How Samantha Bees Full Frontal Tracked Down Russias Pro-Trump Trolls [View all]

[TomCADem]

The recent intelligence report confirms a segment that was done by Samantha Bee on Russia's use of paid trolls to influence foreign politics.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/07/how-samantha-bee-s-full-frontal-tracked-down-russia-s-pro-trump-trolls.html

When Full Frontal executive producer Miles Kahn decided to travel with host Samantha Bee to Moscow for a series of field piece segments on how America could turn into Russia if Donald Trump becomes president, they had no idea how relevant that story would feel on the eve of Election Day.

This was back in mid-summer when the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government, through since-fired manager Paul Manafort and former foreign policy adviser Carter Page, were just starting to bubble up to the surface.

“This was a huge story that a lot of western journalists really hadn’t talked about that much,” Kahn, who also produced Bee’s field pieces at The Daily Show, tells The Daily Beast. “It wasn’t by design but it seems it has now come to a boiling point so, for whatever reason, we got lucky with this issue we chose to investigate. We knew it was going to be part of the conversation, but we didn’t realize it was going to be so domineering this late in the game.”

The team ended up traveling to Russia in early October, where Bee interviewed a couple of masked trolls who say they have been paid by the Kremlin to post negative things about Hillary Clinton—and positive messages about Trump—all over U.S. social and traditional media websites.