, people who loved him, but also people who hadn't met him, you know, in a sort of casual way like myself. And then after that tragedy happens, you kind of expect the thing to happen that always happens, which is the story fades from the news. His family has this moment to grieve, to remember him, to process this horrible event. But instead, what happens is his life and his death gets swept into the conspiratorial updraft of American politics at that time. And I'm sitting at home watching this at my desk at work watching this. One day, I remember seeing Seth Rich's name trend on Twitter. And it's almost like seeing a family member's name trend on Twitter. You think,

how on earth is this possibly happening? And really from that moment onward, August, September of 2016, I was just obsessed with this story and had to understand why it turned into this massive international fiasco that it did. So before we get into why it turned into this international fiasco and this viral story, what do we actually know about the circumstances of Seth's death? Yeah, and the circumstances are important. They are conveniently glossed over by the people who make this into something conspiratorial and nefarious. Seth is at a bar in early July 2016.

He is drinking at the bar by himself, going through some personal issues. He has an offer to go work on the Clinton campaign, doing voter registration, get out the vote. But his personal relationship with a woman in D.C. is broken up and the chances of this getting repaired are not great if he moves to Brooklyn to take a political campaign job. So he's at this bar till pretty late. And he decides that instead of taking an Uber or taxi home, he wants to walk home from Northwest DC to a neighborhood a mile and a half, two miles away called Bloomingdale. And something he loved to do, he was always walking around DC or biking around DC, preferred to see our nation's capital from that vantage point.

Something all of us who lived in D.C. and have been out to a bar late have done. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, his neighborhood had been the site of a, really a sort of spree of armed robberies all summer long. Again, in Bloomingdale, same MO, same kind of thing. Police are well aware of this and trying to do something about it. And unfortunately, what seems to have happened the people who did it fled off into the night. And when I talked to detectives and homicide prosecutors and law enforcement experts, you know, they all said this thing happens in big cities all over America all the time,

unfortunately. And there was nothing about it that surprised them. But that was not the story that people online wanted to hear, wanted to believe. And so they end up taking this fairly standard street robbery and murder in a big city, to the first rumors popping up online, why they did, to viral conspiracy theory? Yeah, I mean, the trajectory that you describe and that I lay out in the book, I found really fascinating because it is the same trajectory that so many of these crazy viral conspiracy theories follow. Pizzagate happens a couple of months after all of this initial nonsense with Seth, and it's almost the same story. The big lie, more than four years later, almost the same story. I mean, it's just fascinating to pick these things apart and see how, I mean, as I write in the book,

I felt like kind of a social media archaeologist and like going back and digging through the layers and understanding how did we get to the thing that we see? Where did it start? And what were the steps? And, you know, what happens is almost right away, there's speculation. There are crazy posts on Reddit about, you know, that Seth Rich was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, I mean, all of the sort of deep, dark corners of internet conspiracy culture. What's interesting, what people forget is that it actually started on the far, far left. It was actually Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein people, the Green Party candidate at the time, piece of trivia for your audience, who start speculating that, oh, wow, well, the Clintons are evil. We believe that.

And we believe that they'll do anything to win, including kill dozens or hundreds of people, depending on who you talk to. So clearly they must have killed this guy, Seth Rich, on their way to, you know, claiming power. That trickles along the internet for a while. And there was just this, there was just this assumption that Seth was a Bernie bro, right? Even though there was no evidence for that whatsoever. Yeah, none, none at all. And when I asked his mom about this, she said, you know, Seth was a, was a pragmatist. I mean, he's a Democrat from Omaha, Nebraska. You're not usually gravitating toward the Bernie Sanders, Medicare for all types when you come from a red state like that.

So no, he was not a Bernie bro. There's never been any evidence he was. This is how the conspiracy psychology works. If there are other people saying it, and if you want to believe it, and this we'll get back to with Fox because this is another great Fox connection, then if you want to believe it, and this we'll get back to with Fox because this is another great Fox connection, then you just try to will it into existence. So the far left people are willing into existence that Seth Rich must have been a Bernie bro who was aggrieved at the Clintons and the DNC and he tried to expose the truth.

And then when the far right picks up on this, and actually just the right writ large, Roger Stone, other people close to Trump, R the Donald on Reddit, for people who remember that cesspool of a forum, they see Seth Rich as someone who was going to expose the Clintons and who was taken out because he was going to hurt Trump or he was going to hurt Clinton and help Trump. And each side starts to grab onto this tragedy and say, how can I use it for my own ideological advancement to help my guy in this presidential race, whoever your candidate was? It becomes something completely different, Seth's life and death.

It becomes really like a ping pong ball that people are whacking back and forth and that they're trying to use to score points for their side in this political environment. Yeah. And reading through your book, there's sort of like two moments that sort of pull it out of, you know, random Reddit thread tweet that just floats a conspiracy to just some kernel of something that people grab onto. And one is Hillary Clinton mentioning Seth's name and the other is Julian Assange. Can you just talk briefly about both of those incidents? When you look at how these viral theories take off. It's not like a smooth line pointing upward. It looks more like an EKG or like a seismic measurement where there are these spikes and troughs and there are these big moments where something catches on. Hillary Clinton mentioning Seth in a speech soon after

he was killed, a really high profile one, was one of those moments. And it was eerie, you know, sort of skin prickly weird to talk to people who'd worked with Seth, who had wanted Hillary to say something to remember him. And then realizing in the moment that she did that, that, oh my God, this whole universe of people who believe anything connected to Hillary Clinton is evil, now know the name Seth Rich. And I quote someone in a book, oh my God, what have we done? But the bigger spike is Julian Assange. And Hillary Clinton, when she mentioned Seth, she was doing it out of a sense of remembrance, grief, trying to make sure that this person who had worked for the Democratic Party was remembered and not forgotten. Julian Assange's motives are clearly very different. He's just dumped all

these Democratic emails into the world. He's being questioned about the providence of these emails when all the forensics at the time, and to this day, say there was hackers affiliated with Russia, and he mentioned Seth's name. He does not say Seth did it. He very, very artfully, disingenuously says, oh, well, you know, our sources take risks. Hey, do you remember this guy, Seth Rich, was killed in D.C.? Our sources get worried when they see those things. And that, I mean, that is just gross.

It's off the charts, the amount of people who see that and say, Assange is telling us the truth. This Seth Rich guy is the leaker. He is the person that we need to focus on. And, you know, we really can't put the genie back in the bottle afterS., people all over the world, all believe that Russia was the entity that dumped the emails or, you know. And the idea that Seth Rich somehow would have been able to hack into the DNC, get these emails and give them to, it's just, it's so fucking off the charts.

But what's interesting about, you say the left and the right too,, it's just it is back to that sort of horseshoe theory of politics, right? Where it's not even left like, you know, your average Bernie Sanders supporter or AOC supporter. We're talking like fringe, fringe, super far left, super far right. And when you get to that level, it gets a little blurry. Like it's just a lot of people who have extremely low social trust in all institutions. And in many cases, their only interest is to burn it all down. And I feel like that's where these conspiracies really take root and who they take root with. That is the most fertile soil in the entire American political landscape for any of these

kinds of theories. Seth Rich being one, but Pizzagate and QAnon and anti-vaccine beliefs and the big lie. Absolutely. That's where it happens. And one of the more fascinating things I tried to do with the book was track down some of the people who said these things and wrote these things and believe these things at the time the Seth Rich conspiracy theories were taking root and sprouting up. One was a younger guy in Florida, just going into college at the time, I believe, Bernie Sanders supporter, classic distrust of the establishment, classic, you know, I get my news from Democracy Now!, but also from these other kind of, like Jimmy Dore or whatever that guy's name is, you know, these very sort of far left, I mean, Democracy Now! I've been on and I

wouldn't put in this super far left category, but definitely a progressive anti-establishment view. But Jimmy Dore and all these people on YouTube, you know, this is a guy who is, I thought kind of was an emblem of this younger generation that, you know, they don't watch the news. They get their news from YouTube and YouTube shapes their worldview. And when I went back to him, he said, you know, I don't think I was right about this. I wrote a Reddit post that suggested the Clintons killed him. And now that I think about it and I hear what you, Andy, are telling me, you know, I don't believe it. And, you know, I wish I could apologize to the riches, but I'll leave them alone.

You know, he was one example. But then there was another guy out in the Bay Area who stood by it and said, you know, the Clintons would do this. And you're not going to say anything that's going to convince me. And indeed, even when the book came out, wrote me a nasty email that said, I'm not going to read your establishment corporate media propaganda, because I know what I know. And what I know is that the Clintons are capable of doing these kinds of things, or at least the people in their world are. And so you see these different trajectoriesories and you see how this psychology works, which I just thought was so fascinating, if also a bit disturbing. Very disturbing. I did a series of focus groups back in 2018. And one of them was with a bunch of Obama-Trump voters, which a lot of people are probably like, who are those people? Those people actually made more sense to me. A lot of

them were like, you know, Obama was changed and now Trump has changed and I just want change, blah, blah, blah. It's crazy. But the group that really was nuts was this group in Miami of voters who voted in the 2012 election, but then in 2016, they either voted third party or they didn't vote at all. And I remember talking to one of these voters and I was like, well, so what did you think about, you know, why didn't you, because she goes, I hate Trump. Trump was awful. I couldn't vote for Trump in 2016. Like it was just, I couldn't do it. No, well then what, what about Hillary Clinton? She goes, well, you know, I'm for universal healthcare and gay rights and civil rights. And it's just that Hillary Clinton killed all those people.

And I was like, what? I'm like, do you mean like her Iraq war vote or her policies? No, no, no, no. She has a kill list, the kill list. And I'm like, what are you talking about the kill? And then a couple other people in the room are nodding. And I was like, where do you get the kill list? Oh, you know, Facebook.

And I'm like, this person has certain progressive views doesn't like donald trump and is still just totally clear on the idea that the clintons have a kill list and could kill people yeah it it amazed me to the degree to which the the clinton kill list or the clinton body count is the other name that gets tossed around for this thing. You know, it amazed me how much that conspiracy theory is just in the air that people breathe, that it is almost implicit. When I asked some people about the Clinton body count, because I was trying to connect it to Seth, I mean, obviously people said, of course, Seth Rich is the next name on this list, you know, joining, depending on who you ask, like two dozen to 500 other people.

They said, well, I mean, it's just, it's every, you know, of course they kill people. You know, it's like asking them, you know, do trees go up from the ground or down from the sky? And of course they grow up from the ground. And of course the Clintons just kill people, get in the way. And one chapter in the book where I sort of break from the narrative, the present day narrative, and I go back in time. And I go back in time to this horrible tragedy in the 90s that I didn't even remember, in which a woman who'd worked in the Clinton White House in like the tour guide. I mean, you would know the name for this better than I would, but

it worked in the tour guide, taking people around reception office. She was an intern. She did her internship, left the White House, was working in a Starbucks in Georgetown here in DC and was killed in an attempted armed robbery. Again, nothing was taken from this Starbucks, just as nothing was taken from Seth, which is kind of a key pillar of the conspiracy theory. And yet this woman, Katie Mahoney, became just part of the gospel. She became another name on the list, and her family dealt with it just as the Rich family did. And the fact that it happened in more or less the pre-internet era, it just shows how enduring this kind of thinking is. I mean, I don't

know if there's anyone, maybe except for the Kennedys, an American family in politics that has become such a magnet for this stuff as the Clintons have. I mean, I'm not like casting my lot and, oh, poor Clintons, you know, gosh, you know, but it's true though. Yeah. When I read that part of the book, I had not heard that story before. But it's interesting in that, you know, we've debated on this show before, like, is the internet fueling conspiracies? Is that the cause? Is it not?

And clearly, conspiracies have been part of American politics for a very, very long time since, you know, the country's inception. And I think the conspiracies floating around the Clintons are evidence of that. Obviously, this gets supercharged in the era that we're currently in. I mean, the conspiracy probably would have just stayed on the Internet if it wasn't for Fox News. Can you talk about how the lies about Seth Rich and WikiLeaks ended up first on FoxNews.com and then all over the network's primetime programming. Fox, it's important to understand, does not originate these kinds of theories, does not originate these stories, whether we're talking about Seth Rich, or we're talking about the Great Replacement Theory that Tucker Carlson loves to talk about.

Tucker Carlson did not come up with this. Sean Hannity does not come up with this. Sean Hannity does not come up with anything. But Fox is the place where if a story, a conspiracy theory like Seth Rich or The Big Lie gains enough traction in the world of Fox viewers, usually online, usually in these forums or on, you know, sort of fringier websites like The Gateway Pundit, it goes upward, it goes upward, it goes upward, and then eventually it gets to Fox in some form or another, either on foxnews.com or Fox News opinion side, primetime. And so Fox is, it's really the center of the conservative media universe. It is the ultimate megaphone. It is the ultimate validator for these kinds of stories. And so what you have with this Seth Rich story, the way I depict it in the book, is you have a reporter for Fox News, a talking head for Fox News and Fox Business, and then another Fox News on-air commentator who the three of them get together and they set out to try to prove the conspiracy theory.

That is the starting point is Seth Rich was the source for these emails that WikiLeaks dumped into the presidential election and changed the election, helped elect Trump. It was not Russian intelligence, despite what everyone who is an expert in the space says, and we're going to set out to prove it. And I draw on a lot of documents that would later come out in court to show how this happened, how this story on the fringes online makes its way to Fox. And it's just like a absolutely fascinating inside glimpse at how a story comes to life at Fox. And it's also just incredibly ironic because Fox loves to talk about how people in the media, like me, like you, we have all these preconceived notions or we have this sort of thing we want to prove, report, write, whatever, predetermined. And we just go around looking for, you know, biased facts to confirm what we already think is true.

Well, that is what Fox did in this case. And when I say that, I mean it. There is a draft of the story that would eventually be published on the front page of foxnews.com and go viral all over the world. There is a draft of that story where all of the key lines like Seth Rich was the source are bolded. And the reporter for Fox says, I need to confirm all of these things. Like I need to confirm them completely. And it's in an email to this other Fox News pundit, this other Fox News commentator. And that is what they ultimately try to do. The story actually gets published at Fox, even though to this day, they're never able to say like who their source was for any of this.

And they're certainly not able to prove it. Just like, you know, again, I see this Dominion stuff coming out. I just think of, wow, the Seth Rich story was like a precursor to this, a preview, you know, a tremor before the earthquake kind of thing. I keep thinking about two words you said about Fox, which is megaphone and validator, right? And I think it shows how this conspiracy ecosystem, particularly on the right, works. I think there was a time where something ended up on Fox, you would say, okay, well, yeah, they're the most popular cable network, primetime, 3 million, 4 million viewers, That's now. But, you know, when you think there's 160 million voters out there, that's still a drop in the bucket. The internet changes that for two reasons.

One, the megaphone, which is if it's broadcast on Fox, it's not just on Fox. It's on foxnews.com. It goes on Facebook. Clips are shared all over the internet. And two, I think this is sort of an underappreciated point is the validator point, right? That like, it's one thing if Gateway Pundit says something or Breitbart says something or it's in a Reddit thread. If it's on Fox, it has sort of this air of legitimacy. And the legitimacy comes from both the fact that they're a television network, the fact that politicians from both parties go on the network, the other journalists treat it as a news organization. And so this, the validator function, I think, really helps these conspiracies take off in a way that they wouldn't if they just stayed online.

Fox is alone in having the power to take a story and by virtue of putting it on air, Sean Hannity's show, Tucker Carlson, or on the front page of FoxNews Fox knows that. Fox knows that it has that power. And it also knows that it has to protect that power. I mean, in the case of the Seth Rich story, I get a little bit into the 2016 campaign and how Fox saw Breitbart News, then under the watch of Steve Bannon, as this sort of challenger coming up on the right flank of Fox. And Fox went to great lengths to try to take away Breitbart's momentum, to try to co-opt them, maybe by getting closer to Donald Trump, and certainly by when, by the time Trump is the nominee, airing his rallies live, really embracing the Trump viewership, there is just no equal to Fox in terms of its ability to take a story and blast it into the world. And of course, once it's on Fox, then it's on Drudge again.

Then it gets picked up again by everyone else in the cycle. Yeah, it feeds you. Yeah, and the news cycle is circular. And if you get to Fox, you've just launched it around the sun another hundred times. And in terms of the rich family, that was the moment for them when Fox News really grabbed this story, published this written story on its site that it would retract a week later. That was the point of no return for them. That was when they realized like, this thing's not going to go away. We can't hold for it to quiet down.

A Google search for Seth's name will never be the same after this point. And their thinking starts to change about what to do about it at that point. I think the motivation here is interesting, too. Like, one dynamic you notice from the texts that have come out in the Dominion lawsuit between Fox hosts, is this constant fear that they'll lose viewers to one of these competitors like a Breitbart or now OAN Newsmax. Did you notice that dynamic at play that they were always sort of worried about that it was the motivation was like ratings and money? And like how many of the Fox staffers and hosts involved in spreading the lie about Seth do you think actually believed it? So on the first one, I mean, ratings, audience drive everything.

That definitely came through in the emails and text messages leading up to this FoxNews.com story being published, a sense that this could be massive for us. This could fuel an entire week's worth of Fox News primetime segments. And the fact that Fox News itself was breaking this really enormous story. I mean, if you think about the actual repercussions of what Fox published about Seth Rich, saying that he was this leaker and that everything that everyone had said about Russian interference in the election was wrong. I mean, this is earth shattering. This is arguably bigger than Watergate, if true. It just wasn't. And you see them absolutely thinking about audience, thinking about how this story has already percolated around

in the conservative media, and that if Fox was going to do something, they had to do something big on it. They had to really deliver the story. So there's that piece of it. And then the other piece of it that's so important is seeing how the story could be so helpful for their side. And this is, again, another echo in the Dominion documents coming out and the Seth Rich story. At the time, Trump is besieged by stories, leaks, revelations about Russian involvement. He's fired Jim Comey. Michael Flynn has gotten pushed out. I mean, this is like May 2017 is like peak Russian scandal engulfing the White House. And this Fox News story could change all of that. I

mean, Sean Hannity literally says that on air. This could change all of that. This could demolish all of this Russian nonsense. And so it was so politically convenient for them, in addition to being an obvious ratings hit, was the perfect story for Fox. I want to touch on what seems like a relatively new practice of fighting conspiracy theories with defamation lawsuits. How did the Rich family come to decide that suing Fox was the best course of action? And how challenging was that lawsuit? I mean, it was a David versus Goliath endeavor, you know, without a doubt. I mean, just to set...

They don't have the money that Dominion has. No, they don't have the money that Dominion has. They are not politically plugged in or media savvy people. I mean, just to paint the picture for you, Joel and Mary Rich, you know, they live in Omaha, Nebraska. Joel works for the family printing company. Mary had worked in sales for the Yellow Pages. I mean, they are wonderful, wholesome, honest, very funny, actually, people. But they don't know anything about dealing with a multinational media conglomerate like Fox News, Fox Corp. Well, and one other complicating factor is also they cannot sue

on behalf of Seth for defamation. There is a sort of an angle in their litigation that they have to put forward, which is that Fox engaged in intentional infliction of emotional distress, that the trauma that the Riches felt was so severe and Fox had been so reckless that they deserved damages for that. The thing that the Riches did have going for them, Joel and Mary, and also Aaron, Seth's older brother, who became a target on his own of these conspiracy theories, is they had some really good lawyers. They had lawyers who were really at the vanguard of how do we use the law and parts of the law that are very, very old to combat a problem that is very, very new, which is online disinformation. And they are, I wouldn't say making it up as they go. Mike Gottlieb, Merrill Gavirnsky, lawyers with Sussman Godfrey, which is now suing Fox in the Dominion case.

They're not making it up as they go, but they're certainly writing the playbook as they go. Yeah. Mike Gottlieb is one of my close friends from DC. So I have talked to him a lot about this case and how difficult in general these cases are. And, you know, I know that he has always been concerned that like the damages don't necessarily dissuade places like Fox from spreading lies and conspiracies, as we have certainly seen after the Seth Rich case was settled, we now have Dominion. What are the Gottlieb and the other lawyers you spoke to think would have to happen for defamation lawsuits like this to really act as a deterrent? Or what are some of the things they're trying to go for? Yeah. I mean, obviously, a case like Dominion,

the dollar figures are so large that you could get to a place where there's a settlement or there's a warrant at trial that does create a real deterrent. And I think that the Dominion case could have that effect. I think there's something of a deterrent from the rich lawsuits, even though the sort of rough dollar amount we know of from Joel and Mary's case was in the seven figures, so certainly not bankrupting Fox. But it did sort of expose the inner workings of Fox in a way that I know they really did not like. So that's a deterrent. But also what Mike and his colleague Merrill and other lawyers and sort of disinformation experts in the space are thinking about is, look, damages in a case like this should not just be a kind of dollar figure that we think compensates you for what you've gone through. Damages should be what is the cost for exposing to everyone who heard the conspiracy theory about you, the true story. Literally, how would we design a media campaign, print, TV, online, social media, whatever,

that would actually take a measurable step toward repairing your reputation? Because that is what is damaged more than anything in these cases, whether you're Aaron Rich, whether you are Joel and Mary Rich, Seth Rich, whether you're Dominion, your name is sullied, your reputation. You go online, people see horrible things about you. What would it cost to actually counteract that? No one has come up with this. No one has thought about this really

until Mike and Meryl started thinking about it coming through these cases. And I think it's still in the works, but I think you'll see some pretty interesting stuff in that vein and, you know, coming up pretty soon. Well, I mean, just putting my sort of political strategist, communication strategist hat on here, I was thinking about this because there's a dollar amount and there's like a big media campaign to try to reach people but then it there's also what you include in that media campaign and i do think like an apology and also these hosts who have spread the lie who have some measure of credibility clearly with the people who believe these conspiracies saying i was wrong i

lied you know and put that in an ad yeah and that around. I think that's, I mean, you're still not going to convince everyone, but that's probably, in my mind, the most effective, that would be the most, the best chance you have at convincing people. Right. I mean, imagine a world in which Sean Hannity is on his primetime show with millions of viewers and he says, I have a special announcement. And that special announcement is him apologizing and or correcting the record about whoever it was he talked about or whatever the things he said that were inaccurate and defamatory. I mean, that would strike me as, it'd be hard to put a dollar amount on the value of that, but that is the kind of thing that people,

I mean, like you, people like Mike, people like Meryl, people who specialize in disinformation are really trying to think about because the old ways of doing this, you know, a brief clip of someone saying what we said was wrong, sorry, or just giving case, having now written a book about the Seth Rich case. Like, I was thinking that Fox, and I talked to some legal experts about this, that Fox will settle. And one reason they'll settle is not just because they think they're going to lose in court, but because if it goes to trial, like, all of these hosts are going to be under oath and have to tell the truth that we have already seen in all of their text messages. And that seems like it would be most damaging to Fox. Right. I mean, what we're seeing in the Dominion documents are emails, texts, contemporaneous messages, which are on their own, I think, incredibly damning. Well, not only show that they were airing false information, but that they knew that it was false. They knew that it was dodgy.

Sidney Powell is going on air and she got information from a source. We don't know the name of the source. Again, who said, I was internally decapitated as a youth. The wind talks to me. Even the source said the thing she was claiming about Dominion that went to Sidney Powell

that then went on Fox were quote, pretty wackadoodle. Imagine all of these people, Sidney Powell, Sean Hannity, Suzanne Scott, the CEO, going up on the stand and being questioned under oath. I mean, we don't know what's in all the depositions. We know what was in Rupert Murdoch's and excerpts. And that was pretty damning. Do they want everyone at Fox to do that? I don't imagine that they do. I mean, you know, seeing all this stuff play out is, again, I feel like I saw a tiny bit of it doing the Seth Rich story.

And I learned things about how Fox operates that now are being borne out in, you know, wild living color. I mean, you know, I was told by a lot of people at Fox that, you know, the different big shows kind of operate independently. They're like loosely confederated. Sean Hannity and his producers call the shots. Tucker, they call their shots. You know, there's not a lot of like vetting coherence. You know, Hannity kind of does what Hannity wants to do unless they really come down hard on him. And you see that now playing out with the Dominion evidence because you see Maria

Bartiromo having Sidney Powell on and then people elsewhere in Fox going, why are we doing this? We have to stop doing this. You know, you'd think Fox would be more organized than that, but apparently not. Yeah, it is sort of what you would expect watching some of these people you're like maria brad romo she seems nuts she seems like she's lost it and then you're like oh yeah yeah she that's clearly how she how she was behind the scenes as well and you're like tucker carlson he seems like he's conniving and strategic but yeah that's that's exactly what he is you spent a lot of time in the darkest corners of the internet while writing this book. What was that like? Oh, it was taxing. It was hard. I mean, I would do a lot of this work at night. I would do my

day job and then my wife and I would have dinner, watch a television show, and she'd go to bed and I'd spend another three hours trolling through 4chan, 8chan, The Donalds, Twitter threads, whatever. And I would not recommend that to even my worst enemies. There were a lot of times, too, that I would have to just get up from the desk and just go outside and walk around and clear my head and just like breathe real air and not think about the internet. And then of course, I'm like, should I be walking around my neighborhood like super late at night? Aren't I writing a book about a guy who was killed walking around his neighborhood super late at night? So, you know, it was not good for my health,

but it was also really instructive that when I see things happening online now, when I see some viral story catching on, when I see some conspiracy theory taking root, I can kind of see the signal in the noise. I can see how these things happen. And it helps me understand them. It helps me write about them or some cases just ignore them if I just don't think that it matters. But yeah, I don't know if I'd want to have anyone else have that same knowledge. Well, isn't it interesting that even, you know, you're a journalist, you're doing this for research and I've done the same thing, you know, go down these rabbit holes and you you sort of learn the real power and pull of these conspiracy theories because

as much as you want to separate yourself from them because you're just researching it it like draws you in in a weird way not that it becomes compelling but it fucks with your head basically i think what you're saying and you're like well i should know better that it shouldn't fuck with my head like i'm just reading something i can step away but you're like, well, I should know better that it shouldn't fuck with my head. Like, I'm just reading something I can step away. But you're like, if it's doing that to me, imagine what it's doing to someone with low social trust, who is prone to conspiracies, who's on the fringes of politics anyway, who sit around and then you start realizing how these things then spill from online to offline. This to me is the big difference between conspiracy culture now and conspiracy culture pre-internet. You mentioned this earlier, you know, there's this tendency for some to say, oh man, conspiracy theories have never been as bad as they are now. And it's all the internet's fault. And it's like, no, that's not true. Conspiracy thinking has been around for as long as human beings have had brains. We were sitting around the campfire

and someone saw a shadow and thought, oh, light, flat fire, shadow, okay. And someone thought like, there's an evil spirit who's coming in to suck our souls out. No basis for that, but they believed it. But what the internet has done, you said supercharged earlier. I think that's a good word for it. I would say what it's done is it has turned conspiracy thinking into a world that you can inhabit, a closed universe where every door leads to another conspiracy theory. And you can get the version of the conspiracy theory about any issue you care about, all in the same place, because the internet is, I mean, that's what the internet has done for us. It is a fully immersive experience.

In the Clinton days, yes, there was the Clinton body count, but mostly it was like early email, newsletter, whatever things. Or it was five guys sitting at a bar in Little Rock, Arkansas saying, well, all those state troopers, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton probably killed him. But you're still in the world there. When you're doing this online, you can just sort of marinate in it so much more you can you can live in it and never step out of it in a way that you just couldn't before the last 10-15 years yeah i taught i interviewed um megan garber of the atlantic on this show because she had written that piece that says we're already living in the metaverse and that is what you're talking about here is that you can completely inhabit that world and never i mean you faulted algorithms for sucking people into conspiracies, making it easier than ever to spread

them. Like we've talked a lot about that on the show. You've also written about another culprit we've covered here, which is the loneliness epidemic. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I do think that's sort of the other side of what's happening with a lot of these people who are spending a lot of time on the computer. That was probably the most personally, I don't know if moving is the right word, but the element that I encountered in these late nights, in these dark places, that really sort of shook me as a person, just as a guy in the world, which was going into these Facebook groups or Reddit forums, 4chan, YouTube, whatever, watching videos, listening to people talk, and realizing that what many of these people,

though not all, were finding in these places was community. They were finding like-minded people, welcoming strangers who said, come join us. You can participate if you want. You don't have to, if you don't want to, you can just hang out and listen or watch or whatever, just read along. And that part was, yeah, that part really hit me because I just imagine that in another time, these people are spending time with family, or they're at the VFW lodge, or they're at the Rotary, or they're at the local library. losing their place in communities can be directly connected to someone saying, all my friends are on Facebook and they're all in this group about how vaccines are dangerous and might kill us all or about Seth Rich. We had certainly spent time in those groups. And that is a real world cause of this that needs a real world solution, a sort of re-knitting back together. Because

otherwise, it's so easy to go online and find people who will welcome you in, but they'll welcome you in because they want to sell you something or they want to convince you of something that isn't true. Yeah. And look, experts who have studied deradicalization will say that one of the more effective ways of pulling people out of these conspiracy groups, universes, is to sort of give them another community that has more sort of positive aspects to it. And I do think if we want to, one of the many solutions that will be needed to sort of combat this is giving people a choice that is also community-based, whether it's like you said, rebuilding these institutions or whether it's online, right? Like more productive, happier,

less dangerous communities for people to go to instead. How has this book sort of changed the way you think about politics and your approach to political journalism? I know you've covered politics for a long time before this book. How has it made you rethink sort of the problems that we're facing with, you know, trying to hold on to this democracy and all the other political issues that we're dealing with? I'd say it's changed me in a lot of ways. You know, weirdly enough, before I set out to write the book, I was probably more dismissive of online culture and the way that it can spill into the real world. And I'm not that way now, obviously. You know, again, I watch how these online stories sprout and spread and how they get used and misused by people on all sides of the political aisle. And, you know, I think I just take that a lot more seriously when I think it should

be taken seriously, without a doubt. I mean, I'm definitely more cynical about the lines of truth and falsity and the use of disinformation to advance partisan agendas. I mean, I'm just so much more on guard for that now. I guess I should have been like this all the time, but everyone I listen to, I'm just looking for the faint. I'm looking for the sleight of hand because I'm so skeptical that anyone is just going to put the real truth out there without fear of favor, without worrying that it's not going to be good for their side. I mean, this is the big lesson of the Fox Dominion stuff is Fox was terrified of

alienating and losing this audience that it had conditioned over its entire existence to want to believe something like the big lie or birtherism before that. The examples are numerous. And, you know, I just, everyone I listen to, everyone I write about, I'm skeptical of what the faint is, what the angle is. But, you know, also, I would say, too, that the book renewed my faith in mankind in a few little ways. And certainly, watching people like Mike, your pal, who really didn't need to take on these cases, didn't need to spend whatever it is, four, five, six years litigating these cases pro bono. He didn't need to do that. And yet he did because he believed that this family needed to be defended. And he

believed that the truth was worth fighting for, even if it wasn't a pleasant experience, even if it wasn't what he imagined himself doing as a lawyer. And, you know, to his credit, he's still doing these cases. He's representing, you know, Ruby and Shay, the election workers out of Atlanta. That's a massive case that just gets more and more complicated every time Donald Trump opens his mouth. And he hasn't shied away from this stuff. And so I do also come away with a bit of inspiration that the truth is worth fighting for and that people can fight. It can win. It just takes a long time. Well, that's a good note to leave it. Andy Kroll, thank you so much for joining.

The book is A Death on W Street, The Murder of Seth Rich, and The Age of Conspiracy. It's a fantastic book. And all your writing and reporting is great. So thanks for coming on Offline. Appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Thank you.